We are so lucky to be living here, on the Big Island, among friends and family.
Best wishes to all for a hopeful and wonderful New Year.
Where Have I Been?
A friend of mine sent me this link to A Vision of Bhutan in the Year 2020.
“Before you read,” he told me, “please just switch the word ‘Bhutan’ with ‘Hawaii County’ and ‘Hydro’ to ‘Geothermal.’ Then you may find this to be an ideal Vision 2020 for Hawaii County as well.”
It turns out that Bhutan sells hydro electricity to India, and so it has a strong basis for further GDP growth. Bhutan is a small developing country with aspirations to exist in the modern world while keeping the essence of who they are.
Another thing that struck me about this new democracy is the importance it places on Gross National Happiness (GNH), which it considers more important that its Gross Domestic Product. The country actually quantifies this concept so they can measure progress.
Click to watch a BBS video titled Bhutan in Pursuit of Gross National Happiness.
Coincidentally, there was an article in Friday’s Hawaii Tribune-Herald titled “Study – Living in Hawaii may make you a happier person.” Hawaii was rated second in the nation for happiness.
The happiness ratings were based on a survey of 1.3 million people across the country by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Economists Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick, England, and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. compared the happiness ranking with studies ranking states on various criteria. Their report was published in the journal Science and found that the happiest people tend to live in the states that do well in quality-of-life issues.
Back to Bhutan:
While much recognition has been accorded to Gross National Happiness (GNH) there has also been much criticism, and most of which is directed on the difficulty of measuring GNH in quantitative terms. Bhutan’s determination to develop the GNH vision in concrete terms took a big step forward with the preliminary findings of rare GNH indicators.
The Centre for Bhutan Studies [CBS] had identified nine provisional GNH indicators that were used in the pilot survey to measure GNH in Bhutan. To avoid an isolated implementation of the study, and to arrive at a realistic measurement of GNH, the CBS had done extensive researching and assimilated lessons from “like-minded” organizations from as far as Canada and the UK.
The 9 provisional indicators which were used in the survey:
1. Standard of living
2. Health of the population
3. Education
4. Ecosystem vitality and diversity
5. Cultural vitality and diversity
6. Time use and balance
7. Good governance
8. Community vitality, and
9. Emotional well being
I shared this link with my friend Jim, and he said: “My niece lives in Bhutan. I have always felt that the GNH should replace our GDP for us to live a more sustainable life.”
Leslie said, “I’ve always loved the Gross National Happiness goal in Bhutan.”
Where have I been?
Keaukaha School – ‘Really Something Else’
Richard and June just attended the “Evening of Song” holiday program at Keaukaha Elementary School, and he told me that when it was over and they came out of the program, they were both amazed.
“It was the most fun thing,” he said. “We couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how often you see a principal of a school with an ‘ukulele out in the front, dancing. We came out pretty happy, both of us.
June at left, with Principal Kumu Lehua Veincent and his mother
He said another thing that really struck him was the Santa Claus. “The Santa came out boogying while carrying his boogie board in one hand,” he said. “He had the beat, and stayed with it, spinning around and punctuating the beat with his rubbah slippahs, waving to the crowd as he made his way to his Santa chair.
“How could kids be afraid of a dancing Santa Claus wearing rubbah slippahs and carrying a boogie board?” he said. “They loved him; you could see it in the tiniest ones’ faces. When he sat down and the kids came to sit on his lap, they were not afraid of him. You cannot be afraid of someone in rubbah slippers.”
During the program the school recognized Ilde Aceret, a custodian retiring after 27 years of service; Aunty Momi Wakita, for starting up the Evening of Song several years ago; and Ed and Irene Kozohara, retired teachers who volunteered for many years to give the keiki ‘ukulele lessons.
“You can just see the values at that school,” said Richard. “You can see that the community there is really tight. They are really basic, down to earth, solid values. When you see the folks being recognized…. that janitor, she’s very important. If everybody there had had shiny shoes on, I don’t think the janitor would have been up there being recognized.”
“Just the look at how the community interacts – it’s no wonder the school is doing so good.”
Then Kumu Lehua called up Richard and June. “June and I were totally surprised to be called up,” he said. “We recognized that it was in appreciation of the folks that fund the Adopt-A-Class project, which sends that school’s keiki on excursions.”
Counting the people that were outside the gym, Kumu Lehua estimated there were about 750 people there.
Each class sang during the program, with what Richard said was only minimal backup. “We all know there are lots of entertainers in Keaukaha, but it was just an ‘ukulele and a bass. The bass was way in the background but kept up a nice beat. It made them look and sound almost professional. They’re starting at a high level, not a low level.
“When they did the introduction chant, it was three or four times more enthusiastic. Those voices were STRONG. There was no loudspeaker; they didn’t need it, the voices were strong.”
