 inventing our future on Tink Tech Hawaii. The subject today is geothermal. What would our kupuna do? I'm your host Richard Ha. I'll be joined by Dr. Nicole Laozi, co-founder and director of the Hawaii Groundwater and Geothermal Resource Center. Today we will review the different types of geothermal energy, current state of knowledge in Hawaii, who is talking about geothermal and other interesting topics. So Nicole, can you give us a briefing on what the different types of geothermal energy that's out there? Geothermal electricity production has different types, but the only one we know today that works to produce electricity is traditional geothermal where warm fluid is brought to the surface to turn a turbine, warm natural fluid to turn a turbine and generate electrons that go out onto the grid. There's new technologies called enhanced geothermal EGS and advanced geothermal AGS that are being looked into in different parts of the mainland U.S. and globally, but those are not yet producing electrons for electricity. Maybe you can give us a rundown on what the status of Hawaii geothermal is. In Hawaii, I say I started geothermal research about 10 years ago, and one of the things that really surprised me is how little Hawaii knows about this extent of the resource statewide. So we really, really know very little. There's one electricity producing plant in Puna, Puna geothermal venture, and we don't know for sure whether or not there's geothermal resources outside of Kilauea's East Coast Zone, which is where Puna is. There was a study published in 1985 by Don Thomas where evidence was gathered of heat on all of the main Hawaiian islands, including Kauai, the volcanically oldest, and I worked with Don on another project that was completed in about 2020. So, a few years ago, that also concluded that there may be geothermal resources statewide, and that data gathered is just basic groundwater data, so from existing water wells across the state, and then sometimes we do geophysics, but we believe that there might be geothermal resources or are likely geothermal resources out of that one location where we have proven that geothermal electricity production is viable. Yeah, you know, and this is such a current topic nowadays. Today, you know, what's going on in Israel? They're saying that in a triangle, a 700-mile triangle, maybe 50 to 65% of the water resources in the world is located there, and we have, how long are we going to be sitting over the geothermal hotspot? Kind of a long time, huh? Yeah, I mean, we don't, I like to think of the geothermal production like, you know, a drop in a bucket. Like, we're not going to take away the heat from the mantle, a mantle plume that's producing heat in the Hawaiian islands by using some of that heat to generate electricity. So typically, the geothermal kind of lags behind the intermittent renewables, solar and wind, because it's expensive to discover the resource, but once it's discovered and the plant, the power plant is in place, it can continue for decades and decades as long as the plant is, or the resource is managed sustainably. Like, Lauderello and Tuscany started developing in the 1900s, early 1900s, and is still producing with expansion of their megawatt production a century later, a century plus later. Yeah, so, so, you know, I come, this is such a fascinating subject, you know, because it seems like, isn't the steam basically free? Coming out of the hole free? Yeah, yes and no. You know, we need to drill down into the resource to tap the heat, and so that's costly, but, and then in Hawaii the state owns the resource, so the developer will need to pay royalties to the state or to Department of Hawaiian Homeland, in the case of development on DHL land. But yeah, the high cost is in finding and then building the power plant, and then the price of geothermal goes down a lot. So over time, it has the lowest, what's called levelized cost versus the other renewables, because just the maintenance once the power plant is in place is low. Yeah, so I understand what you're saying. So basically, you've got to drill, and then you've got to have a pipe, how long the pipe lasts, and but basically the steam, because we're sitting over this hot spot and there's water underneath the island, the steam is coming out free, and as I understand it's going to be free a million or two years? Anyway. If the resource is managed right, so yeah, the fluid that comes up, we need to put back down, that's what you do in traditional geothermal, and there can be some complexities like certain minerals will precipitate out of the fluid that comes up due to the decrease in temperature, so that requires some maintenance that costs the money, but I understand what you're trying to say in principle to you. The heat is there, so. Yeah, you know, and relative to other places in the world, the US may not just start off with. We have a based power resource, whereas oil and all the other sources are not based power, you know, they run out and get more expensive, and take a lot of, you know, rare earth metals and minerals to maintain batteries, etc. What I'm asking is, how much of an advantage do we have for most places? Well, I think that development of more geothermal is traditional, and the traditional development sense of geothermal for electricity production is very low hanging fruit for the US. I mean, the USA, basically, there's a lot of money by the federal government being invested right now in these new technologies, so that geothermal electricity can be produced anywhere. But I try to convince the federal funding agencies that Hawaii is very low hanging fruit, because it seems that we have heat to produce using a technology that's been in place for over a century. And I think what you were getting at is that, yeah, oil and gas is considered base load, meaning consumers consumption or communities consumption of electricity changes goes up and down throughout the day. And the utility needs to make sure that the amount of electricity that they're supplying on the grid matches what a community or an island is using at that point in time. And