 Welcome to Stan Energyman. Stan Osterman here, as usual, coming to you from the great state of Hawaii, the beautiful community of Kailua, on the windward side of Oahu, our main island. And we're going to talk about sustainability. You know, sustainability is kind of an interesting topic. When you tie it to things like agriculture and renewable energy, it really gets people excited in Hawaii because a long time ago in Hawaii, these islands were totally sustainable. They had a population similar to what we have in Hawaii right now, and they didn't import anything. And today we import not over 90% of our food and, and everything else, coming in a big container ships that put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere and we don't like that. But sustainability is something we're trying to get back to in Hawaii. So on today's show we've got a couple guests associated with sustainable energy Hawaii. And Richard Ha is going to be joining us a little bit later but for for now we have a new guest at least for my show, Nicole Lao Tzu Lao Tzu, who works at the University of Hawaii so Nicole welcome to the show. And I hear you're a whiz on sustainability and you can probably give a better definition than me. But in terms of getting Hawaii where it needs to be economically, which is being sustainable for me has a huge economic impact here in Hawaii we could, if we could reduce our dependence on imported and replace that with clean energy. And if we didn't have to bring in so many things on ships and airplanes, we could probably improve our economy dramatically here in Hawaii, especially with times like now during COVID. When so many small businesses are shut down and like our tax revenues are down our economies really hurting sustainability can make a huge difference so welcome to the show. And could you start off by just introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at the University of Hawaii and some of your background. Sure. Nice to be here. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah, my name is Nicole Lao Tzu I am associate tenured faculty at the University of Hawaii. My position is within the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. I'm a GP there, which is within the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology at the University. And in my position I founded what we named the Hawaii Groundwater and Geothermal Resources Research Center. So HGGRC. My background I'm from Bay Area, California. I did my undergraduate degree in geology with a specialization in chemistry at UCLA. I came to Hawaii to pursue my PhD graduate school here. I left for about four years and then came back as a postdoctoral researcher and started then from then my faculty position where I started focusing on geothermal energy. Great. So as a kid growing up in the Bay Area, did earthquakes drive some of your interest in geology? You would think I did experience I was in seventh or eighth grade when the, what was the 1980s, 7.0 6.9 hit the Bay Area. I was a big San Francisco Giants fan and they were about to play the A's in the World Series, the Bay Bridge World Series. Anyway, so remember that vividly. But no, actually, through high school, I was just interested in the pure sciences. I loved chemistry. I love physics. And I love the planet. And so I started out as a biochem major at UCLA and I happened to have a few classes in the Earth Sciences Department. When I met, I was kind of in a competitive environment with pre-med majors. There is no pre-med major, so they were majoring in biochemistry. And in the Earth Science building, there were all these beautiful pictures of the outdoors and rocks. And so I looked into what that degree meant. And the advanced level classes sounded really exciting to me. So I switched to my degree. So when it comes to geothermal, that's a really, for me personally, a really big topic because I consider, for a lot of reasons, and it'll take me a whole hour to tell you why, I consider hydrogen and geothermal as like the perfect matchup to make Hawaii sustainable. With geothermal being, providing electricity to create electrolysis to make really pure green hydrogen and then using the green hydrogen for not only transportation, but also for the grid here on Oahu, where, you know, when it comes to transporting energy, you can transport it in oil, of course, but if you transported liquid hydrogen, you'd be clean and carbon free all the way through. So for me, geothermal plays a huge role, maybe 15, 20 years from now, in the future, to really make Hawaii an energy independent state, maybe even an energy border. So with your experience in geothermal, could you tell us about some of the advancements? By the way, I've been to Iceland at least four or five times. So I get what geothermal can do for an island community. Could you kind of give us a picture of what your view of geothermal doing for Hawaii? How it could be done cleanly, safely and effectively here? And give us some positive notes on geothermal. I agree. When I started geothermal research about 2011 or 2012, what really impressed me, two things really impressed me. One, I was fairly unfamiliar with what geothermal resource meant. And I mean, it's an amazing resource if it's available to a given location in terms of its base load power, the amount of energy output for square footage of land needed to produce the energy and then, yeah, generally because it's 24 seven, you know, always on the Department of Energy says you need to throttle back when the consumers don't want to consume a lot of energy and so it can be used like things for hydrogen production. That and the second thing that really impressed me with specifically to Hawaii is how little Hawaii, the state knows about the extent of its geothermal resource. So most people think of Puna being the only place where geothermal can be produced. And in fact I'm about to conclude a five year long Department of Energy funded statewide resource assessment. And this is the first resource