Category Archives: Peak Oil

Aquaponics, Bananas, Hamakua Coast, Hydroponics, Lettuce, Peak Oil, Sustainability, Taro/Poi, Water, Where We Live

Conversations With My Mom

4 Comments

Richard Ha writes:

I took Mom to Hamakua Springs to get a few tilapia for her dinner.

Mom1

While we were there, we looked at some of the things we have going on.

Corn field

Corn
 
Corn field
Hamakua Springs bananas
 
Corn field
Hydroponic lettuce, with special procedures to control slugs
 

Corn field

Sweet potatoes

Corn field

Zucchini

One thing that strikes me is how much water we have running through our 600-acre farm. We must maximize its usage.

Reservoir

Water Supply will build a new reservoir adjacent to this one and bring electricity right through the farm to the new well, which is right behind this reservoir

I really want to raise tilapia when the price of oil goes so high that bringing it in from Asia is prohibitive.

Tilapia for mom

Tilapia for Mom. These are the small ones, to fry crispy.

And, while doing that, we want to demonstrate how Hawaiians were self-sufficient in ancient days.

Then while we are at it, we want to reforest the streams with ‘ohi‘a, koa, bamboo, kukui, hapu‘u, etc.

  1. Also, how about aquaponics with tilapia and taro?
  2. How about a certified kitchen to make lomi salmon, poi and other things where we and other farmers can add value?
  3. What about classes for at-risk students?
  4. Maybe a permanent imu.
  5. Events set around food?
  6. How about showing how food was produced then and now – ancient and modern?

Mom and I always have these kinds of conversations. I like it.

Geothermal, Peak Oil

My Op-Ed From Yesterday’s Paper: “Oil Price May Lead To Exporting Our Children”

2 Comments

I wrote an Op-Ed piece that appeared in yesterday’s Hawaii Tribune-Herald:

Oil price may lead to exporting our children

By RICHARD HA

Here are some real world facts, which people probably don’t realize yet because nobody’s comfortable talking about this: If we weren’t starting to change how we power our farm, we’d possibly be looking at bankruptcy before too long.

Recently, I talked to Dean Okimoto, of Nalo Farms, and he said the same thing. He’s not sure he’s going to be able to stay in business in the face of rising electricity costs.

I think there are plenty of other farmers in this same boat, too. Electricity prices keep doubling and doubling again — as do fertilizer and other farm input costs — and yet we cannot turn around and double the prices of our products.

Farmers are feeling guilty, like they’re failing in some way because they cannot make ends meet, but it’s not their fault as farmers. Energy prices are rising, and circumstances are out of our control.

…We need to come to grips with our situation, because there are serious consequences.

We will have to continue exporting our children, and Hawaii will change. Already there are more Hawaiians living on the U.S. mainland than here in Hawaii. People who have money will move here and find it a wonderful place to live, and those who can no longer afford it will leave.

It’s already happening. Look around downtown, and go into the nicer restaurants. They aren’t filled with local people. There are more mainland folks I don’t recognize than local people.

I don’t have any problem with people moving here, but I do have a problem with us having to export our children because we cannot afford to live here.

This is a call to action. We cannot sit back. We cannot afford to be quiet and afraid to rock the boat. We cannot afford to NOT take a stand. We have to do something….

There’s more. Read the rest here.

Also, I’m speaking on all this at Lyman Museum soon. It’s on Monday, May 19 at 7 p.m., if you are interested.

Geothermal, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources

EROI is our Common Energy Language

We need a common frame of reference, and I think Energy Return on Investment (EROI) might be it.

It’s a simple concept: The energy you use to get energy, minus the energy it takes to get your food, gives you your lifestyle.

A mama cheetah needs to get enough energy from a rabbit to feed the kids, miss catching a few more rabbits and still have enough energy to catch another one, or else the species goes extinct.

All organisms, organizations and civilizations need surplus energy or they go extinct.

Professor Charlie Hall is the father of the EROI concept, and he has influenced me a lot. This is the Charles Hall paper that got my attention.

Professor Hall and his colleagues have been calculating the EROI of many energy sources. They’ve found that in the 1930s, you could use the energy in one barrel of oil to get you 100 more barrels of oil. By the 1970s it became 30-1. Now it is around 10-15 to 1. It is taking more energy to get energy.

The tar sands in Canada have an EROI of around 6-8 to 1. Shale oil, an incompletely cooked oil, is around 2.5 to 1. Biofuel is less than 2-1.