so solar and wind don't have the advantage of matching necessarily what the island's needs are at a point in time. Geothermal can, so it can provide a steady amount of electricity that the utility can rely on 24-7. And so that's a big advantage of geothermal. Oil and gas can do that too, but it's by burning fossil fuels and emitting CO2. And then we need the fossil fuels, which have very volatile prices, right? We can't control the price of oil and gas, that largely comes from the Middle East, right? And so once we have geothermal, we can decouple that from the cost of fossil fuels. And so that we have both a steady electricity supply that's reliable at a steady price. When did you folks form the HGGRC? Was it 2016? I think it was January 1, 2015, that I, with a team of students, launched the website. And the conception of HGGRC was actually with a team of students where we had, Don Thomas and myself had several different projects going on. And we wanted to publicize the results of our projects in kind of a unified website, because the science was linked. And for example, Don was drilling on the Big Island, and we were posting daily drilling reports on a blogspot.com. And then I was feeding a lot of data that the team of students was digitizing to the federal government, but we wanted to have a local hub for that information for the local public and policymakers. And so kind of the students said, we should found a center, a research center, and put this information locally online. So HGGRC was actually founded with no money. The website was put together by passionate students and myself with no money. And I think it's been a pretty good success. I get emails from the general public that send email to hdgrc at higp.y.edu. They come straight to my inbox. And so I see that people are utilizing the information that we've posted online. Yeah, it's pretty incredible, because it's like 12 years ago. That's just like nothing. But then it's so important today, because everybody knows that we're running short of fossil fuels. And it's just a matter of time. And anyway, it's just wonderful what you folks did. It was pretty, pretty incredible. How does water fit into drilling, you know, what is the relationship there? Yeah, and actually all the methods that we use to better understand our groundwater resource will help our geothermal discovery and vice versa. So yeah, I mean, as a starting point to look for geothermal, we look at groundwater data. The second thing that we can do to better understand our groundwater or our geothermal resources is to do some surface geophysics, which kind of provides a map of the subsurface. And then to really understand the quality, so how saline or how fresh the water is, and what the temperature of the water is, we need to drill, as you've just said. And for geothermal, we need to drill fairly deep just to tap into fresh groundwater in some locations in the state. We don't have to drill very deep, but now in several locations of the state, we found deep fresh groundwater below salt water. So I really advocate that for statewide, you know, very little about our deep resources. And so more deep drilling and by deep, I mean, two to three kilometers would be very informative for the state. And a new research arena of mine is carbon storage. So injection of CO2 that's captured from the atmosphere or captured as it's being emitted into the atmosphere would be injected into the ground where it turns into rock and is permanently stored. And to do this, we also need to understand the deep subsurface environment, which we can only do through drilling. Yeah. You know, talking about the Hawaii island, we've got five volcanoes here. And the youngest one is Kilauea, of course, and it's live lava, up lava, which is, and I'm getting at risk of reward, you know, where would you go look? And monologue, you know, we just saw what happened. Monologue just erupted. It wasn't very long ago. But monocam, monocam, last erupted 4,000 years ago, I understand. Is that right? Yeah. So it's relatively safe, it would seem so. And there's still Huala Lai, as well as Goa'an, yeah. You know, staying on that track about the risk and reward. You know, if we were to explore on Maui and Borukai and Anai and Oahu and Kauai, and just get a source of base power, that would make all the islands relatively secure and secure for a very, very, very long time as energy prices rise and rare earth metals and minerals that go along with the batteries, etc. Yeah. I think, yeah, I tend to say I think understanding my ideal way to go about this would be to drill these slim holes, a lot of them. And by slim, I mean very slim. I probably have a piece of rock core, so 3 to 5 inch diameter, very deep and then understand. So invest, say, 100 million dollars in this statewide, which sounds like a lot of money, but we spend 7 billion, I believe, it's number now per year importing fossil fuels. So once we could understand where the resource looks like, we can have an informed and intelligent conversation over where we would want to develop and how big the resource is, right? We don't know that at all now. I often get asked the questions, how many megawatts is possible on Oahu? Somewhere between 0 and 500. I don't know because we have no deep wells, we have no temperature data. We can't answer that question, but I really think it's a worthy investment that's also going to, as we mentioned, tie into a better understanding of our fresh groundwater resource, which is also very precious and understanding our carbon storage potential. You know, Nicole, you, Don, and the rest of your team that started the HGJRC, you know, future generations are going to look at you folks like heroes, you know, because it's our obligation to make life better for future generations. And you guys have done that, and we really need to pay attention because after all, we're their ancestors. When they look back at us, they'll ask, what did you folks do? What are you just saying? Imagine 100 years from now, they'll say, oh, you guys knew all that and didn't do anything, except for Nicole folks? But that's what it is, you