 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm Mitch, you and your host. Our sponsor is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, a program funded by the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest, Professor Nicole Loutsey. Nicole co-founded and leads the University of Hawaii's Groundwater and Geothermal Resources Center. Today, Nicole is gonna tell us about the center's program and the good work the center is doing to identify Hawaii's water and geothermal energy resources, both of which we have a tremendous need for now and certainly in the future. Nicole will be discussing Hawaii's groundwater and geothermal resource limits and the need for a conscious drilling program. Nicole, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. I'm glad to be here. So Nicole, let's start off by learning a little bit about you. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to the University of Hawaii and why you founded the center. Sounds good. So I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and left there before Silicon Valley took off. I went to UCLA for my undergraduate where I studied geology. So fundamentally I consider myself a geologist. After UCLA, I did a couple of things different for a couple of years and then I started PhD program at UH Manoa. So that's what brought me to Hawaii. For my PhD program, I studied active volcanoes in Italy and it was kind of like why one volcano went boom versus bang at a different time was exciting and fun. I left Hawaii for four years after completing my PhD and then returned on the last postdoc I had. I lived in Italy for 15 months and then Hawaii for nine months. And when that postdoc ended, I started working on a groundwater project and geothermal project. And so I've been here since 2010. Consistent. So tell us a little bit about the center and let's pull up that first slide. Sure, the center was founded at a time I had a lot of students working on one of my projects and Don Thomas who I work closely with had a drilling project on Hawaii Island. We had a lot going on and we were using things like a blogspot.com to post daily drilling updates. And so I was sending blogspot.com to colleagues and myself and the students said we should have our own kind of central hub to present information to the community and to the science colleagues. And really with no funding dedicated to forming a center or a website, we kind of pulled that together. And yeah, and there's a wealth of information on that website and we're pretty proud of it. So it launched, the website launched January 1, 2015. And how do we get to your website? I guess it's on the slide, right? It's on slide one, I think. Yeah, so the website is higp.hawai.edu slash hddrc. It's great. So I've been to the website and it does have a wealth of information. So let's get educated a little bit on groundwater and on geothermal. So let's pull up the second slide and... Okay, so this cartoon we can call it or schematic is from our DLNR's Commissioned Water Resource Management. And it shows the conceptual model for groundwater, fresh groundwater in Hawaii. So you can see the slide shows that there's fresh water, a lens of fresh water, which sits on our saltwater, just ocean water. What's a lens? Tell us what a lens is. A lens is the shape. So it's kind of like a lens of a glass, glasses, right? So it's a lens. And according to what's called the Garben-Hersburg principle, based on the density difference between freshwater and saltwater, for every one foot or unit of measurement of freshwater above sea level, there'll be 40 feet below sea level. And as a result of that, and as this cartoon shows, the thought is that freshwater level above sea level does not increase much towards the interior of the island, unless it's trapped in impermeable rock, which in Hawaii we know to be dike material, or which is unerrupted magma. So that same cartoon, if you wanna go back to it for a second, shows where there's those vertical structures, those dike material in the waters, fresh waters at a higher level in the interior of the island, in those locations. All over the earth, as you go into the earth, the temperature increases, where geothermal and geopotential geothermal resource exists is where that temperature gradient is accelerated. So instead of your typical geothermal or increase in temperature with depth, we have an accelerated increase in temperature with depth, which makes the heat accessible to us at the surface of the earth, and our drilling technologies. And so we know in Hawaii, because we have volcanoes that where magma is erupted, or magma is trapped in the subsurface, that there could be an elevated temperature gradient. And so what that slide shows is locations where deep wells have been drilled, and the temperature gradient has been measured. So on the vertical axis, it's depth, and on the horizontal axis is temperature. And you can see that there's very varying slopes of the lines that show different temperature gradients. And so what I can talk about where these wells are, if you'd like. Okay, so on the left side, the left graphic shows wells that are not drilled along Kilauea's East Rift Zone. So Kilauea, we probably know, is the most active volcano in the state. And the East Rift of Kilauea is what erupted in 2018, and has been the locus of eruptions in the state for the last, or for the volcano in the state for the last hundred or so years. So not in Kilauea, we don't see as high temperature gradients as we see drilling into Kilauea, which is what's shown on the right side on that slide. However, that one red shows an accelerated temperature gradient that was measured on Linai. So