The EROI for geothermal is about 10-1, and because the Big Island will be over the geothermal “hot spot” for 500,000 to a million years, geothermal costs will remain stable.

Professor Hall estimates that it will take an EROI of 3-1 to maintain our present infrastructure – and that’s not counting the food we eat.

The significance of EROI analysis is that it applies to all of us, from ancient times to now. It’s the common thread that runs through the gift economy – such as the type the ancient Hawaiians had – as well as today’s market economy. It is about surplus energy. This is the common language we all can speak.

Some who are off the grid already have surplus energy, and others are on the grid and need time to transition. What energy source, under what conditions, can we use to help ourselves – and future generations of us?

This is the common language we need to be speaking, combined with Patrick Kahawaiola‘a wisdom: “It’s about the process.” He’s saying that if we follow the process, then everyone who contributes to the process makes for a better end result. Therefore, we must aloha everyone, no matter on what side of the issue they are on.

We must also incorporate Kumu Lehua Veincent’s wisdom: “What about the rest?” This is about all of us, not just a few.

­

This is why I am so encouraged by the meetings that have been taking place. We are moving toward common ground.

Community, Geothermal, Peak Oil

County Council Geothermal Meeting in Pahoa

1 Comment

Last night the County Council held a meeting in Pahoa regarding geothermal, and hundreds of people attended.

The Pele Defense Fund was scheduled to speak for an hour, but they had at least an hour and a half’s worth of material.

Read about it at the Big Island Chronicle: Puna News – Dispatch of a County Council Geothermal Meeting in Pahoa.

While island-wide these days there is a great deal of support for geothermal, most of the testimony from these people in Pahoa, near the Puna Geothermal Venture plant, was against geothermal for religious and safety reasons.

Clearly, these issues need to be addressed.

Photo

I gave a short testimony in my role as a farmer. I talked about how I am the only person from Hawai‘i to have attended four Peak Oil conferences – because my farm costs were going up, due to the rising price of oil, and I wanted to learn as much as I could to help my farm adapt.

What I’ve learned has been very disturbing. I knew that I needed to transform my farm. But the burden of knowing that the world has been using twice as much oil as it had been finding for the last 20-30 years, and that this was going to continue, became my kuleana. I needed to inform people and also do something about it.

People might not have noticed, but in 2000 the oil price was $25 per barrel, and then it doubled to $50, and by the end of 2011 it was at $100/barrel. This means that the price of oil has doubled every 5.5 years.

If that continues, a family whose electric bill is $300 today can expect that in 5.5 years it will be close to $600/month. And when 11 years has gone by, it might approach $1,200/month.

Our families are struggling today; they will not be able to handle that added burden. They need relief now. We don’t have much time.

I pointed out that geothermal is estimated to cost 10 cents/kWh (according to a 2005 GeotherEx report), compared to electricity generated from oil, which costs more than 20 cents/kWh.

I said that I asked Jim Kauahikaua, Scientist-in-Charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, “How long will the Big Island be over the hot spot?” He replied, “500,000 to a million years.”

I said that we can expect electricity generated from oil, now at 20 cents/kWh, to double to 40 cents in 5.5 years and then to 80 cents/ kWh in 11 years – while geothermal would stay at 10 cents/kWh.

I told them what I asked Carl Bonham, head of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. As oil prices rise, I asked, and if we were to use geothermal as our primary base power, would Hawaii then become more competitive with the rest of the world? He said yes.

My next question to him is close to my heart, because of the effect on the “rubbah slippah folks.”

“Is it fair to say that our standard of living would rise, relative to the rest of the world?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

Geothermal, Peak Oil

Gail Tverberg on 2011 World Oil Production Data

1 Comment

A few years ago, Gail Tverberg gave a presentation here on the Big Island to the Kanaka Council. Her view of the world energy situation caused a split in its membership – some of them are now pro-geothermal, and some are still against.

The pro-geothermal group agrees with Gail that one day “the boat not going come.” Meaning that one day, all things that have oil embedded will be too expensive for the common people to afford. To people with this view, geothermal is a gift from our volcano goddess Pele.

Gail is a mathematician and former insurance actuary. She quit her job pricing risk for the insurance industry to take on a higher calling – to inform people about the implications of the world’s oil supply not keeping up with demand.

There is a parable illustrating the need for empirical evidence. It concerns scholars vigorously debating the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth. A naive young man suggests that they might resolve the question by looking in the horse’s mouth and counting them. The scholars are horrified at this outrageous suggestion. 

