About 46,000 people work in San Diego's maritime industry in sectors as obvious as fishing and as surprising as metal forging, according to a recent report on the field.
Altogether, the industry generates more than $14 billion in direct spending, according to the study, which is billed as the most comprehensive report to date on maritime activities and their regional impact.
The study's sponsors include San Diego Workforce Partnership (SDWP), the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. (SDREDC) and The Maritime Alliance.
Out of the 46,000 local jobs that encompass all the economic activity related to oceans, seas, harbors, ports and coastal zones, about 8,000 are in traditional, exclusively maritime industries.
“It’s all those things when you walk on the embarcadero. Those are the easy ones to count,” said Bill Riedy, executive director of The Maritime Alliance.
They include jobs related to the Port of San Diego, boat building, fishing, sportfishing and General Dynamics NASSCO, the major shipbuilding, repairing and design outfit in San Diego.
Approximately 19,000 work in maritime technology.
Based on the report's feedback, the employment in the industry is expected to grow 12 percent by 2020, or the addition of nearly 6,000 new jobs. Fast growth, new technologies and new opportunities could yield significantly higher numbers, points out the report.
For San Diego, an area of opportunity and job growth lies in robotics.
“It’s a huge growing area driven by a combination of military needs and any sort of offshore oil or energy exploration,” Riedy said.
San Diego has a long history in underwater vehicles and maritime robotics, initially driven by the U.S. Navy’s needs. Over the decades, the major Navy lab in San Diego (SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific) developed 10 manned underwater vehicles and nearly two dozen unmanned vehicles.
“When we started organizing the maritime technology cluster in San Diego, no one outside of the industry knew it existed. We have incredible expertise," Riedy said.
San Diego's maritime industry also excels in telecommunications.
“A lot has grown out of the Navy’s need for wireless,” Riedy said.
High-tech maritime jobs cut across a wide variety of domains, including fishing, defense and navigation.
“In the boat and shipbuilding industry, there are applications of technology in these more traditional industries,” Riedy said.
For example, the kind of paint that coats hulls, or the watertight body of a ship, requires high-tech applications these days; copper was traditionally used in paint to keep barnacles from growing on hulls, but it was recently discovered that it can cause environmental concerns when the paint sinks to the ocean floor.
“Figuring out how to make new paint involves application of technology,” Riedy said.
Rising competition amongst fishermen has prompted them to be more efficient and rely on GPS to find fish, whether it’s schools of salmon or Dungeness crab.
“They rely on technology to understand weather patterns. The notion of buying a boat and setting out to sea to catch fish is not what it used to be,” Riedy said.
The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Gulf Coast of Florida also have a high maritime concentration, he pointed out.
Maritime-heavy areas are cashing in on the clean water technology trend, which will continue to bloom as more countries increase their standard of living and improve infrastructure.
San Diego is the world leader in desalination technology, with the reverse osmosis spiral module patented in San Diego in 1964, according to the report. More than 3,000 professionals and workers are employed by companies in the region, which includes two of the three global market-share leaders in membrane supply.
The worldwide desalination industry alone was estimated at $10 billion annually in 2010 and projected to expand to $30 billion by 2016, according to Global Water Intelligence.
“It will be tripling in size. That represents a huge opportunity,” Riedy said.
San Diego is an ideal location to set up a Desalination and Clean Water Technology Center of Excellence that could serve as a test bed for local companies, as an incubator, and to attract scientists and companies from around the world, suggests the report.
One challenge is crossing the high regulatory hurdles the domestic desalination market faces.
Due to high gross margins, maritime technology is largely self-reliant and is not as dependent on venture capital and equity for growth opportunities as many other technology sub-fields.
In addition, employees in the field can make a good living with just a high school diploma on their resume.
“A lot of people are in positions that are well-paying jobs but they don’t necessarily require advanced degrees, like you do in the rest of the high-tech sector,” Riedy said.
Plumbers, pipefitters, steamfitters, sales reps and wholesale and manufacturing jobs, for example, have average annual earnings of $54,871 to $78,140, said the report.
“They are reasonably high paying but don’t require all the high education the science and engineering jobs require,” he said. “That is one of the strengths of the traditional maritime industry.”
The general and operations managers, mechanical engineers and management analysts make $78,141 or more in average annual earnings.
“It’s important to understand there are two big sectors of high-wage paying jobs in the maritime industry,” he said.
There’s talk to create another report that looks at the total economic impact of the local maritime industry, to include indirect spending.
More than 230 San Diego-based employers participated in the survey.
The project was conducted by San Diego-based ERISS Corp. over four weeks in May and June. It involved quantitative economic analysis, numerous in-person and telephone interviews, and both a telephone and an online survey.
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