that is the first kind of elevated temperature gradient that we've seen off of Hawaii Island, which I think is significant in indicating the potential geothermal resource outside of Big Island. So talk about the concept, what I call a twofer. Like if I'm looking for water or whatever, I have like two major resources for the same cost. So comment on what you would. Yeah, I mean, I like to point out that doing groundwater research and doing geothermal research are, in some respects, almost the same thing. So Hawaii still has a lot to learn about its groundwater resources, which we'll probably get to. And any research that we do for groundwater, we learn about geothermal and vice versa. So the geothermal process is basically prospecting for water at an elevated temperature, but still requires understanding all elements of a groundwater system, like where the groundwater comes from, where it flows, if it's trapped within impermeable rocks, all of that information is important to understanding the geothermal resource and helps us understand our fresh groundwater resource as well. So just to make sure everybody understands, groundwater is fresh water, the stuff we are able to drink and take showers with, correct? Correct, yeah. So other locations on the mainland have maybe surface water, lakes and streams. We don't have a whole lot of surface water in Hawaii because our lava flows, which are basically the carapace of our islands are permeable. And so our rainwater trickles down into the island. And so I think it's over 90% of our water that comes from our faucets and things is groundwater. So groundwater stored underground. So I understand you, we'll talk about your drilling program a little later in the show, but just at the top level, I understand that you've had a lot of surprises, good surprises in your drilling program, finding water, particularly in places where people thought we had no water. You care to comment on that? Yeah, every, so typically groundwater wells for production of water are drilled along the coast. And that's based on that Guyburn Hertzberg freshwater lens model, where basically less expensive to not have to drill very deep and then less expensive not to have to pump the water very far to reach the surface. And so because of that lens that you see there, it's just cheaper to drill water wells around the coast. There have been four projects in this century, 21st century that have drilled deeper wells to try and find water or to characterize the evolution and growth of Hawaiian volcanoes. So these wells were drilled to 6,000 feet or deeper and every single one of them kind of hold us something entirely new about the groundwater system that's not consistent with the conceptual model that was shown on that first slide. So this is important because we're essentially running out of fresh water in Hawaii is my understanding particularly on leeward sides of islands like even the big islands got no droughts and water issues, do you care to comment on that? Well, yeah, it's just understanding our freshwater resource so that we can appropriately manage our fresh water. I think is critical and will become increasingly more critical with climate change and the impacts of climate change. And so it's really been eye-opening what we've learned from the deep drilling projects that we've done, which indicates in most cases that we have more fresh water than we think. So what's the alternative? We don't go out and find this fresh water. What do we have to do if we start running out of water? What's the alternative? Well, reduce, reuse, recycle or you know, desalinate our ocean water. But some good things to do would be to reduce water use reuse water where possible, recycle water and then, yeah, find it really, figure out what our resource looks like and appropriately manage it. So finding it would be a lot cheaper than trying to desalinate salt water using very expensive electricity, correct? Yep. So in the state of Hawaii, there's heat in the surface thanks to the hotspot magnetism. And we know that the hotspot currently resides below Kilauea and Manaloa volcanoes on Hawaii Island and volcanism gets older to the Northwest. So it's logical to consider it's going to be the hottest or highest temperature resources associated with Kilauea volcano data. Though it surprises a lot of people that the data that we've collected indicates that there's likely a resource statewide and we would need to do more of that drilling, the exploratory drilling to figure that out to really prove the presence of residual heat in the subsurface. But if you bring that slide up again, I can talk about how the geothermal resource produces electricity and this kind of schematic that you see at the right here, that's specific to how the one geothermal plant in the state does it. There's variations to how the electricity is produced, but essentially we need a gas phase. And so typically there's a well that is drilled into the heat resource and either a steam phase forms or warm fluid is brought to the surface. If there's a steam phase, which is the case for puny geothermal venture, that steam can turn a turbine. And so in that turbine translate kinetic energy to electricity and that electricity goes out on the grid. The water is then cooled and condenses, but still hot. And so that hot water can be used to cause a gas phase to form in a liquid with a lower boiling temperature. So in that yellow, whitish pipe is what's called a working fluid and the warm water that was brought to the surface then heats the working fluid to a gas phase and another burst of electricity is produced. The liquid that was brought to the surface is then re-injected