Tag Archives: Association for the Study of Peak Oil

Why LNG is Such a Bad Risk

December 29, 2014 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

We are getting ready to make huge liquified natural gas (LNG) decisions, and LNG is a big risk. We need to understand the risk and who’s going to be left paying the price.

The first time I heard about shale oil and gas was at an Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference. I attended five of those conferences, the only person from Hawai‘i to do so. Hawai‘i County paid for the trip to the 2010 ASPO conference, held in Washington D.C., and is still benefitting from that small investment.

That discussion about shale oil and gas though was at the 2009 ASPO conference, in Denver, and it turned into a sharp discussion between the geologist Art Berman and a drilling company executive.

Art said he had studied data from 4,000 wells in the Barnett Shale and found that the average well gave off 72 percent of its production in the first year.

The executive countered that his figures showed a hyperbolic curve indicating that production lasts for 22 years.

Somebody was wrong. Later I learned that hyperbolic curves only mean that the following year is less than the one previous.

I didn’t know the definition then, but common sense told me that at the end of 22 years, maybe just a gallon might be coming out per hour. I felt like the executive was just trying to sell stock.

Later, a study of 19,000 wells showed that the average well gave more than ninety percent of its production in its first five years. This was not rocket science – even a banana farmer could tell that you would need to replace one-fifth of the wells each year just to stay even. More if production is higher in the first few years.

As of 2010, it was common knowledge that the average shale oil and gas well depleted in a short time, and it was a subject of intense discussion among those of us who attended the ASPO conferences.

In the meantime, some of the folks out there trying to sell stocks were using the terms “resource” and “reserves” interchangeably in describing what was available. The phrase “Saudi America” started to be thrown around.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) finally estimated that the U.S. had an economically accessible shale oil supply of about 100 more years.

But David Hughes, a Canadian geologist, challenged the availability of the Monterey Shale oil due to its geological characteristics. Instead of being flat, the resource rock was wavy and squished. It was hard to access via horizontal drilling.

And then this March, the EIA quietly changed its estimate. In a low-key announcement, it readjusted its estimate of Monterey Shale oil availability – which was two-thirds of our national recoverable supply – downward by an amazing 96 percent.

I saw the announcement and realized its significance immediately. Readjusting the estimate of the US supply of oil downward by two-thirds was a huge, huge deal. But the news kind of just slipped by.

Shale gas has the same characteristics of shale oil – it depletes rapidly. If you ask me who I believe about shale oil and gas? Based on his track record, I believe the data and conclusions of David Hughes.

He based his studies on the same historical data and information the U.S. EIA used, but analyzed it in a more meticulous and targeted way. His data shows natural gas declining much, much faster than does the EIA. A recent University of Texas study agrees more with David Hughes than with the EIA.

This Peak Prosperity podcast features an interview with David Hughes talking about shale production and how he did his analysis. It’s a good interview (47:24). Alternately, you can read the transcript here.

On p. 300 of his report, in figure 3-116, Hughes shows an interesting graph of the EIA’s forecast for shale gas projections and how, in the long term, they are greatly overestimated.

At the end of Hughes’ study on natural gas, he cautions (click to enlarge) :

Here on the Big Island, based on the precautionary principle, I would rely on geothermal rather than liquid natural gas for our electricity generation. A faster decline probably means a faster rise in natural gas price. If we rely on LNG, the rate payer will assume that risk.

And in Hawai‘i we do not have methane underground. So the bad effects of fracking does not apply to us at all. We have drilled 85,000 wells by now. It’s a mature industry that deals with H2S routinely.

In the future, geothermal could also help us solve our transportation problem by providing hydrogen for fuel-celled vehicles. The cost of hydrogen comes from either natural gas or from passing electricity through water. Eventually, the cost of making hydrogen from natural gas will pass the cost of making hydrogen from electricity from geothermal. Then we will have a permanent advantage over the rest of the world. That’s what we want!

