Makai, Bellinger told the NELHA board, teamed up with Lockheed Martin after the Office of Naval Research awarded a contract to Makai to look into evaluating the technical and financial challenges of building a large-scale OTEC plant that would produce hydrogen or other alternative fuel. Over the last few years, about $10 million has been invested in the project, he said.
“This has probably been the most detailed, thorough, cautious look at putting OTEC on a commercial scale that’s been done in the last thirty to forty years,” he told the NELHA board. “We’re a conservative, cautious bunch, not into wild claims. We do things systematically.”
Makai announced last year that it was proposing to build a 10-megawatt plant three to four miles offshore of O`ahu as a demonstration of OTEC technology. The reason for the relatively small project, said Bellinger, is that 10 MW “is a size we can get operating experience on, and it’s scalable – that’s the key thing, it has to be scalable.”
“Once that’s done, 100 megawatts is what we’ve calculated to be the smallest commercially viable size,” he said. “We think the private sector will finance it. But to get there, there’s a lot of work in the interim.”
That work includes “big technology issues,” Bellinger said. “Heat exchangers, cold-water pipes, cable-to-shore systems, environmental impacts, financing – those are some of the real challenges.”
Of those, marine heat exchangers “are probably the single most important technical challenge for commercial development of OTEC,” he said, with heat exchangers representing about a third of the $100 billion cost of a 100 megawatt plant.
That’s where NELHA comes into the picture.
No Power Plant
What Makai wants at NELHA is a site for research on heat exchangers, not a site for a plant. That seemed to disappoint some of the board members, prompting Bellinger to explain that given the giant footprint of a commercial-scale plant, basing one on land was hardly practical.
But for research, he said, NELHA – specifically, its pipelines reaching into the deep ocean – was ideally suited. “There’s no place in the world except here where research and development for heat exchangers can be conducted at an economic scale.”
“A 100-megawatt plant would have over 200 sets of heat exchangers, each one about the size of a 20-foot container,” he said. “Being able to test, to experiment with designs for corrosion, how to manufacture heat exchangers, we need a place like this where we have offshore conditions” similar to those under which an OTEC plant would have to operate.
Members of NELHA’s Research Advisory Committee had looked over the proposal and on the whole were enthusiastically in support. Don Thomas, chairman of the committee, said that one concern raised was the possible impact of pumping up deep, nutrient-rich ocean water and then releasing it into the shallow near-shore area. “We need to get some handle on what type of impact nutrient cycling will have,” he said.
“We’re mindful of the fact that in large plants, there will be a large volume of water moving around,” Bellinger said. But in an operating plant, “deep water will be returned to the deep, and it won’t be heated up too much, so it will still be heavy and will sink.” In near-shore operations, he said, “we don’t want to take nutrient-rich cold water and simply dump it on the reef.”
To resolve this issue, one of NELHA’s aquaculture tenants might be willing to receive the deep-ocean water discharges from the Makai research area, members of the board suggested.
Another issue raised by the RAC was how NELHA might share in the value of any “intellectual property” that Makai develops as a result of its work at the facility.
Since executive director Ron Baird took over the helm of NELHA, the push to get equity positions and/or a claim on any marketable patent or license developed by its tenants has been strong. And it has not always worked out. Early on in Baird’s tenure, a simple pass-through grant (result of an earmark put into the federal budget by Senator Daniel Inouye) to a New Mexico institution became so snarled up by Baird’s insistence on having a claim to intellectual property that, in the end, the earmarked funds were redirected, cutting NELHA out of the picture altogether.
More recently, a proposal to build an OTEC plant at NELHA by an O`ahu-based company, OCEES, ran aground. At least part of the reason for the foundering had to do with Baird’s desire to have NELHA obtain an equity stake in the company. For now, though, the discussions between Makai and NELHA are continuing.
Past Overtures
In recent years, Makai had been considering NELHA as a possible site for OTEC research, but had been concerned that commitments to OCEES might shut that door.
In July 2007, Makai vice president Joe Van Ryzin and Lockheed Martin’s Robert Varley asked the NELHA board to defer committing to the construction of any OTEC power generation facility.
“Be aware of the oncoming OTEC research-and-development need,” Van Ryzin said. “Realize that you possess a unique, incredibly valuable facility. You’ve got the only show in town, and you should position yourself to take advantage of that.” A power-producing OTEC plant, he warned, would mean the end of any hope of using NELHA facilities for research.
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