The common folk – the rubbah slippah folks, as I call them – have counted the teeth in the horse’s mouth, and they know that the era of cheap oil is over. In their view, a hot water heater provides a luxury sponge bath, and a clothes dryer is a luxury clothesline. The electric grid is essential for the hospital, for childbirth support, life support, analysis, computers. It doesn’t take them 10 minutes to understand that cheap, proven and no greenhouse gas emissions is good. And that geothermal is cheap and proven technology.

The price of oil was $25 per barrel in 2000, then doubled to $50 per barrel and in 2011 doubled yet again to $100 per barrel. If the price of oil, electricity and water follow the same doubling pattern, we can expect today’s $300 monthly electricity bill to rise toward $600 by 2016 and $1,200 by 2022.

But there is a great upside. If we stabilize our electricity rates by using geothermal as our primary base power, then as the price of oil continues to rise we will become more competitive to the rest of the world. And our standard of living will rise.

We need compassionate, decisive leaders who will take all of us to a safer place. Not, no can. CAN!

From Gail Tverberg’s blog Our Finite World:

What the new 2011 EIA oil supply data shows

Posted on April 9, 2012

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent data, and provide some views as to where this leads with respect to future production…. Read the rest

Geothermal, Peak Oil, Philippines

Dispatch from the Philippines: Visited a Geothermal Production Site

I’m still in Ormoc City. We visited the Energy Development Corporation (EDC) geothermal production site the other day. It generates 700 MW in the Ormoc City area. Its five projects range from 50 to 230 MW in this area, and they have other geothermal projects in other areas.

This is a company that knows what it’s doing. They have expertise in steam field geothermal, the kind that would be most applicable in Hawai‘i.

We toured the Tongonan field, which has a plant capacity of 112 MW. It consists of 17 production wells and 7 reinjection wells. Its source is a volcano that last erupted 100,000 years ago.

EDC is impressive because of its years of experience and because of the social and environmental component of its business philosophy. At EDC, they have been doing this as a part of their business model for many years. They work with the surrounding communities in many areas of mutual benefit – from tax credits, to schooling, reforestation, etc. Each of the plants has a nurse on station. They are very safety conscious.

However, I must note Hawai‘i’s standards for hydrogen sulfide emissions are much more stringent than either the Philippines or the Icelandic operations’.

Puhagan geothermal plant

Palinpinon Geothermal power plant in Sitio Nasulo, Brgy. Puhagan, Valencia, Negros Oriental. Photo by Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. 

The Philippines, which lies alongside the Pacific Ring of Fire, is the second largest geothermal producer in the world. They are actively developing more geothermal there than the 1,400 MW that exists today. Using this stable, low-cost and proven technology resource will pay enormous dividends to its society in the future.

It is clear to see that as the price of oil rises, and they bring more geothermal on line, individual Filipinos will start to see their standard of living rise. If we in Hawai‘i took similar bold steps, our standard of living could also rise.

Geothermal, Peak Oil, Philippines, Renewable Energy Sources

Dispatch from the Philippines: Why We’re Here

I’m in Ormoc City, Philippines right now. I wrote before about Ormoc City:

…which has an economy similar to the Big Island’s. Its population is close to the population of the Big Island. They produce 700MW of geothermal, which they share by cable with other islands. We only produce 30MW.

The mayor wants to see how they do it. Since “if they can do it, we can do it.”  Read the rest here

 

Ormoc City and the Big Island are now “Sister Cities,” and it’s fascinating to talk with the folks that were instrumental in developing that Sister City relationship.

Ormoc CityIt started when Council Person Angel Pilago, his wife Nitta, and Jane Clement met at Lito Ilagan’s house in Kona to discuss the possibility of forming a Sister City relationship between the Big Island and a city in the Philippines.

From that small get-together, the idea took off. They explored several criteria of compatibility and found several prime candidates.

As the idea started moving forward, Council Person Brittany Smart asked if it was possible to focus on renewable energy. Lito and Jane did some research and came up with Ormoc City as a candidate. Jane checked its website and called the Mayor of Ormoc City, who picked up the phone. She explained the idea, and the Ormoc City Mayor was interested.

With the Visayan Club of Kona sponsoring them, Lito and Jane asked Hawai‘i County Mayor Billy Kenoi for his support in pursuing this initiative. Mayor Kenoi thought it was a good idea, and that it would be great to have it highlighted at the Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit and Expo (APCESE).