into the subsurface so that we don't deplete the subsurface of the groundwater resource and that should warm up and then the cycle is continuous. So essentially if you have a very hot well, like they have at the PGV, you get two shots at it, the steam phase and then the working fluid phase. Resources with lower temperature that doesn't have a steam phase, you just get the working fluid like a Danick-Rackin cycle engine, which would produce electricity and then, but you'd still re-inject that hot water back into the ground so that you preserve your water. You're not wasting water, just spewing it out, correct? Not wasting water. And typically that whole process where the water is hot is actually below the drinking water table. So it's a deeper process and there's actually no documented cases of any contamination of groundwater occurring in the United States from geothermal production. And what I just presented is called traditional geothermal. There's other technologies that are either under development or being talked about. And those are typically where there's not a fluid in the subsurface. In Hawaii, we don't have to worry about that because we're in an island environment with the ocean water that's infiltrated the island. So we have water everywhere. Yeah, I'm fascinated by the fact that freshwater floats on top of seawater. Who would have thought that, right? Now let's go to the next slide and I wanna talk about land use and how the efficiency of land use with geothermal versus other forms of energy. So talk to this one. Yeah, I didn't know a lot about geothermal when I started work on the projects maybe 10 years ago and I've been really impressed about many aspects of geothermal. One of which is that its land use is the lowest footprint among renewables that are easily accessible to us. So like solar and wind and that's what this slide shows. There's in the top left there, there's a 33 megawatt geothermal plant and then you see the land occupied by a 26.4 megawatt solar plant. One really cool thing about geothermal is that it's baseload or it's reliable it always can produce the same amount of energy or almost always. So its capacity factor availability you see in that table is 90% whereas solar is gonna fluctuate in time and of course we get no solar energy at night. What this translates to basically is that you get more bang for your buck with the geothermal resource. So on 10% of the land occupied you get four and a half times the amount of energy produced from the geothermal plant. That's true pretty much everywhere where there's solar resources in geothermal. And so I have another diagram like that for Hawaii comparing TGVs output to some of the larger solar farms that are going in. So I understand also geothermal technology has progressed to the point where it's pretty benign to the surrounding environment. All the influence are pumped back into the ground like you said safely. Do you wanna comment on that? Yeah, I mean, that's true in Hawaii and that's what we do in Hawaii. I guess another benefit to geothermal that for example, California is taking advantage of is a link to lithium. So what will happen when the liquid that comes to the surface cools some is some precipitates and minerals might come out of that fluid that were dissolved in the fluid. And lithium is one of them. But I just, I haven't heard any cases of anything negative associated with geothermal. And let's start talking about your deep drilling program. What I have here is one, two, and three. These were all deep drilling projects executed by Don Thomas. And you can see you're completed 2013, 2015, 2017. Again, they were funded for different purposes. One and two were funded to try and find water through the U.S. Army on Pahakalua training area where they were spending a whole lot of money or still are spending a whole lot of taxpayer dollars to bring fresh water to the center of the Big Island. So I should have pointed out on the image of Hawaii Island on the right and bring the slide back. There's a purple and a blue star. And so those two are wells one and two drilled to almost 6,000 feet and then 5,000 feet. So that's a, that's a significantly deep well. And what the first one found was instead of water at about sea level, which that conceptual model would have suggested because we're not in a region where there's thought to be dike material. The water table was at 4,600 feet above sea level. So imagine that, like that's huge. And so that was a big find for the Army if they produced that water locally instead of trucking it to them, it would be reduced price and smaller environmental footprint, right? Also surprising about that well was at the base of it or the depth from below 3,000 feet, the water was fairly elevated temperature. So that was also one of the first times, the first time that elevated temperature was measured outside of Kilauea Z-Strickstone. Well, the second well- I understand they found a lot of water, it's not just a little bit of water, it was like a lot of water, right? Yeah. So that's good for all of the island because that could be supplied to the West Coast, the corner side of the big island, which is a big deal. Perhaps, yeah. I mean, it's exciting for that general area, I think, for the different landowners that rep. So the geophysical data that we have for that region suggests that that fresh water would extend pretty extensively to the Northeast. And so it could be of interest to the landowners. Oh, let's go to your next slide. So I'm in the process of wrapping up a five year long statewide resource assessment. The prior one was done 30 years earlier and published in 1985 and both statewide