Geothermal is climate change-friendly and as infinite as we can get—we will sit for 500,000 to a million years over the “hot spot.” And we are one of the few places in the world with these circumstances and this opportunity.

We have truly come to a crossroads in our history. We must put our personal agendas behind us and do the right thing for ourselves and future generations.

Geothermal

A Geothermal Column in OHA Newspaper

June 4, 2014 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

Do you read the Office of Hawaiian Affairs monthly newspaper Ka Wai Ola? You can download the June 2014 issue here, and if you scroll down to page 28, you’ll see Trustee Robert Lindsey’s column.

He asked Davianna McGregor and me to write about geothermal in his column this month. She writes from the “anti” perspective, and I write from the “pro” one.

It was not a debate. I have no expertise in the cultural area of geothermal, though I am very respectful of the cultural aspect. I’m sharing my mana’o as a 35-year farmer and the only person from Hawaii to have attended five Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conferences on the mainland. I’ve visited both Iceland and the Philippines to see geothermal operations and I have a good sense of how and why it would work for us here.

Current Affairs, Geothermal, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

What Monterey Shale Oil?

May 27, 2014 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) made a dramatic announcement recently: it is revising its estimate of the Monterey Shale Oil supply downward by 96 percent.

Ninety-six percent is a lot.

Especially when you consider that the Monterey Shale Oil supply presented two-thirds of the United States’s oil reserves. It was estimated that we had 100 years of oil reserves left in this country altogether, but now that we know 66 percent of it doesn’t exist, there must be only 34 percent, or 34 years, of oil reserves remaining in the U.S.

However, the cost we would have to pay for oil companies to retrieve it would exceed what it would cost them to do so. In other words, if we consumers were willing to pay $1 million/barrel, all of those 34 years’ worth of oil could probably be recovered. But if we the people can only pay $150/barrel, we might only see ten years’ worth drilled. Hmm.

Those of us who attend Association for the Study of Peak Oil conferences (I’ve attended five now, the only person from the Big Island to do so) have known that the claim that the U.S. has a 100-year supply of oil was way overestimated. We are never going to be Saudi America.

Kurt Cobb writes about this at Resource Insights:

The great imaginary California oil boom: Over before it started

Sunday, May 25, 2014

It turns out that the oil industry has been pulling our collective leg.

The pending 96 percent reduction in estimated deep shale oil resources in California revealed last week in the Los Angeles Times calls into question the oil industry's premise of a decades-long revival in U.S. oil production and the already implausible predictions of American energy independence. The reduction also appears to bolster the view of long-time skeptics that the U.S. shale oil boom–now centered in North Dakota and Texas–will likely be short-lived, petering out by the end of this decade. (I've been expressing my skepticism in writing about resource claims made for both shale gas and oil since 2008.)

California has been abuzz for the past couple of years about the prospect of vast new oil wealth supposedly ready for the taking in the Monterey Shale thousands of feet below the state. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) had previously estimated that 15.4 billion barrels were technically recoverable, basing the number on a report from a contractor who relied heavily on oil industry presentations rather than independent data.

The California economy was supposed to benefit from 2.8 million new jobs by 2020. The state was also supposed to gain $220 billion in additional income and $24 billion in additional tax revenues in that year alone, according to a study from the University of Southern California that relied heavily on industry funding.

But that was before the revelation by the Times that the EIA will reduce its estimate of technically recoverable oil in California's Monterey Shale by 96 percent–almost a complete wipeout–after taking a close look at actual data for wells drilled there already. The agency now believes that only about 600 million barrels are recoverable using existing technology. The 600 million barrels still sound like a lot, but those barrels would last the United States all of 40 days at the current rate of consumption….

Read the rest

We need to take a step back and reevaluate where we are and what we need to do. As I’ve been saying for years now, we need to get on with geothermal. For the Big Island, the path we need to take is clear.

A byproduct of the oil operations is natural gas, and it would be helpful if natural gas prices rose to help with the costs of development.