“The school, the parents, they cannot force that. It was something else.”
Surfing at Santa Cruz
Richard Ha writes:
There was an interesting article recently in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
Hawaiian royals honor Santa Cruz surfing history
Posted: 11/25/2009 01:30:17 AM PST
SANTA CRUZ — Take that, Huntington Beach.
The royal family of Hawaii boosted Santa Cruz's claim as the real Surf City, giving the city a bronze plaque honoring the three island princes who introduced surfing to the mainland when they first paddled out at the San Lorenzo River mouth in 1885. The City Council officially accepted the plaque Tuesday.
…According to Dunn's historical report, "Riders Like the Sea Spray: The Three Surfing Princes in Santa Cruz," Hawaiian princes Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana'ole, David Kawananakoa and Edward Keliiahonui visited family friends in Santa Cruz during their summer break from St. Matthew's Hall, a military school for boys that they attended in San Mateo, in 1885.
The three princes ordered 15-foot, 100 pound surfboards carved from local redwood and paddled out at the river mouth, where a large wave historically broke before the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor was built in the 1960s…. (Read more here)
In the mid-1960s, when I was in Army boot camp at Fort Ord, we went down to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. We did some body surfing on the south side of the beach, at the Boardwalk. I wonder if that was where the princes surfed?
This was the first time that I actually got in the water on the mainland. It was fun but shockingly cold compared to what I was accustomed. It was the coldest water I ever experienced. No wonder people were wearing wet suits.
Michael Bolte tells me, “The Boardwalk is bordered on the south side by the San Lorenzo river. There is a sandbar that forms off the river mouth that often has a nice break in the winter. I think this is where the princes surfed.”
Differing Geothermal Processes
From the New York Times:
Geothermal Project in California Is Shut Down
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: December 11, 2009
The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned….. (read more)
There is a big difference between that California geothermal project and what we have here. In Hawai‘i, we already have the three key elements of HEAT, WATER and FRACTURES (PERMEABILITY), so our geothermal operators only use conventional methods for exploration– unlike that California project, where they were doing fracturing that can cause earthquakes.
The Alta Rock Energy company shutdown at Geysers (California), in the article above, comes one day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel because it produced damaging earthquakes.
The type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers required fracturing the bedrock, and then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. They both had HEAT but they needed to FRACTURE the surrounding rock and then inject WATER to produce steam.
By its nature, fracturing causes small earthquakes. One of the largest ones measured 3 on the Richter scale, which is considered small for those of us living on the Big Island.
Still, 99 percent of the geothermal operations in the world — including ours here in Hawai‘i — do not use the fracturing techniques that caused the earthquakes leading to that
California project shutdown.
Here, they drill two types of holes: production and injection holes.
Production wells bring up the hot water and steam that pushes itself up under pressure. Injection wells take the “cooled” fluids back into the ground. This is a “closed loop cycle.”
From The Oil Drum, some examples of fracturing procedures used in the oil and gas business — again, this is not the process used here in Hawai‘i:
Equipment used for hydraulic fracturing a well (Primer)
Arrangement of shaped charges (the yellow cylinders) – when the
explosive goes off the cones collapse and small liquid metal jets shoot
out of the open end, through the casing, concrete and into the rock,
creating a channel. (Core Labs)
The charges aren’t all necessarily fired at one time or place, even though, for the illustration below, they appear to be.
Representation of shaped charges firing and penetrating the casing, cement and wall (OSHA)
The jet of metal that shoots out of the cone will travel into the rock roughly 10 cone diameters, as a rough rule of thumb, and this carries a channel, or tunnel, out through the damaged rock into the surrounding reservoir. The collapse and creation of the channel happens very fast:
Penetration of a perforating charge into Plexiglas after 3, 12, 21 and 30 microseconds. Marks are in cone diameters. (after Konya*)
The channel is initially hollow, and drives a set of small and large cracks out into the rock around the line of the charge.
Jet penetration through Plexiglas (note the lateral cracks away from the line of penetration. The dark section is due to a change in background. (after Konya*)
However, while it is easier to show the damage that the jet does by showing how it penetrates Plexiglas, this is not rock, but it does show some of the events that occur. When, for example, (vide the discussion on jointed shale last week) the jet shoots into rock where there are clear joint planes defined, then these act to stop the crack growth (perhaps in the way that those who used to remember stopping cracks growing in old cars by drilling a hole at the end of the crack. It distributes the stress that was causing the crack to grow when focused on the tip, over a larger area so that it drops below the critical level). Or the stress is high enough to cause cracks to form and be reflected back at the jet.
Jet damage confined between two adjacent planes when the charge is fired into plates that run parallel to the direction of the jet. (after Konya*)
Salad Bars in Schools
I wrote here awhile back that Rep. Sam Farr was planning to introduce a bill that would help install salad bars in U.S. elementary schools. He did introduce the bill on December 3rd.