assessment since 1985 so 30 year hiatus or 35 now as we start to produce our results, which indicates there's a probability we don't know the answer to this for sure of there being a geothermal resource on all islands in the state so including a Hawaiian Kauai. So we can't even really start to talk about what the development would look like do we need to develop just on big island and then have an underwater cable to export to the other islands or does each island in fact have its unique geothermal resource that can be developed to assist with the renewable energy portfolio of that state. And to me this should be almost the main driver of the discussion of renewables in the state of Hawaii. I agree with you completely. I'm familiar with the study was that was done I believe in 1974 by the University of Hawaii. That showed that there were at least three Oahu possibilities for geothermal wanted bellows Air Force station on the windward side. In West Oahu in why and I, in that area and I believe it also included somewhere in Pearl City, and then diamond head crater, three or four locations that have potential for geothermal. And it didn't go in. And at that time, this is 74 so that's what 50 years ago, the technology geothermal technology wasn't that well developed. In today's world, you know, and I go back to Iceland, you know geothermal energy is pretty mature, and I'm not sure compared to Iceland, what Puna geothermal is technology development wise. But in today's state of the art cutting edge geothermal technology. What are the safety safety relative factors and things like that in terms of, you know one of the problems we have in Hawaii is we introduce these really great ideas we don't worry about second third order effects and, and most of the time we don't don't get them until after we spent millions or billions of dollars, you know, putting it in the ground and then then all of a sudden we realize it wasn't such a great idea. So, what is geothermal really look like from a practical standpoint for the state of Hawaii in the next 20 years. I guess. So my expertise is in exploring for geothermal with my geologic background. So trying to characterize the subsurface and there's utility in doing that for many reasons geothermal being one of them. So that's really my niche. I mean say, and I'm not entirely familiar with, you know the regulations but but the regulatory process for geothermal in Hawaii is very conservative meaning very strict. You know for so far so for dioxide output the Department of Health, why Department of Health regulations restrict what is permissible for Pune geothermal venture to admit to be, I believe it's three orders of magnitude lower. So, PGV will get find if their missions are of sulfur dioxide or three orders of magnitude lower than OSHA, which is a scientific standard. So for geothermal under the current regulatory process in Hawaii for geothermal a new development to get permitted and approved that plant will need to be very extremely safe. Is basically how. So compared to what madam Pilly does it volcano national park in terms of sulfur dioxide. Can you kind of compare that to what we're allowing. Yeah, no, I exactly that's it so what what Pelle emits is orders of magnitude higher just in terms of sulfur dioxide during the 2018 East Rift zone eruption of Kilauea. Those levels of carbon dioxide or sorry sulfur dioxide were extremely higher than what what PGV has admitted, even in terms of times of blowout where where the facility has been fine. So at least I've been told and this may be outside your area of expertise that we don't have to use as hot of a source of geothermal energy to produce energy now as we did 2030 years ago when they were really just kind of getting into geothermal. So do we really have to go deep enough where we, we end up getting sulfur and sulfur dioxide emissions to still produce a reasonable amount of geothermal energy. Not necessarily I don't think we have a comprehensive enough data set to be able to understand that question but certainly I mean, we, as geologists volcanologists we anticipate that the hottest resource in the state which is favorable for electricity would be where there was the most recent volcanic activity. And so certainly then it's kind of a no brainer to go to the most active volcanically active location in the state which is Kilauea's East Rift zone. And so that's where most of the exploration for geothermal in the state of Hawaii has been focused, and really where we have only until very recently deep wells that can assess what the temperature at depth is, which is what we need to know we need more of those deep wells outside of Kilauea's East Rift zone to know what the temperature gradient to depth is and know what, what type of development facility, whether it's a steam plan a binary plan and as you said the technology keeps on getting more and more progressive towards, you know, developing lower temperature resources so so what is feasible we need to know what kind of temperatures we have at what depth and then what the permeability of the rock is to enable fluid flow to in traditional geothermal. I tell you what we're going to take a quick break here, and maybe we can pull Richard into discussion if he's on the zoom meter here back in the studio so we'll turn it back over to Eric to do some commercials and we'll try and get Richard on on the line as well. Welcome back to stand energy man Stan Osterman here with Nicole loutsy and joining us as Mr Richard Hoff from the big island with a beautiful picture of he low bay and the beautiful mountains behind them with the snow on top and everything. I know that's not a live picture because it's too pretty, but Richard looks pretty so who cares. Anyway welcome to the show Richard and Richard is part of a group on the big island called sustainable energy Hawaii. And Richard we've already talked to Nicole for a little bit about geothermal energy and different sources on the different islands. Um, could you give us some