It’s kind of like curtailed electricity. If it could be sold at any price, it would help lower the bid price of geothermal and wind operations and would result in lower electricity costs for the rubbah slippah folks.

If curtailed electricity could be bought at a cheap enough price, it could also enable a hydrogen storage option. Then we could get a hydrogen fuel cell option for various motors. And we could look at converting hydrogen to ammonia, so we would have nitrogen fertilizer to help with our food security.

Big Island, Geothermal, Peak Oil

Do You Know The Rule of 70?

September 20, 2013 Richard Ha 1 Comment

Richard Ha writes:

One of the most important things I have learned from going to Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conferences is “The Rule of 70.”

The Rule of 70 tells you the doubling time of anything that is growing at a compound rate. For example, China’s economy is growing at seven percent a year. How many years will it take for its economy to double?

Seventy divided by seven percent per year tells you that in 10 years, China’s economy will double.

Once you know that, you can start to ask the questions: Will they have enough oil? Where will it come from? How about water? Etc.

Professor Albert Bartlett, an advisor to ASPO until he passed away this month, said that the biggest shortcoming of the human race is its inability to understand this exponential function.

From the blog Resource Insights:

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2013

Albert Bartlett: On message about exponential growth to the end

Albert Bartlett might have been another obscure physics professor had he not put together a now famous lecture entitled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” in 1969. The lecture, available broadly on the internet, begins with the line: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

The logic is surprisingly simple and irrefutable. Exponential growth, which is simply consistent growth at some percentage rate each year (or other time period), cannot proceed indefinitely within a finite system, for example, planet Earth. The fact that human populations continue to grow or that the extraction of energy and other natural resources continues to climb does not in any way refute this statement. It simply means that the absolute limits have not yet been reached….

“…exponential growth in the consumption of finite resources is unsustainable. At some point growth in the rate of extraction will cease. And, given the dependence of the economy on continuous growth of resource inputs including energy, this leads to instability and finally decline.”

Read the rest

The message: Compound growth of a finite resource is, clearly, not sustainable.

This is why the Big Island should be using our geothermal resource for energy, and technology instead of oil in farming.

Since the Big Island will be over our geothermal “hot spot” for 500,000 to a million years, we can view geothermal energy as sustainable.

Let’s say the State’s Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) needs an annual return of 7 percent. That means its money will need to double in 10 years. How?

How about Hawai‘i’s economy doubling in 24 years? That would result from a compound growth of just 3 percent. Would we need double the number of hotel rooms? But if the price of oil keeps rising, can we do that?

These are important considerations.

Biofuel, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Video

Cutting Edge Info on Peak Oil: Here, Now & in November

May 28, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

Five Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) annual conferences later, it’s very clear to me that the information I learn at the conferences is cutting edge. It’s consistently two or more years before what the experts there are talking about shows up in the mainstream news.

From the first ASPO conference I attended, I noticed there were stock traders in the audience. I asked them why there were there, and one told me it was so he could make better investment decisions.

The oil decline situation is much more serious than people realize, and I highly recommend that anyone who wants to be on the cutting edge of knowledge attend the next ASPO conference. It is usually held around the end of November.

I also recommend you visit the ASPO-TV site and take in some of the videos there.

Robert Rapier gave this interesting talk at ASPO last year, which may be of interest to folks who have more than just a passing interest in energy issues.

Robert Rapier – Navigating a New Energy Reality from Peak Oil TV on Vimeo.

Robert, who presented at the conference the last two years, lives
in Waimea now, where he moved to take the job of Chief Technology Officer for Merica International.

He has written a book, Power Plays: Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil:

In Power Plays: Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil, energy expert Robert Rapier helps readers sort through energy hype, doom and gloom, and misinformation to understand what really matters in energy, and how it impacts individuals, investors, businesspeople, and policy makers worldwide. The book
covers the overall global energy situation, the particular risks for the U.S. with its present energy mix, the energy outlook for the developed world and emerging economies like China and India, what peak oil really means, and the present and likely future of natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear power, and alternative energy sources.   