resources assessment point to the probability of a geothermal resource existing on all islands in the state, not just Hawaii Island. So that's number one. And I think that surprises a lot of people. Despite this, there's still only one plant that produces electricity and that's PGV. It's about where the yellow star is on the map of the big island to the right. And that one plant alone, which occupies 45 acres of land, produces 30% of the big island's electricity or did when it was active prior to the 2018 eruption of Kilauea. And then again, so then that saddle road well that orange on this graph is the only other location in the state where elevated temperatures have been measured until a couple of years ago when we measured the elevated temperatures, but only to a depth of about 3000 feet on Linai. That's exciting. And otherwise we really don't know very much about the state's geothermal resource because we lack the drilling data. Our background gradient is pretty low because we have cold ocean water in our island. And we don't see like, though I have blind there, there's not surface manifestations that show evidence of the subsurface heat like hot springs or steam coming out of the ground which occurs on the mainland. And our water table is pretty deep because again, we have permeable lava flows and the water rainwater triples down and that translate to a pretty deep water table which makes our geothermal exploration expensive relative to other places in the world. Well, let's talk about expensive. So what do you mean by expensive? And if you had your druthers, I mean if you had unlimited resources or some adequate resources, more adequate, more resources than you have now, what kind of a prospecting plan would you recommend that we put in place? Sure. Well, so everything in Hawaii is expensive, right? Our food is expensive, our electricity is expensive. And so similarly, when we have a deep resource then we've got to drill pretty deep into the ground to try and access that temperature. And again, we learn about our groundwater too. I do want to point out and we can show that at the end that the drilling that I'm talking about doing has a very small footprint. So we're talking about drilling a like three inch diameter hole and we take the rock out of the ground to study the rock but we want to get deep to see what's going on deeper below to characterize both our groundwater and the temperatures. And so one deep well, one of those wells to say 5,000, 6,000 feet costs about two and a half to $3 million for UH to do the drilling. So... And talk about the UH drilling rig, if you may. Yeah, the UH drill rig that is owned by UH right now is a pouring rig different than a rotary drilling rig. So typically when somebody wants to drill a groundwater well or something, it's a rotary drill that rigs up the rock and turns up the rock as it drills down. The pouring rig that we have is meant to preserve a rock core that can be studied. So we can study the minerals, we can understand the volcanoes. And yeah, it's basically like, it's a truck mounted rig. So it's small in that it's smaller than your average STEMA that you would see on a mainland highway or I guess we have them in our highways too which as much as if you're taking a road trip. And we have a picture of that too. And I want to throw out that first slide and I think it has a picture of what the drill rig looks like. There you go. Yeah, so this is a typical setup for one of our exploratory drilling projects. That rig is the mast that's pointed up about, I think it's 30 feet high. It can lie flat too and it's actually hidden behind that shipping container. So really the drilling that I'm talking about we need about one or two acres of land. So not very much. We need some containers that can hold our shipping supplies and then the rig itself. And it's a crew of about four people at a time when we're actively drilling. So it's not a huge production. That's why I refer to it as conscious drilling in our introduction to this. So how long does it take to drill a well? Like I know it depends on the depth, but you know. Yeah, so the drilling is actually the not time consuming part. So we of course do all the environmental checks before executing a drilling project. And that's the most time consuming part. And then making sure we have all the supplies to execute the drilling because drilling days are really expensive. And so we don't want to have down days with a crew sitting around while the drilling project is going. And so I would say start to finish for like a five to 6,000 foot well, two to three years is what it takes us. But that's maybe six months of active drilling. So the drilling... So all the rest of it's permitting and all the other stuff we had, all the other, oops, we have to jump through. Exactly. So, okay. So if I wanted to do a survey of all the islands, I mean, I don't want to do it one island at a time because say, well, what, three years times four or five islands. I mean, we're up to what? 15 years is that sounds like a long time to me. Yeah. Well, and with predictions of climate change and how it's going to accelerate and take off, you know, I agree with this. So the ambitious idea would be to have, you know, multiple drilling projects going on at the same time or as part of one cohesive or comprehensive project. We could be looking at more than one island at a time, but we've really only ever done basically one hole at a time. So, you know, if I said, I'll give you five years, we can pretty well have a good idea of what each island, what kind of resources each island has, correct? Is that a viable assumption? Well, so five years in each island would