some words about sustainable energy Hawaii as as an organization and what you're looking at doing there on the big island and for the state. Yeah, sure. Sustainable energy Hawaii we funded in January this this year. And it was at the same time we entered the power purchase agreement between health code and PGV as a participant in other words we were a supporter. And 10 years prior to that you know we were pretty much aware of what was taking place with energy and specifically share oil. Come about 2009 or so we started to get indications that it wasn't going to last you know it was it was new then, but because it depleted so quickly 90% of what was going to come out comes out in the first years then. And then as technology increase by you know several years ago, it was down to three years 90% in three years. Now clearly that's not sustainable so what they were doing was making sure that as well started to decline they would start to drill more. So they were up to I think maybe a lot 700 different of drilling drilling. So, so now it's down to below 200 or so. So, so now it's pretty clear that by next year, we'll see another drop in oil supply and what what is the main thing is is that it takes the whole economy is made up of oil. You know the, and the reason for it is a difference between a gallon of diesel and a gallon of orange juice. Yeah, so that's that's the difference, and you got to kind of be really aware that that this is what runs the economy. I don't think most people are aware of how energy dense the fuels are that we use today and how much energy is stored up in those fuels we take it for granted and the fact that we really don't make oil, we just harvest it. We harvest it from the ground and we pull it out of the ground and it's subsidized and I mean if you buy gasoline or diesel in Europe or Australia or wherever. It's only $182 a gallon. It's expensive. And that's because it's not subsidized. So if we had to pay the real price of those fuels for that really efficient stored fossil fuel energy. We'd be paying a lot more. And there's cleaner ways to do it and here in Hawaii and that's why we talk about sustainability in Hawaii. We have the resources to make our own energy, including to make our own electricity for a future that from my perspective is going to be more renewable energy sources and like Nicole mentioned right off the bat, baseload power. I mean, geothermal represents a absolutely unbeatable baseload power source, not only for the big island but for Maui, Oahu and possibly even Kauai. So we learned a lot from her in the first 15 minutes. So I know you two folks talk a little bit more. I think when Nicole's paper comes out and gets published, it's going to be an eye-opener for all of our legislature and all of our county councils in terms of the availability of renewable energy in the form of geothermal for all islands. And quite frankly, if we don't have to transport it, I mean, although I'd love to see liquid hydrogen on the big island being sent all over the world. But if we could make it on Maui and Oahu, fully macro, that's a game changer for the state that it would be hard to beat. So for the big island, right now it shows the most potential because you've actually got PGV going. So it'll probably start in the big island. But what's your plan, at least for the big island, Richard, on making sure that everybody understands the impact of geothermal in a safe, clean environment on the big island to make it part of our clean energy resources? Yeah, you know, compared to the rest of the world, we are incredibly lucky. You know, I read somewhere that only about 1% of the world has this resource available to them. And we're wonderful. Yeah, just incredible. But at the same time, you know, when oil starts to decline, and this is what really scares me, I've been doing this for 10 years, you know, and watching it move and then the pandemic sits right on top of it. As soon as we get out of it, we're going to be facing a real serious situation. So we don't have time. And we really need to get going. And, you know, and I'm sure Nicole talked about all the different possibilities we have of analyzing using the water wells, using the different places that they've surveyed and stuff like that. But there can be a lot more to be done, because you know when you compare this, us against, let's say New Zealand, for example, I was down there at PGV with Icaico Marzol and a friend of his from New Zealand. And the New Zealand guy, you know, I asked him, gee, how's you guys resource down there. And he basically said that we've done a lot of testing and stuff so there's a bunch of places that are sitting waiting to be used. But we're not like that. Yeah, we're not at that point. And of course, their resource is shallower, but nevertheless, they're ready to go. Yeah. So you know what's really interesting you mentioned that we're really fortunate to have the resources, but it's even bigger than that because we're part of the ring of fire, although we're smack in the middle of it around the whole Pacific. But we don't have the kind of volcanoes that could be super dangerous, like many of the other nations that have the geothermal resources available, including the continental US. I think they're like, some of what is it, the big national parks and where you got the old faithful geyser and stuff. They're sitting on top of the Northwest of a huge geothermal supply, but it's also really dangerous you've had Mount St. In the Netherlands you've got other, you know, things in Alaska, great geothermal, but those volcanoes aren't really friendly. We've got friendly volcanoes, you know, we've got the kind of volcanoes you want to have in a geothermal world to make geothermal energy. So, Melissa, what do you think about that you're the, you're the geology expert house house wise resources. It's an interesting point you make and actually so the Pacific Northwest has hydro power. So it's also a portfolio that needs to be considered right and I think