The Dragon Within Magma, rain forest and goddess

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Issue # 123 May/June 1990

DISPATCHES

by Ben Finney

A plan to tap the volcanic energy of Hawaii's Big Island for domestic use is encountering rough surf.

Hawaii seems perfect for geothermal power-at least to the politicians, planners, engineers and builders who seek to reduce the state's more than 90% dependence on imported oil. As an archipelago of recent volcanic origin, Hawaii has no fossil fuels to bum, but it does have an ever-growing demand for energy. The geotechnological solution to this oil dependency is to exploit the very source of the islands diemselves--the magma from a "hot spot" lying below the earth's surface. By periodically punching through the Pacific Plate as it slowly slides northwest toward Asia, the magma cooled and formed (and is still forming) the Hawaiian chain. The southeasternmost and youngest island of the chain, the Big Island of Hawaii, sits right over this hot spot and boasts active volcanoes through which erupting lava constantly adds to the island's real estate. In the depths of a rift zone leading from Kilauea volcano, magma superheats a deposit of water, which when piped up to die surface and converted into high-pressure steam is capable of driving powerful turbine generators.

Electricity from volcanoes would not only reduce oil dependency and hence the state's vulnerability to outside forces, it would also play a small but positive part in slowing CO 2 buildup from fossil fuels and the accompanying global warning. (Unchecked, this warming could result in the inundation of Hawaii"s famed coastline, where most of its people live.) So an ambitious initiative is now under way to develop a series of geothermal stations on die Big Island to produce some 500 megawatts of electricity, much of which would be exported via an undersea cable to the island of Oahu, where 80% of the state's people live.

The drilling is not difficult by today's standards. Geothermal technology is proven, as power plants in Italy, Iceland, California, New Zealand and other places have shown. Indeed, a test plant on the Big Island built for experimental purposes worked well enough to be successfully hooked into the island's power grid over a period of several years. So, from the perspective of the engineers and the planners sitting in Honolulu offices, geothermal is definitely part of the solution.

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