The Maui News: Suit challenges EIS approval for wastewater plant

June 1, 2018 by Rob Weltman

Suit challenges EIS approval for wastewater plant

Anaergia aims to install anaerobic digester to produce methane gas

The Maui News

The Sierra Club Maui Group and Maui Tomorrow have filed a lawsuit challenging the approval of an environmental impact statement for Anaergia Services’ project with Maui County for a renewable energy conversion and sludge processing project at the Wailuku-Kahului Wastewater Reclamation Facility.

The project led by Anaergia’s Maui All Natural Alternative aims to install an anaerobic digester to produce methane gas from energy crops grown on 500 acres of former Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. lands. The gas would be refined at the Kahului wastewater facility site and fuel a combined heat-and-power engine to generate electricity for the treatment plant located on 18.8 acres next to the ocean on Amala Place.

Waste heat from the engine would dry wastewater solid matter, known as “sludge.”

Undried sludge has been used for years as raw material for Maui EKO Systems to create compost at the Central Maui Landfill. Without the sludge, EKO is expected to go out of business.

According to the plaintiffs’ announcement of the lawsuit, the project entails trucking sludge from wastewater facilities in Kihei and Lahaina to the Kahului facility to be dried using methane gas byproducts of the plant’s anaerobic digestion project.

The announcement says that Anaergia was the sole bidder for the project. Anaergia holds a county waste-to-energy landfill gas contract, which an independent auditor determined would cost the county $35 million more than anticipated, the plaintiffs said.

The groups challenge Anaergia’s preparation of the environmental impact statement, as opposed to the county, “for reasons including the county’s unwritten policy of imposing less-strict oversight over projects for which they have outside entities prepare an EIS.”

They also contend the environmental review failed to adequately consider predicted sea-level rise.

“Taxpayers should not be burdened with underwriting complicated science experiments that will only cost taxpayers more money and likely do nothing to protect the environment,” said Maui Tomorrow Executive Director Albert Perez. “Maui County needs to move forward, not backward, by getting the Kahului treatment facility out of the tsunami zone and away from sea-level rise.”

Sierra Club Maui Group President Rob Weltman said: The “Sierra Club is very much in favor of increasing the use of renewable energy, including microgrids for specific purposes. However, it must be done in a responsible way which does not result in new threats to our sensitive shoreline environment.”

There was no immediate comment Thursday afternoon from Maui County or Anaergia.

County officials have said Anaergia would develop the facility at no construction cost to the county. In return, the county would pay 29 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced at the plant. The cost of disposing the sludge would be reduced from $103 to $80 per ton by switching from EKO Compost to Anaergia, officials said.

Built in 1973, the wastewater treatment plant can treat up to 7.9 million gallons of Central Maui wastewater daily. The plant is forecast to reach its treatment capacity by 2030.

Op-Ed: Maui’s most controversial permit was approved in only 29 minutes

February 3, 2018 by Rob Weltman

http://www.mauinews.com/opinion/columns/2018/02/mauis-most-controversial-permit-was-approved-in-only-29-minutes/

Published as a Viewpoint Op-Ed in the Maui News on February 1, 2018

By Adriane Raff Corwin

It’s a matter of basic human decency to show respect toward each other’s ancestral remains. The Central Maui sand dunes are the resting place for thousands of iwi kupuna (ancestral bones), but landowner Maui Lani Partners has been allowed to illegally mine

hundred of thousands of tons of Central Maui sand and destroy countless burials in its Phase 9 site. Malama Kakanilua, a local group of cultural descendents and their supporters, is fighting to stop this desecration once and for all.

As a first step, County Council member Elle Cochran introduced legislation to establish a moratorium against all sand mining in Central Maui in spring 2017. It finally became law on Jan. 5 but included an exemption clause: Anyone with land in the moratorium area would be excused from it if they held a valid grading permit before the moratorium passed.

MLP’s Phase 9 permit was set to expire in late 2017, so it would not be able to get a new permit once the moratorium became law. But instead, in late November 2017, the Public Works Department quietly extended Maui Lani’s Phase 9 permit. The time stamp in the email exchange showed only 29 minutes passed between Public Works receiving MLP’s application for permit extension and the department’s approval of it. This made sure MLP’s Phase 9 site is exempt from the moratorium.

Public Works cannot claim that it was unaware of the controversy. In April 2017, Gina Mangieri of KHON2 did an expose on the scheme between development company MLP and cement company HC&D (formally Ameron) to mine thousands of tons of sand from MLP’s Phase 9 site, export it on barges and create cement for construction projects like Oahu’s rail. According to KHON2, MLP and HC&D’s joint owner, the Mills Group, made $30 million off Maui sand mining in 2016 alone. All of this was done with a simple grubbing and grading permit (No. G2014/0090); the Mills Group found loopholes in the law that allowed them to mine away the small amount of inland sand Maui has left.