From sgvtribune.com (San Gabriel Valley, CA):
Farr bill aims to get students to eat their veggies
Posted: 10/26/2009 01:30:47 AM PDT
Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, is renewing his push for salad bars in schools through legislation that would require more fruits and vegetables on campus menus.The Children’s Fruit and Vegetable Act of 2009, which Farr expects to introduce in coming weeks, directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to spend more of its school food budget on produce and provide additional money for cafeteria upgrades like salad bars.
“For the first time, parents are asking school boards what are you feeding my kid, not just what are you teaching him,” said Farr, who represents most of Santa Cruz County. “These kids are too often obese, and we as a government are not leading the way and providing them healthy food.”
The congressman’s push for better eating follows a highly publicized federal report this month that suggests fat- and sodium-filled school meals are not consistent with government dietary guidelines. Needed, according to the findings by the Institute of Medicine, are less saturated fat and salt and more whole grains, fruits and vegetables, changes Farr believes his bill would bring.
“We’re not practicing what we preach,” Farr said. The new bill would move things in the right direction, he said…. (Read the rest here)
The bill Rep. Farr introduced on December 3 is called the Children’s Fruit and Vegetable Act.
More on this at The Packer:
Salad bar advocates head to Capitol Hill
Published on 12/04/2009 03:36pm By Tom Karst
…Slusser was one of several advocates of salad bars on Dec. 3-4 in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the United Fresh Produce Association, to brief lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill.
Slusser asked Congress to provide increased funding so schools can serve more fruits and vegetables and purchase salad bar equipment and other needed cafeteria items so more schools can have salad bars.
The group also scheduled visits with food and nutrition officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture…. (Read the rest here)
It would be great if local produce was available in Hawai‘i’s schools. And, especially, if it was in salad bars.
Supporting the Mauna Kea CMP
A diverse group – all of us supporting the Comprehensive Management Plan to malama Mauna Kea – met in front of the new court house yesterday to show our support for the process.
Judge Hara ruled that a Comprehensive Management Plan had to be done before any new construction could happen on the mountain. Many, many volunteers worked very hard and did their very best to ensure that the CMP would comply with the spirit of the ruling – which is to malama Mauna Kea.
No matter what side of the issue we’re all on, we all want the best for Mauna Kea.
Everyone had a fair chance to provide input to the process. We aloha everyone who participated. It took everybody’s input to make this the best plan it can be.
We came together yesterday to celebrate the process.
Biofuels & Geothermal
In Saturday’s Honolulu Advertiser, there was an article about a $25 million Department of Energy grant to UOP, LLC. That’s a Honeywell company that will test biomass feedstock at Tesoro’s refinery in Kapolei.
In Denver this past October, prior to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference, I asked my friend Gail Tverberg if she would introduce me to Robert Rapier. He is a well-respected chemical engineer and a frequent contributor to The Oil Drum blog. I wanted to ask him about next-generation biofuel projects.
Gail forwarded my email to Robert, and he wrote back that he was sitting in an office in Waimea, and that he had moved to Hawai‘i to work on just these kinds of projects. It’s very fortunate for us, as he can explain these complex processes in a very clear way.
From his September 2009 post at The Oil Drum. There is a reference to UOP.
There are a number of companies involved in pyrolysis research. Dynamotive Energy Systems has been working on this for a while (I first wrote about them in 2007). UOP – a company that specializes in product upgrading for refineries – has teamed with Ensyn to form a joint venture called Envergent Technologies. The company intends to make pyrolysis oils from biomass for power generation, heat, and transport fuel (this is where UOP’s skills will come into play).
When I asked him about this specific project, Robert responded that: “…Pyrolysis is not too difficult unless you are trying to upgrade to transportation fuels. Then it gets expensive. But for stationary power generation, it is a pretty promising option in my view.”
And in this post he talks about pretenders, those technologies that are not working:
To summarize, the biofuel pretenders fall into several broad categories. The big ones are:
- Hydrogen
- Most would-be cellulosic ethanol producers
- Most would-be algal biofuel producers
- Most first generation biodiesel producers
This isn’t to say that none of these will work in any circumstances. I will get into that when I talk about niches. But I will say that I am confident that none of these are scalable solutions to our fossil fuel dependence. Frankly, I wish the algae story was true. I love the idea of getting renewable fuel from brackish waterways. But I try not to let a hope get confused with what I believe is realistic.
I agree with Robert that first generation biofuels, farmer grown, will not scale without major subsidies. If we were to give 20 cents/pound subsidies to grow biofuels, I would rather give the farmers a 20-cents/pound subsidy to grow food!