The book also addresses common misconceptions. For instance, most readers are likely unaware that the U.S. is the third-largest oil producer in the world. Or that Canada leads the U.S. in per capita oil consumption. It will also highlight interesting facts—for example, China has solved part of its energy challenge by
mandating solar hot water systems in all new construction. Most
importantly, the book will provide specific energy insights unavailable elsewhere and help individuals and business planners chart future actions and decisions.

In a recent blog entry, Robert talks about why rising natural gas prices will affect the biofuel industry (natural gas is a cost component of the biofuel industry).

He once told me that if a biofuel project has a negative energy balance, it would never be cheaper than oil.

He is highly technically qualified and has a knack of making difficult issues and conclusions easy to understand. I highly recommend both his book and blog.

Articles, Eating Locally, Geothermal, Peak Oil

Agreed: Local Products Shouldn’t Be More Expensive

May 7, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

Over the weekend, Scott Bosshardt of Kea‘au had an important letter to the editor of the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

His point was that products produced and purchased locally shouldn’t be more expensive than the same product purchased abroad.

One extremely important fact that the “Think Local, Buy Local” proponents shouldn’t overlook is that local businesses need to “price local.”

Products produced and purchased locally shouldn’t be more expensive than the same product purchased abroad.

He also wrote:

“Price local” instead of as if our Big Island-grown tomatoes and coconuts were imported from half way around the world or some other planet, then people will be much more inclined to “buy local.” This holds true for everything we produce here. Think about it. When you live in Columbia, you don’t pay more for coffee than you do in San Francisco.

He’s right: Prices are higher here, and we need to lower them. It’s what I keep talking about. We need to find a way that we can lower our costs.

I first noticed our farm costs rising steadily back in 2005 and 2006. Rising costs affect every aspect of our farm, and it was very worrisome. Looking into it, I realized that the rise in price was due to the price of oil increasing.

Here in Hawai‘i, we are being squeezed extra hard. More than 70 percent of our electricity comes from oil. Compare this to the U.S. mainland – Hawaii’s primary competitor in many produce and food manufacturing categories – which relies on oil for only about two percent of its electricity generation.

As the price of oil rises, you can see how our local farmers and food manufacturers become less and less competitive with the mainland.

Farming is very energy intensive, and farmers’ refrigeration and water pumping costs have steadily gotten more expensive. Wholesalers’ and retailer refrigeration costs have gone up, too. This means food costs more.

Oil prices have quadrupled in the last 10 years, and this has put the economy into a continuous recession. Everything has been squeezed. Government workers’ pay has been cut. Electricity costs have gone up steadily. School budgets have been squeezed. Medical costs have risen.

I have so far attended five annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conferences trying to figure out how to protect our farm from the rising price of oil. I don’t have a degree in chemistry or the sciences – but I am a farmer with common sense. So I spent my time figuring out who I can trust for good information

I determined that the folks at ASPO can be trusted because they have no other agenda than to produce good information. It is up to me to decide if their studies are valid or not, or whether I agree with their conclusion. On the other hand, I thought that people whose livelihood depends on putting on a happy face would probably just put on a happy face.

I have learned that the world has been using two to three times as much oil as it has been finding, a trend that continues. I’ve learned that the oil being produced now is much more expensive than what they found 50 years ago. It takes more energy now to get the energy. The cost of producing oil from shale and oil sands was $92 per barrel in 2011, and the floor price of oil is probably not much lower than that.

The era of cheap oil is over. And the stuff produced in the future will be even more costly, setting a higher floor as time goes by. Unless we do something, it will squeeze us all even more.

Look around: It is happening right now, even with a banner tourism year. Imagine what it will be like if we have a significant downturn.

