2025-01-07 Michael Reimer - Laserfiche WebLink

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TESTIMONY: Hawaii County General Plan 2045: Leeward Planning Commission January 16-17, 2025 p. 2 In 2023, Hawaiian Home Lands was seeking to evaluate the development of geothermal resources under its lands. (https-//www.higp.Hawai'i.edu/hggrc/Hawai'ian- home-lands-seeks-6m-to-test-for-geothermal-power/). Therefore, including a discussion of subsurface development in the County Plan is merited. There is a long history of fracturing rock as a means to increase its permeability. Increasing permeability was first used in the 1860s to increase the amount of water available to wells. Explosives were lowered into the drilled or dug well. This practice was given a name and called "shooting the well," and had a very localized effect. This practice of increasing permeability of rocks on a large scale was then applied to oil recovery and recently to gas recovery as a means of extracting more energy resources from underground areas where rock permeability is so low as to prevent free flow of those fluids. Perhaps the largest use of fracking was a project to use atomic bombs to cause "fracking" over vast areas. This was done in the 1950s as part of Project Plowshare, when the concept of using atomic weapons to create great canals was proposed, perhaps to form competition to the Panama Canal. It was also thought to be applicable to enhance the flow of natural gas by increasing permeability of tight rock. In 1969, an atomic bomb was set off underground near Rulison, Colorado to see if it could enhance flow in natural gas by fracturing the fine-grained, low-permeability sandstone of the Williams Fork Formation of the Mesaverde Group. It did, but the gas was radioactive and not really useful for commercial use. (https-//www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2020/04/f74/RulisonFactSheet.pdf). Although this seemed an extreme fracking approach, today's hydraulic fracking activities are not without their own pollution problems. Hawaii government agencies are no stranger to pollution effects from various activities in the state, including disposal of public sewage wastewater and pollution created by military activities, the most recent of the latter being the Red Hill fuel releases into potable groundwater supplies and the use of radioactive materials in training exercises on Oahu and Hawaii Island. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is a drilling technology that involves pumping large quantities of fluids at high pressure into a wellbore and into the target rock formation. The fluid typically contains water, a proppant (a material like spherical sand particles to keep the fractures open), and chemical additives. A large fracking operation can require millions of gallons of water pumped underground. The chemicals, in large part used to reduce the viscosity of water so the proppant flows readily into the fractures, are