There were various Sister City proposals coming in from the other counties. But due to the hard work of Angel and Nitta Pilago, Lito Ilagan, Jane Clement and the Kona people, this event was the one chosen to be featured at APCESE.

I was there, at the APCESE conference last year, to witness the signing ceremony for the new Sister City affiliation. Randy Kurohara arranged for a group of us meet with some high-level people from the Ormoc City geothermal generating operations. Their safety and dependability record seemed to be very good.

But we needed to see for ourselves.

So the Mayor put together this delegation to do an obligatory reciprocal ceremony and study tour of Ormoc City. Of special interest to me was the fact that Bruce Matthews, Dean of the College of Agriculture of UH Hilo, had been to the Visayas State University and knew about the school’s ag program. He mentioned to me how similar the soils in and around Ormoc City are to the soils of Hamakua.

And, of course, we are here to learn everything we can about how Ormoc City lives with and benefits from geothermal. For a $30,000 investment in this trip to the Phillipines, the county of Hawai‘i is getting great bang for its buck.

Stay tuned for more Dispatches from the Philippines coming soon.

Big Island, Hamakua Coast, Peak Oil, Sustainability

Sustainability in Hamakua

1 Comment

My worlds collided on Saturday, when I led a tour that included a stop to meet Richard and see Hamakua Springs Country Farms.

Along with Hilo historian and anthropologist Judith Kirkendall, I lead van tours around East Hawai‘i. Right now we are doing a series of five tours that focus on agriculture and sustainability – what people are doing right now to be more sustainable, and how we can support them and also be more sustainable ourselves. The tours operate through Lyman Museum.

Our tour this past Saturday was called “The Garden As Provider,” and we focused on Hamakua. First we met at the Lyman Museum and heard a short talk by Sam Robinson about Let’s Grow Hilo. That’s the program she started that has volunteers planting edibles along downtown Hilo streets and in traffic medians.

“Anyone is free to help themselves to the fruit or vegetables once it’s ripe,” she told us, and she invited anyone interested in the project to come help plant and tend. They meet every last Sunday at the East Hawai‘i Cultural Center at 2 p.m.

Then we visited Barbara and Philip Williams, who live just outside Hilo near Pueopaku. Barbara grew up in Kenya, where they lived 50 miles away from the nearest railroad and so had to be self-sufficient. After she and Philip married, they lived on a plantation in East Africa. Now on the Big Island, they still grow and harvest everything they can. They have animals, including goats, and every fruit and vegetable you can imagine. “We retain the habits of being self-sufficient to the present day,” she told us.

From there we headed to Pepe‘ekeo, where Richard met us at Hamakua Springs.

IMG_0537

Richard is such an interesting speaker. He told us the story of how he started in farming (after flunking out of UH and consequently serving in Vietnam, he returned home and helped his father on the family’s chicken farm; then traded chicken manure for banana keiki and started farming bananas). He talked about how they decided to move the farm to Pepe‘ekeo and why (hint: free water; the farm alone has one-third as much water as supports agriculture where 234,000 people live in Leeward O‘ahu). Our tour group was totally engaged.

He told about how he started noticing prices going up (on fertilizer, boxes, all the things they were using on the farm) and how he realized it was due to oil prices and decided to attend Peak Oil conferences to learn what was happening. And how he felt bad and so didn’t tell the others there that he would return to Hawai‘i and wear shorts throughout the winter, and grow his produce throughout the winter; nor how we have geothermal to provide us with energy – which we don’t even fully take advantage of.

He spoke about how he has been positioning themselves for how conditions will be five or 10 years from now, and about the hydroelectric project that is getting going on the farm very shortly, and how since his workers first asked to borrow money for gas to get to work he has started what they call the Family of Farms, working with nearby farmers. And about how they are experimenting with how they can produce protein on the farm by raising tilapia, and giving their workers fish (and produce) every week in lieu of monetary raises they cannot afford to give right now.

There was more, and as editor of this blog for all these years, none of it was new to me, but I, too, listened intently and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was fascinating to hear Richard pull all the pieces he talks about on this blog together into one, interrelated, narrative that tells such a real, on-the-ground story of how things are (and how they are changing). The people on the tour were really interested. We all were. Afterward, I heard people talking about what a great thinker he is, and how much they enjoyed meeting him.

That Richard, he’s all right!

We also went to Hi‘ilani Eco House in Honoka‘a, an amazing house being constructed to be as “green” as it gets. Wow, that’s a fascinating place (they say it should last for 500 years!) and they are very open to groups visiting, if anyone is interested. And we stopped a couple other places as well.

