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quote:
Originally posted by opihikao
opensecret, appreciate your opinion, but statements like Don Thomas is on PGV/ORMAT's payroll needs to be proven. He has worked for the UH for many years, and frankly, has credentials that far outweigh any "rumors". Can you prove that statement?
True, I cannot provide check stubs, and yes, it is perfectly legitimate for a UH professor to be getting funding and consulting work from local industry. My concern is that with such a divisive issue, the "pro" people bring in their experts to tell us the "truth", without being upfront about their motives.
...and I really don't know how Ku'oko'a can be seen to be a "local" company.
http://hbe.ehawaii.gov/documents/busines...er=42552F1&mobile=Y
I agree, HELCO, HECO, PUC etc. have a lot to answer for. We might want to take care about trading one monopoly for another.
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This is Don Thomas' response to opensecret's and Hollinger's comments:
The allegation that I am under contract to PGV is one, of many, fabrications concocted by Mr. Patricci in an attempt to attack my motivation and credibility in the geothermal discussion. Opensecret, you are simply parroting and propagating the lies spewed by Mr. Petricci. The allegation is completely and entirely false. I am not, and never have been, under contract to Puna Geothermal Venture and have never received compensation from them. Thirty years ago, I made the decision that, since I wanted to assist the state agencies in making rational, science-based, decisions regarding geothermal, and that any economic benefit I might gain by those decisions would be a conflict of interest, that I would do NO paid consulting for anyone with a financial stake in the geothermal industry in Hawaii. If anyone - public, private, investor, landowner, legislator, resident - has a legitimate question on geothermal (or radon, since I have done research in that area as well), I will give them the best answer I can provide at no cost to them. I have provided technical expertise on geothermal and geochemistry problems to many organizations and individuals, none of them have ever received an invoice from me and none will.
The complete absence of integrity is characteristic of Mr. Petricci and many in the anti geothermal crowd - they will fabricate whatever nonsense that they think can get them what they want. They came discouragingly close to accomplishing that, at considerable cost to many other Puna residents, with far too many on the County Council - but that's another issue.
Mr. Hollinger, I have responded to the off-the-wall claims made here and on the Civil Beat page there: you either don't know enough about the scientific data that you are citing in your comments to understand that the conclusions you are drawing are completely off base, or you don't care and are engaging in fear-mongering: simply making up exaggerated claims about non-existent threats to scare those more ignorant than yourself. I started researching the groundwater in lower Puna in 1975 - before the first deep geothermal well was drilled there. The chemical compositions of every well within the rift zone showed evidence of natural geothermal discharge from the deep thermal system into the shallow groundwater. This was nearly twenty years before Puna Geothermal Venture started reinjecting fluids into the ground. Your insistence that Green Lake is contaminated by geothermal fluids is not supported by any data that I am aware of - the lake, according to the chemical data we gathered during the work done in the '70's and 80's, appears to be a perched system that gets most of its water from rainfall rather than the groundwater system. As I recall, the lake water was high in magnesium ion concentrations - whereas magnesium is usually depleted in the groundwaters that were mixing with the natural geothermal discharge. The other ion concentrations were also substantially different from the groundwaters. How you can claim that reinjection of geothermal fluids to depths in excess of 6000' are contaminating a perched lake, defies any logic I can conceive of.
Your claims about radon emissions are equally specious. You either don’t understand the numbers in the reports you cite, or you don’t have the integrity to present an accurate analysis. As I indicated in the Civil Beat post, even under about as bad a case of geothermal discharge exposure as can be reasonably projected to occur in the community, the increased radon activity in the ambient air would be about 0.004 picoCuries per liter – which is likely to be considerably smaller than the diurnal variation in ambient air concentrations due to normal meteorological variations. Likewise, you have misrepresented the actual threat from radon – it is now widely recognized that radon daughter products (which will not be present at significant concentrations in the geothermal steam emissions due to their differing chemistry) are responsible for the “radon risk” that is commonly recognized. In tightly constructed homes, with little air exchange, those radon daughter products are known to accumulate in the indoor air over periods of hours-to-days and subsequent inhalation of those daughter products by the occupants will increase the likelihood of cancer initiation. It’s my opinion that that set of conditions is completely irrelevant to the geothermal discussion.
If past experience can be any guide, these and the other baseless claims will continue to be made, without a shred of supporting data - and when time and funds have been spent to prove them to be groundless, the opponents will simply attack the data as being biased or falsified. And that often seems to be their objective: to waste resources and effort far beyond any actual threat posed by geothermal and then complain that it's too expensive a technology to pursue.
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Thank you, Dr. Thomas, for the FACTS.
Standing ovation!
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Thankyou geochem for taking the time to respond. I apologize for having mischaracterized you in my posting.. The fact that you take a stance against "conflict of interest" is heartening. I take responsibility for jumping to conclusions about your motives and do not accept that you should blame anybody else in this regard. Unfortunately though, your participation in the "very successful" leilani meeting demonstrates that you are capable of being manipulated. The whole thing, including the PR afterwards was a complete charade.
Perhaps you'd like to set me straight on your involvement with HGP-A too?
Why exactly did the underground injection process come about? Was there a problem with having all that brine above ground?
Thanks, os
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There is so much information to be digested. While Dr. Thomas has responded, there is much we can learn with a little research. Here are a few reports that involve Dr. Thomas, among thousands of documents about geothermal in Hawaii.
For example:
Technical Report for Dept. of Energy (dated 1987):
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bit...sequence=1
Isotopes & Gases in a Hawaiian Geothermal System (dated 1978):
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bit...sequence=1
Geochemistry of a Hawaii Geothermal Well: (dated 1978)
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/21072
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/21072
There is really no solution to our energy problems unless we have studies and data that is unbiased, credible, and scientific. Dr. Thomas is beyond being "manipulated", in my opinion.
Check out the information out there, do some research and maybe enroll in one of the classes UHH offers on this subject.
opensecret, nice mea culpa (until the "manipulated" part, jmo). Good for you. We're all going to have our own opinions, and I respect yours. I'm still studying all the facts of geothermal,
just the facts.
Waiting for Kenoi to address the Puna community. Still waiting.