require something like probably $25, $30 million and we would need more than one rig. So we'd have to have multiple projects being executed at the same time. It's doable. I'll work in parallel because we have a need for speed. We have to be in a little sense of urgency now. We need that fresh water and we need energy. We're going to get off fossil fuels. Like, you know, the state set up this 100% by 2045. You know, we've picked a lot of low-hanging fruit, but you know, to really get after it, we need some of these types of resources and we're running out of water and geothermal is a fairly economic form of energy. Yeah, it is one of the lowest cost renewable energies. It just has the highest upfront cost, which kind of has it, I suppose. But I mean, also this exploratory drilling is just the first step, right? And my opinion is getting the information about what their resource looks like across the state. And this is in terms of both groundwater and geothermal is a smart way to go about the process of moving towards more development. But of course, the development is gonna be its own beast. And that's whether it's development of production of groundwater or production of geothermal resources, but that's another five, 10 year process, right? So I think that moving on getting the data to understand how to most responsibly harness the resources is, I agree with you basically, that it would be great to get moving. So let's just wind back a little bit to more and have a look at the budget. So, you know, if you were going to a money source, spreading it out over a year, not just one great big lump, but what would be a practical or reasonable kind of annual budget to really find out about our resources here in Hawaii? If we wanted to seriously take this on and do look at the entire state, I mean, few millions a year would be viable and then more when we're actually drilling, the drilling is the most expensive part. But I mean, we spend $3 billion a year importing fossil fuels, and I don't have an estimate of what groundwater costs are, but I mean, if we want to get into money, the PGV pays royalties to the state, they've spent paid $25 million in royalties to Hawaii since 2004. Solar has cost the state over 600 million in subsidies. So millions of dollars is not big numbers for, you know, understanding what a potentially large, powerful electrical resource, indigenous production of electricity could be. Let's go on to the next slide. Thanks for that answer. Okay, here's something about money. So, and this data come from the power supply improvement plan. The table's a little bit detailed to explain, but the bottom line from this analysis, and I've seen analyses that have geothermal coming out even more favorably, but geothermal costs less than solar and wind when you add 75% daily capacity storage to the intermittent renewables. So with geothermal, you don't need storage because it's always on. And, you know, so that geothermal, so solar and wind don't really provide for resilient electricity supply. And that's why we need the fossil fuels, right? Because they are always there. And that's why in my opinion, geothermal has potential to replace the fossil fuels. And then the next point on that slide was that, again, the geothermal is a mineral resource in Hawaii and the state owns mineral resources. And therefore that from the production of electricity, the developer has to pay royalties to the state. And those go to DLNR, Office of Hawaiian Affairs and Department of Hawaiian Homeland. So there's been about 25 million, as I said, in royalties paid from the production of geothermal since 2004, where solar is subsidizing, the state solar subsidies have basically cost over $6 million, $600 million, excuse me. And then again, we spent over $3 billion to pay for fossil fuel imports. Sounds like geothermal and it's a twofer. Don't forget, it's not just geothermal. And it's also that fresh water that we all need to live and grow our crops and all this other stuff. So it looks like it's a really good investment, a very good return on investment if we allocate some resources to your program. So let's have some concluding. Let's go to the conclusion slide because we're getting close to ending here. Talk about some conclusions that you have here. Okay, yeah. I mean, I typically start by saying, we are as an island state and I think we're one of the most isolated island states globally, island nations globally. So we're really vulnerable to climate change being out here all by ourselves, particularly in the context of fresh water and energy and particularly given our reliance on imported fossil fuels. There are major outstanding questions with respect to groundwater, including where does groundwater come from? How does it flow? And as I pointed out, I think we know very little about the extent of the state's geothermal resource. So again, statewide, I strongly believe in geothermal. It is the most reliable form of renewable energy with the smallest footprint, low hazards and comparable, if not lower costs than the intermittent renewables over time. If you look at the life cycle of a geothermal facility versus solar and wind. We'll have to leave it there, Nicole. It's been really great having you on the show. You've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we've been learning about the Hawaii Groundwater and Geothermal Resource Centers Program and the need for a drilling program to define these resources by the University of Hawaii under the leadership of Nicole Loutz. Thanks for participating, Nicole and thanks to our viewers for tuning in. So I'm Mitch Yuan. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy, aloha.