Also important to note is that the rubbah slippah folks have less and less discretionary income. Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of our economy. Our consumers will have more spending money when we can lower the cost of our electricity.

What about the happy news that the U.S. will become the largest producer of oil and gas in the future? In 2009, Art Berman, a petroleum geologist, showed that in a study of 4,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale, most of the production came out in the first year. Sixteen-thousand wells later, we see that 90 percent of shale gas and shale oil wells were more than 90 percent depleted within five years. And the decline rate for all the wells is more than 30 percent. We will need to drill one third as many we have now just to keep production steady.

One can reasonably conclude that the shale gas and shale oil phenomenon may not be a game changer. It probably won’t make a large dent in world oil production.

Meanwhile, the overall trend continues. Most of the world’s oil is produced by giant and supergiant oil fields, and lots of them are declining. Folks who study this estimate that the decline rate is around 4 to 6 percent annually. That is about 3 million barrels a year. This is going on all day, every day, no matter what the stock market does.

What can we do on the Big Island to lower electricity costs, and the cost of locally produced food? Biomass and geothermal can do that today. There may be other choices maturing in the next few years, too.

Producing electricity from geothermal here costs half as much as producing it from oil. And the Big Island will be over the hot spot that provides us with geothermal for 500,000 to a million years.

Iceland is pulling itself out of the largest financial crash in history because it has cheap electricity from geothermal and can export fish.

Let’s say that one wanted to payoff an oil-fired plant that produces 60MW today. That difference in price would save $6,600/hour and $158,400 /day. This is more than $50 million per year. Seems like we could be creative with writing off stranded assets.

We are very lucky to have these options here.

We Need More People With Cutting-Edge Energy Knowledge!

February 25, 2013 Richard Ha 1 Comment

Richard Ha writes:

Hawai‘i should be sending more people to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference. The folks at ASPO are on the leading edge of energy data interpretation. We need more people with cutting -edge energy knowledge.

For example, for several years now ASPO folks have been utilizing Energy Return on Investment (EROI) as a tool to evaluate energy
options.

If HECO had understood the concept and its parameters, it
may not have committed to Aina Koa Pono’s biofuel project so wholeheartedly.

Biofuels, in general, have very low EROI ratios (net energy). It takes a ratioof 3 to 1 just to maintain society’s petroleum infrastructure. Biofuels, except for cane ethanol, are lower than 2 to 1.

If we can’t make money in Hawai‘i now with cane ethanol, what makes us think we can do cellulosic biofuels, which are more costly and more difficult?

Despite spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, there are zero commercial competitive cellulosic biofuels in production
today. Zero. We wish AKP well, but it should use its own money, not that of the rate payers.

The shale oil and shale gas story is probably only be an interim solution. Aubrey McClendon, the fracking cheerleader of Chesapeake Energy, has been removed as its Chairman and will soon resign as CEO. The ASPO folks have known for several years that shale oil and gas is a bunch of financial smoke and mirrors.

When HECO responded to Consumer Advocate questions about how it justified its pricing, the utility used the Energy Information Agency (EIA) 2012 AEO report’s high-case scenario for its long-term forecast.

But the EIA’s short-term forecast, just a couple of weeks ago, estimates the 2014 price of oil at $101/barrel – while HECO estimates that oil will cost $180/barrel in 2015. The rate payer wouldn’t care about this if they didn’t have to subsidize the biofuels at $200/barrel.

Putting a secret $200/barrel biofuel surcharge on rate payers, and then telling them, “Trust us, this won’t hurt much” – while raising the pay of top executives – stands in sharp contrast to the CEO of Japan Airlines, who insists on being treated exactly like his workers. Watch that short (2:20) video for a very different approach than we are used to. Really interesting.

Geothermal, Peak Oil

Are Shale Gas & Shale Oil Hope or Hype?

February 22, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

This video is well worth watching.

It’s called “Shale Promises or Shale Spin? The Economics
Behind Hydrofracking. A Conversation with Deborah Rogers.” If you are following this subject at all, you should watch it.