It was a neat day (the upcoming tours are listed here if you’re interested), and Richard’s information really made it so good. We were all wowed. Thanks, Richard!

Government, Peak Oil

The White House’s ‘Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future: One-Year Progress Report’

If your electric bill is $300 today, with the price of oil going up 13.5 percent a year (as it has for the last 10 years) your electric bill will be $600/month by mid-2017. And by 2023, it will be about $1,200/month.

This is largely due to demand from China and India. If the trend continues, the price of oil will double every 5.5 years.

It is clear that the U.S. mainland has many resources we in Hawai‘i do not. We don’t have nuclear, large hydro, natural gas or coal. Also, the U.S. mainland only relies on oil for 2 percent of its electricity generation.

The mainland mainly has a liquid fuel transportation problem because there isn’t an easy solution for gasoline. But they are in much better shape than we in Hawai‘i because they don’t also have a liquid fuel electricity problem.

In Hawai‘i, we have both a liquid fuel transportation problem and a liquid fuel electric generation problem. The cost of both is rising with oil prices.

Except for a few spikes in the ’70s and ’80s, oil prices have been under $20 per barrel for 100 years. In 2000, the oil price was $25 per barrel and with normal inflation, the price should be $35 per barrel today. Instead, it is over $105 per barrel. Supply cannot keep up with demand.

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 12, 2012
 
The Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future: One-Year Progress Report
One year ago, the President put forward a comprehensive plan in the Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future that outlined the Administration’s all-of-the-above approach to American energy – a strategy aimed at reducing our reliance on foreign oil, saving families and businesses money at the pump, and positioning the United States as the global leader in clean energy.
On Monday, the President will receive a new progress report, showcasing the Administration’s historic achievements in each of these areas. The accomplishments in this report, which represent the efforts of six Federal agencies, underscore the Administration’s commitment over the past three years to promoting an all-hands-on-deck, all-of-the-above approach to American energy and building a more secure energy future. Attached please find a copy of The Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future: One-Year Progress Report.
 
Report Highlights:
·         Increasing American Energy Independence: A year ago, the President set a bold but achievable goal of reducing oil imports by a third in a little over a decade, relative to where they were when he ran for office. Thanks to booming U.S. oil and gas production, more efficient cars and trucks, and a world-class refining sector that last year was a net exporter for the first time in sixty years, we have already cut net imports by ten percent – or a million barrels a day – in the last year alone. And with the new fuel economy standards the President announced last year, we are on pace to meet our goal by the end of the decade.
·         Expanding Domestic Oil and Gas Production: Domestic oil and natural gas production has increased every year President Obama has been in office. In 2011, American oil production reached the highest level in nearly a decade and natural gas production reached an all-time high.
·         Setting Historic New Fuel Economy Standards: The Obama Administration has put in place the first-ever fuel economy standards for heavy-duty trucks, and proposed the toughest fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles in U.S. history, requiring an average performance equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Over time, these new standards will save consumers more than $8,000 in lower fuel costs.
·         Improving Energy Efficiency in 1 Million Homes: Since October 2009, the Department of Energy and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have completed energy upgrades in more than one million homes across the country. For many families, these upgrades save over $400 on their heating and cooling bills in the first year alone.
·         Doubling Renewable Energy Generation: Thanks in part to the Obama Administration’s investment in clean energy – the largest in American history – the United States has nearly doubled renewable energy generation from wind, solar, and geothermal sources since 2008.
·         Developing Advanced, Alternative Fuels: In 2010, President Obama set a goal of breaking ground on at least four commercial scale cellulosic or advanced biorefineries by 2013. That goal has been accomplished, one year ahead of schedule. Together, these projects, and associated demonstration and pilot projects will produce a combined total of nearly 100 million gallons per year of advanced biofuels capacity.
·         Supporting Cutting-Edge Research: The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), which the Obama Administration funded for the first-time ever in 2009, has supported more than 120 individual projects aimed at achieving new and transformational energy breakthroughs.
Even with this progress, there is much more work to be done. Today, we are experiencing yet another painful reminder of why developing new American energy is so critical to our future. Just like last year, gas prices are climbing across the country – except this time, even earlier. While there are no silver bullets to solve these challenges, the Obama Administration will continue to build on the progress we’ve made over the past three years. Through a sustained, all-of-the-above approach to American energy we’ll work to restore middle class security, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create an economy that’s built to last.