“Base power” is proven technology that is dependable 24/7 and makes up 85 to 90 percent of a utility’s power. There are only few options for base power. The first option is fossil fuels. The second is biofuels. And the third is geothermal.
Other options, like wind and solar, are nice to talk about. But they are only a tiny part of the mix. Biofuel, grown by farmers, doesn’t break even until approximately $320 per barrel; oil is in the high $70s today and we all know it will keep on climbing.
Geothermal breaks even at less than $60 per barrel oil. And it will stay that way for centuries!
On the Big Island, unless someone can show that the electricity cost to regular folks will be cheaper with biofuels than with geothermal, then we should go with geothermal.
Ammonia: The Practical Person’s Hydrogen
Midwestern farmers seeking fertilizer security are now looking to ammonia as a way to make fertilizer and fuel.
As we all know, farmers are very practical. What works, works.
What they have figured out is a quicker way to get to the hydrogen economy. (See a brief discussion of the hydrogen economy here.) Ammonia is the short cut they have discovered. To farmers, ammonia is the practical person’s hydrogen.
Ammonia can be made from geothermal and it is a dual-use product. It’s commonly used for nitrogen fertilizer, and it can be used for fuel in internal combustion engines (diesel as well as gas). Ammonia was used to power the rocket powered X-15 aircraft a long time ago. Maybe it can be used as jet fuel, too? Here is a link to the Ammonia Fuel Network.
The problem with straight hydrogen (H2) is that the molecule is so tiny it leaks all over the place. So in a hydrogen economy, our whole infrastructure, from gas cans on up, would need to be retrofitted. Ammonia (NH3) is a larger molecule and can work with present propane containers and pipelines. And because ammonia is more efficient as a carrier of hydrogen than is straight hydrogen, it is cheaper to move around.
It can be made from many renewable energy sources at many locations. It can be made using unused geothermal energy, and then stored for later use. This makes geothermal power even more valuable.
Farmers use ammonia all the time when planting their crops, so they are familiar and comfortable with its uses.
It’s not a done deal and there are limitations – such as that ammonia has half the energy of gas. So a car with a 20-gallon tank would need a 40-gallon tank to travel the same distance.
But what I’m doing is raising the question. I’m saying: Since ammonia is a thinking person’s hydrogen, instead of having to change every single car and every single service station, why not use it until we figure out something better? At this point, it actually seems doable.
It could be created using the off-peak geothermal energy the utility does not use. That makes it cheap.
Geothermal is a great Hawaiian resource. We are having discussions about it with the community right now. Decisions about increasing our use of geothermal need to come from the bottom up and not the top down. I need to repeat this: “It needs to come from the bottom up. Not the top down!”
The Geothermal Fork In The Road
This paper has most influenced my thinking about our energy future. I noted that in the 1930s, one could get 100 barrels of oil from the energy in one barrel of oil. By the 1970s, that had declined to 30 to 1 and now it is around 10 to 1.
An excerpt from that paper:
What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have?
Charles A. S. Hall *, Stephen Balogh and David J. R. Murphy
Program in Environmental Science, State University of New York – College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse NY, 13210, USA
Energy surplus is defined broadly as the amount of energy left over after the costs of obtaining the energy have been accounted for. The energy literature is quite rich with papers and books that emphasize the importance of energy surplus as a necessary criteria for allowing for the survival and growth of many species including humans, as well as human endeavors, including the development of science, art, culture and indeed civilization itself. Most of us who have thought about this issue deeply would even say that energy surplus is the best general way to think about how different societies evolved over time.
The trend is unmistakeable, and it’s what made me realize how important geothermal is to our sustainable future.
Geothermal has an Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of 10 to 1 and unlike fossil fuels, which will steadily decline, that won’t change for centuries. Very few people in the world are lucky enough to have this option.
When coming to the fork in the road where one choice is geothermal, the survivor types – the rubbah slippah folks – will naturally take the geothermal turn.
If we were to take the other fork, our electricity and water costs would rise and rise until there was no more. People would start to leave the electric grid. Our schools would not be able to afford the electric rates, and they would have to turn off the air conditioning and the kids would have a hard time learning. The poorest among us would have their electricity and water tuned off.
Down the geothermal road, however, the grass is always green. Our electricity and water costs will stay the same as they are today – for centuries. After awhile, our everyday living costs would be cheaper than those on the mainland.
Because our low income folks would have extra money, our businesses would start to grow. And as our electricity costs became lower relative to the U.S. mainland, we would be more competitive in manufacturing and things that use energy. Most of us would be cruising around in hybrid electric cars.
It’s perfectly clear that we need to go down the geothermal road. My Pop used to say: “Get thousand reasons why no can; I only looking for one reason why can!”
Here is the Puna Geothermal Ventures website. The company is run by local folks and its manager is Mike Kaleikini. They are good community citizens.