Deborah Rogers began her financial career in London working
in Corporate Finance, specifically venture capital.

Upon her return to the U.S., she worked as a financial consultant for nearly a decade for several major Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney.

She has also served on the Advisory Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and on a task force for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

She currently serves on a regional steering committee for the Oil and Gas Accountability Project (OGAP) and has the responsibility of addressing economic questions.

An entrepreneur herself, she founded Deborah’s Farmstead, an
artisanal cheese-making operation, now one of the premier artisanal cheese dairies in the U.S.

She was featured in a lengthy NY Times article by Ian Urbina on June 26, 2011 entitled Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush.

Shale gas and shale oil: Are they hype, or hope? We farmers want to know.

Nitrogen fertilizers, chemicals, plastics and other farm supplies are made from natural gas as long as it is cheap. Do we really have a hundred years’ worth of supply, and will it be cheap?

At the 2009 Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Denver, the petroleum geologist and consultant Art Berman described his analysis of 4,000 wells in the Barnett Shale. He showed that the average gas well produces 70 percent of its total production in the first year.

Also on the panel, though, was an oil/gas company executive, who said their calculations show that gas wells will produce for 22 years.

Now, three years later, we see that there are wells generating $120/day and they are still in production. What does that mean in
the whole scheme of things? Who is right?

There is more data now, and it still, consistently, shows that shale gas – and, by the way, shale oil – depletes really quickly, like 90 plus percent in the first five years.

And it costs $4 million or so to drill each well. Now that there is so much more data, the math on this is easy.

Farmers do not care who is right. Farmers only care about what is right. So while we do appreciate the low, below-break-even costs of nitrogen fertilizer, chemicals, plastics and other farm supplies today, we are also calculating what our costs might be if the price of natural gas rises to $5, $6, $8/mcf (thousand cubic feet).

If we cannot control the price of oil or natural gas, what do we do?

We must pivot to what is cheap and stable and actually works.

The petroleum age is barely 150 years old and already we are worrying that it will not last another 50 years; it might last even fewer years than that.

On the other hand, the Big Island will be over the geothermal hot spot for 500,000 to a million years.

The rubbah slippah folks get it. This not rocket science!

Biofuel, Food Security, Geothermal, Lowering Electric Rates, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources

Energy & the Future of the Big Island

January 21, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

This past Friday I participated on an energy panel at the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel called “Energy: Facing the Reality of Renewables.” Panel members were Jay Ignacio, President of Hawaii Electric Light company; Mike Kaleikini, who is General
Manager of Puna Geothermal Venture; and myself, as steering committee member of the Big Island Community Coalition.

From the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce: “The 2013 Summit will further explore those initiatives via ‘panels of conversation’ on each topic. Three guests per topic have been invited to participate on panels to discuss their work with the Summit audience, ideas that inspire them and what they see as the future for Hawaii Island. Each panel will have 45 minutes of discussion followed by questions from the audience. We are pleased to have Steve Petranik, Editor of ‘Hawaii Business Magazine’ as our moderator again this year.”

There were five panels: Education, Sustainability, Employment, Energy and Health Care.

West Hawaii Today wrote about it in an article called Prospects of an All-Geothermal Isle Unlikely.

I started out by saying mixed messages are being sent out. Some say that the U.S. has enough oil and gas that we will soon replace Saudi Arabia as a world energy supplier. Using data and scientific methods, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA (ASPO) has come to different conclusions. Its agenda is merely to spread the best information it has on this topic. You can learn more by viewing video at the ASPO-USA.org website.

I described the Big Island Community Coalition’s mission, which is to achieve, for the Big Island, the lowest-cost electricity in the state. Striving for a low cost solution hedges our bets. It is better to be safe than sorry. I told them that those interested in supporting this group can get on the Big Island Community Coalition mailing list.