Washington, the Pacific Northwest is looking at assessing their geothermal resource for further energy production but they also have a lot larger percentage of renewable from power. California actually is one of the largest geothermal producers from what I know and they have something like over 2000 megawatts, or that's in their, their plan. In this century 2000 megawatts why has 38 megawatts although studies have suggested that we also have over 2000 megawatts which could almost meet the entire state electricity demand. So we could just come to terms with exploring and developing it right. In terms of our volcanoes being safe, I maybe know a little bit too much as a volcanologist PhD here because there is evidence that kill away I had explosive eruptions in its past so we might be a little bit misled that are we have passive volcanoes here they have a possibility to erupt explosively as well. But at least for, I mean, future century product projections from what we know, especially in the older volcanoes that the hazard of volcanic eruption, hurting geothermal production facilities really low relative to most of the rest of the world, where there's a lot of geothermal production. About the property in North Kona thinking it'd be really safe because we're, we're not in the path of lava from monoloa or monaca if it happens to go up. And then I read that while ally is actually one of the words dangerous cinder cones in the whole state, and I'm only 20 miles from getting bombarded by an explosive eruption while alive so. Yeah, I hear you, but for generally speaking we're, we do have the nicer volcanoes on the planet. Yeah, our shield shield building volcanoes are. Yeah. And they create some great water to. In fact, I think the big one has has Richard knives talked about this because he has hydroelectric on one of his farms. He's had it for probably 10 years now five or 10 years at least. And, you know, we don't exploit that power source as much as I think we should with all the ag we used to have on sugar and pineapple. We have all the flumes and all of the plumbing in to do in stream hydroelectric and I don't see where we're not doing more of that. It wouldn't be on the multi megawatt scale as you talked about but that's one resource that I also push besides geothermal. I tell you what, Richard, why don't we give you the last word we're going to wrap up here and wrap up the show. We're going to have Melissa, I mean, Nicole back on a later show. And, but why don't you close us out with without geothermal for the big island. Yeah, so so what you know we know that everybody's getting excited about hydrogen I mean, all over everybody's talking about it and he's getting you know and it's a big deal. And we really need to get all of our people together and start to discuss this up front so we know what alternatives are from a scientific point of view what are the consequences and stuff like this, and not be left behind. So that's what sustainable energy Hawaii is looking to do. And I'm so happy that you had Nicole on and I've talked to her, you know, and I'm really impressed with what she wants to do, and you know what we can do. It's an excellent opportunity. Okay, Nicole, do you have any closing words as as our geology expert here on how you see Hawaii exploiting geothermal in the future to help with our energy. I guess in general and and as Richard and I have talked about I mean it's the existential crisis or threat of like climate change that concerns me every day I have little kids and you know is this planet going to survive and so I feel like the work that I do is trying to understand the subsurface and that's related to understanding our fresh groundwater supply and the impacts of climate change on that. I recently got interested in carbon storage potential in rock in the subsurface and then geothermal has been kind of my niche for the past five plus years. And I just think, you know, we need to have more dialogue about it but realizing what a good energy resource it is. And then I mean Richard introduced me to the implications for hydrogen production and stuff. It's really a no brainer, and we really need to better understand what's going on in our subsurface if we're going to make it through this existential crisis. And whether or not fossil fuels are there or not we need to stop bringing them to the surface and using them to combust. I mean we just have to, we just have to stop or our race or species is not going to survive and I, I worry about this constantly. I feel really good about the work that I do, despite the challenges that hasn't and we need more funding and I think for for more people in the state to take it seriously to get to the bottom of this together. Well, I agree that we need to be looking for a carbon free future, whether or not your climate change, you know, advocate or not, I just don't think that it's right that we take things and throw them into our atmosphere that shouldn't be there. I mean, I get, I get poked a lot because one of my things that I used to say on my show was, you wouldn't wrap your lips around your exhaust pipe and breathe so why the heck are we still driving cars that commit those kind of pollution, you know emissions. It, it's just ridiculous, you shouldn't be doing it it just doesn't pass the smell test from the beginning. And when we can use hydroelectric or can use geothermal, or we can use ocean thermal like Dr croc. We should be doing it so I appreciate both of you being on Richard's been on a couple of times but I tell you what Nicole we're going to have you come back and and talk about your paper specifically and and share some more ideas and maybe have some graphics on where we could use geothermal on all the islands here in the state of Hawaii to help us clean up our environment and get cleaner, better energy, the smart way. And thanks for being here Richard thanks, Nicole, and thanks for watching us out there and think tech land and send the energy man signing off until next Tuesday.