know. So anyway, I get on it so well. We're not actually doing anything right now because there's no funding. So I'm talking about it. We're a lot of talking about it, but some funding to actually figure out the answers to these questions would be really nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, what are people talking about geothermal? What's, what's the compensation is like going around if, if I can ask you that? Yeah, you know, maybe it's just the circle that I'm working within these days. But I think most of the most, there's big interests. I mean, people are talking about hydrogen production. And if we can make hydrogen, I'm not a hydrogen expert, but then it's transportable. So we can not talk about an underwater cable anymore to link the islands, although that's a viable potential as well. But we can talk about using hydrogen to move. I think of hydrogen as a battery, so to move energy stored from island to island. Sort of we backed into needing geothermal to make the hydrogen because making hydrogen is electricity consumptive. So there's a lot of excitement that I'm feeling around geothermal right now, which might counter a fear factor that has been discussed over several decades. So Don Thomas did a lot of the exploration in the 1970s, where there was a lot of pushback rate, indigenous pushback, but not only indigenous pushback. And so there's still an element of that, I think, and a fear factor around that today. But most of my conversations are actually with Hawaiian homesteaders, so native Hawaiians and Department of Hawaiian homelands that want to better understand the resource geothermal resource potential on their land. So I'm less fearful about that this day and age. And I enjoy giving presentations to Hawaiian homes associations of Hawaiian homesteaders about potential on DHHL lands. And then the Hawaiian homesteaders talk to DHHL. DHHL has come to Don and I. And there's funding right now that's being most of the geothermal funding being discussed will go to resource discovery on DHHL lands. So I have that sense as well, you know, that there's a lot of folks that are looking at it from a scientific point of view, looking at how this is going to help the keiki when they grow up. And so the pushback that used to be even five years ago is much, much less now. Yeah. So that's a really good sign. And you know, if you were to develop, let's say on this island, you develop geothermal on Hawaiian land of the slopes of Mauna Kea. Now, several things would happen. One is you would be able to identify water because they need water because and you need water for you drilling your slip holes. And because the Hawaiian people own the resource, they don't have to pay royalties. They're paying royalties now to all the different departments. But any new discovery, they can take some of that and lower the rates of their beneficiaries and make that a commitment into the future. So it doesn't depend on whenever the next governor comes in, then it's a long-term thing and they'll have more trust. Yeah. So win win for everybody. I agree. The conversations I've given to DHHL. So we don't know for sure all the data that we have points to the presence of a geothermal resource on DHHL's largest parcel of land east of Mauna Kea. That's their largest parcel of land statewide. And I think that you would know better than me, but there's conversations around building homes there. Yes. And that's going to require both fresh brown water for the homes and then an electricity resource for the homes. And so investing in the drilling of basically to identify where is the water table? How do you do we need to pump the water up from? And what is the temperature of the water as we go down? I think is a worthy investment, even though that will be an expensive place to drill because there's not a water resource nearby. So we do need water to drill. Oh boy. That's really encouraging. Did you, any particular other thing you wanted to talk about around the geothermal subject? Well, I mean, related to my complaint, which it's no funding to try and understand the subsurface in Hawaii. Right now I do have one carbon storage project, but I was thinking maybe of mentioning the legislation that has been floated the last two years. So that would provide some funding for geothermal exploration, ideally the UH Manoa or to White State Energy Office. But I really do think the University of Hawaii here, we have like a million dollars worth of geophysical equipment and owner drill rig that can get to two kilometers. So I think UH is well poised in the HRC to perform the exploration that needs to be done. And, you know, Don and myself have led the two most recent statewide resource assessments. So anyway, the past two years, there has been legislation floated by I think the House in the first year in the Senate in the second year that we're trying to get a portion of the royalties that PGV pays to the state to the University to do some some research. Because right now none of the money that goes that is paid to royalties does anything to help expand geothermal discovery or knowledge in the state. It goes to OHA, DLNR, and Hawaii County. But I think last year, so the first year it pissed the House in the Senate was vetoed by the governor because it was going to cut the portion of royalties going to DLNR, so to the state itself. Last year it passed the House in the Senate but didn't come out of conference committee. This year, I hope that there's going to be some legislation that maybe the governor sponsors that won't cut the percentage of royalties so make the four agencies that or the three agencies that get the money kind of fight over because they're trying to get you a portion of that wedge wedge in kind of and then just sponsor that there'll be some funding dedicated to looking into like firm energy resources. Because I think even the utility has realized that solar and wind aren't going to get us to 100% renewable. We need a firm renewable energy and geothermal is the only one. Yeah, more and more people are starting to realize that this is very serious. Now who's doing the