I related how food and energy are inextricably tied together. Food security has to do with farmers farming. And if farmers make money, the farmers will farm! But while only two percent of the mainland’s electricity comes from oil, more than 70 percent of the electricity in Hawai‘i does. The mainland, of course, is our main supplier of food and our biggest competitor. As oil prices rise, Hawai‘i becomes less and less competitive.

As oil prices rise, and electricity prices rise, and farmers and other businesses become less competitive, local families have less spending money.

The answer is to find the lowest electricity cost solution. For if people have extra money, they will spend it. Two-thirds of our economy is made up of consumer spending.

Provided that the expensive and ill-advised Aina Koa Pono biofuel project does not go forward, we have a bright future ahead of us. In the pipeline is Hu Honua’s 22MW biomass burning project, and
next is 50W of additional geothermal. Add to that 38MW of present geothermal, and, assuming the old geothermal contract is renegotiated, that would amount to 110MW of stable affordable electricity. This would be more than 60 percent of the peak power use on the Big Island. Even if we do not count wind and solar renewables, this would put the Big Island on a trajectory of achieving the lowest cost electricity in the state.

What would happen if our electricity costs were lower than O‘ahu’s? We can’t even imagine it.

It would change our economy.
It would help our County government preserve services.
Fewer of our kids would have to go to the mainland to find jobs.
More of our money could be used for education, instead of paying for oil.
More people would have money to support local farmers.
Single moms would have less pressure than they do now.
Folks on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder would not be pushed over the edge.
There are lots and lots of younger folks who want to farm. Maybe they could actually make money so they could farm.

I told the audience that we on the panel were all friends. But there is too much at stake for the BICC to give ground on our goal to make the Big Island’s electricity the cheapest in the state.

During the Q & A, someone asked what we each thought about an undersea cable to connect all the islands. I replied that our primary objective is to bring low cost electricity to the Big Island before we do anything else.

The audience liked that a lot and spontaneously applauded.

Peak Oil

Hawaii Contingent at the Peak Oil Conference

December 9, 2012 Richard Ha 1 Comment

Richard Ha writes:

The most important thing about this year’s Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference was that we had a whole Hawai‘i contingent. I believe we made the point that Hawai‘i is serious.

Neil Hannahs, Senior Assets Manager for Kamehameha Schools (KS), is a visionary. Any thought about Kamehameha Schools being a slow-moving institution mired in inertia is not true in this area. In fact, KS is making major changes across a wide front.

I was especially pleased that Giorgio Calderone, Regional Asset Manager for KS, pointed out how impressive the academic rigour of the conference presentations was. I thought so too, and it was good to hear confirmation.

Big Island Community Coalition steering committee member Noe Kalipi is a smart, action-oriented young leader who knows what is going on. I cannot be happier that she made the decision to attend on her own.

Noe Kalipi and Giorgio Calderone. Not pictured: Jason Jeremiah, Kamehameha Schools Cultural Resource Manager.

I attended the first annual ASPO conference because my farm costs were rising, due to oil. I wanted to learn about oil so we could position our farm for the future. It was a matter of survival.

But by the second ASPO conference, it was apparent that this situation was bigger than me or Hamakua Springs farm. I learned that for the past 30 years, the world had been using two to three times as much oil as it had been finding—and there were going to be consequences.

More than just being talkers, we need to be doers. What can we do?

There are a thousand reasons why no can. We must find the one reason why CAN!
It is about cost! We need to find the lowest-cost, proven technology, environmentally responsible solution to our problem.
It is about all of us—not just a few of us.
The energy our society has available to use is what’s left over after energy is used to obtain the energy in the first place. Another way to phrase this: the net energy left over from the effort to get energy, minus the energy to get our food, equals our lifestyle.
The Big Island Community Coalition’s goal – of lowering the Big Island’s electricity rates so they are lowest in the state – accomplishes our mission. This is the most important thing we can do.

View descriptions of this year’s conference topics.