legislation? And the reason I'm asking is if there are people out there who want to support legislation like that, how would they know what's happening? How would they find out? You could email me or you could email White State Energy Office. How are you funded? How much money do you get? My position as faculty at UH Manoa is funded 82% of funded by the state. So state funding comes into the University of Hawaii but all my projects are funded through grants that I apply for and win. Oh, I see, I see. So all your staff and everybody is funded by grants and stuff that you've initiated, yeah? Is grants donations or can just be funding that comes from the state? At the moment I have a little bit of donation funding and I have a large grant to work from Department of Energy to work on carbon storage. I have very, very little funding to do anything related to geothermal, which I do come through DOE to National Renewable Energy Lab to me, but it's not funding staff. I have little staff right now do the little funding. You know, the subject is so important. It takes energy to do work, period. And then ancient Hawaiian history is all about water. So you gotta do the two things. It would seem to me, because you're so new, yeah, that you guys are down on the organizational structure because you're new, it would seem to me just my personal opinion is that your HIGP and yourself should probably be put on the side so people know who you are because nobody knows who you are. And that's not right. You know, I mean it's so, so, so important and nobody knows who you are because you lost weight on the chain. And then look at what you guys are doing. I mean, it's incredible. Anyway, is it fair to, you know, you hear this argument that, you know, when you do geothermal, the ground will sink and then there's all kinds of bad things are going to happen. Does that, how legitimate or scientifically based on how legitimate is that and how would that change, you know, if you move from say PGV because that's what is the question is, you know, mostly PGV to another location. Can you alleviate that kind of risk? Okay. Yeah, so traditional geothermal does bring natural fluids from the subsurface to the surface. And if there's not appropriate reinjection of the fluid, the ground can sink. PGV, the fluids re-injected and to my knowledge, subsidence sinking of the ground has not been a problem. In New Zealand, actually, that was a problem. And the developer realized that they were not sustainably managing the resource. And so I think even foreign waters was brought in to be injected to the subsurface and that fixed the subsidence problem of the ground. Most of what I've heard being complained about at PGV is the kind of rotten egg smell, which that comes from Kilauea volcano naturally, but when bringing some of the magmatic or the fluids that are associated with the southeast rift of Kilauea to the surface can bring some of that sulfur dioxide smells like the rotten eggs to the surface. But that's more of an aesthetic issue. I think that would probably not be the same, an issue of the same magnitude moving to an older volcano. So I would think that that rotten egg smell would not be as prevalent if we move off of Kilauea to a less volcanically active zone of the big islands. And again, as long as the re-injection of the fluid brought to the surface occurs, I don't expect subsidence would be a problem. You know, I was part of a group that went to the Philippines to look at the geothermal over the area. And when I came back, you know, the first thing I noticed while I was there was they were on the side of a volcano that at last erupted a hundred thousand years ago. And there was a whole bunch of energy coming out of the volcano. And what they did was they made a deal with the company to the company would develop the resource. And in 10 years time, they committed the state government there committed to buying back the whole operation with the condition that they trained everybody from the highest level person to the janitor to be local people. And when we went there was pretty amazing, you know, you look all around, yeah, well, it was all Filipinos. Yeah. Yeah. So it was quite a thing to see that. We could apply a similar model here. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And it goes along to what would our Kupuna do? Yeah. And we are Kupuna now. No, you're not. You don't have the age. But for those of us that have done what we needed to do and we can just see what you folks are doing. It makes so much sense to put a lot of effort into this. And I myself, I think, you know, everybody should get to get behind you guys and see what we can do to help the next generation. Did you have anything that you wanted to talk about before we close up? You know, I have maybe a final comment is that I have been getting emails from groups or companies that are interested in being vocal and supportive geothermal and in supportive HGDR to kind of form an alliance of folks that do. So perhaps to anybody watching, if you haven't made a connection with myself or Sustainable Energy Hawaii, please do reach out. And, you know, I'm working kind of behind the scenes to build that alliance and organize. And so the more the merrier, I guess, you know, so. Yeah, that's terrific. It's just a last name at Hawaii.edu. I don't think it's been up there, but. Okay, well, thanks for sharing with us, you know, with everybody, what you folks have been doing. Again, I got to say, hardly anybody knows what you folks have been doing in the last 10 years by yourself with no money. You know, it's it's pretty incredible. Money for some of the time, but the money is run out. So it'd be nice to have a replenishment of money. Yes. And that was federal funds. There hasn't been much state support. So I think if one or the other we could get one or the other state funding would help demonstrate to the feds that the state really wants this. And we'd have a bigger in to get more money there too. So. Okay, well, thanks a lot. Yeah. So. This has been a tremendous educational thing for everybody. I'm sure. Thank you. Thank you.