Mayor Alan Arakawa called for a moratorium on sand mining but took no action, so Malama Kakanilua sent him a letter in May 2017 that explained why MLP’s Phase 9 permit should be revoked, including the fact that MLP provided incorrect information in its original application by checking “No” after the application question, “Are there known burials, cemeteries, or other historic sites on the property?” The land in question is a well-documented pre-contact burial ground, and this type of omission should warrant revocation and reevaluation.

David Goode, director of Public Works, signaled that he was aware of the controversy by writing a letter to the State Historic Preservation Division in July 2017, relating community testimony stating MLP did not have required archaeological monitors on hand during its work.

So, despite the fact that the original permit application included false information, new burials were found at the site, the council was working on a moratorium, Maui-Lana’i Burial Council was weighing a motion to preserve the burials in place, Malama Kakanilua filed a lawsuit against MLP, the judge issued a preliminary injunction in that suit to stop the mining, and the Planning Department sent a warning letter that MLP initially ignored, Public Works extended MLP’s Phase 9 permit in 29 minutes — without consulting any other pertinent agency or department.

Malama Kakanilua and Sierra Club Maui are calling on the county to revoke MLP’s permit extension as well as the grading permit granted to Waiko Industrials (also granted right before the moratorium for another highly sensitive burial area). We want a complete audit of the permitting process so that we: 1) get to the bottom of how the MLP permit was approved in the first place, and 2) ensure this blind approval process stops once and for all.

County government needs to make sure the mining stops. So far, Public Works has taken no action, so Cochran has introduced a new bill to remove the exemption clause from the moratorium law, which may be discussed at the Feb. 2 council meeting. We urge the public to stand up for decency and demand these burials be protected.

* Adriane Raff Corwin is the directing coordinator of Sierra Club of Hawai’i’s Maui Group.

Anaergia’s MANA Project Questioned in The Maui News

February 7, 2018January 27, 2018 by Rob Weltman

Original Article at: http://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2018/01/sewage-plant-project-would-end-landfill-green-waste-composting/

Sewage plant project would end landfill green waste composting

Green waste is dumped off at EKO System’s drop-off at the Central Maui Landfill in this photo taken in February 2016. A proposed renewable energy project at the Wailuku-Kahului Wastewater Reclamation Facility would put the 23-year-old composting facility out of business, diverting the sewage sludge that is a necessary component in EKO’s composing process. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

KAHULUI — Maui EKO Systems, which has processed the island’s green waste and county sewage sludge into compost for nearly 23 years, could be put out of business as early as the end of next year because of a proposed renewable energy project at the Wailuku-Kahului Wastewater Reclamation Facility.

The closure stands as one future impact among several other potential problems residents voiced during a community meeting focused on the project led by Maui All Natural Alternative, an Anaergia Services company, on Wednesday at Kahului Elementary School.

“I think we left the meeting with more questions than answers,” Sierra Club Maui coordinator Adriane Raff Corwin said Thursday. “They didn’t give many specifics at all, so we’ll be following up. But I think last night’s meeting illustrated the community has a huge amount of concerns and questions that aren’t being answered.”

Officials with the energy company and county Department of Environmental Management provided a brief presentation and answered questions during their first public meeting on the project. An environmental impact statement is nearly completed, and a final draft is expected later this year.

“No project I’ve ever seen in my 27 years with the county is perfect, but I think this consists of everything we’re looking for,” Environmental Management Department Director Stewart Stant told the crowd of about 40 people.

Stewart Stant

The project calls for installation of an anaerobic digester to produce methane gas from energy crops grown on former Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. lands. The natural gas would be refined on-site and fuel a combined heat-and-power engine to generate electricity for the sewage treatment plant.

Waste heat from the plant’s engine would dry biosolids, or digested sewage sludge, produced by the plant. The anaerobic digester would be located on the west side of an existing aerobic blower building.

The treatment plant is next to the ocean on Amala Place in Kahului. The Kanaha Pond Wildlife Sanctuary is inland of the sewage treatment plant, and Kanaha Beach Park and Kahului Airport are located to the east.

Anaergia and county officials said the renewable energy project would provide 4.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year and dry the county’s 24,000 tons of biosolids annually. The biosolids would be treated and returned to the county to possibly be used as fertilizer for parks, including the Waiehu Municipal Golf Course.

The energy company would develop the project at no upfront construction cost to the county and charge the county 29 cents kWh as part of a 20-year contract.

Residents and environmental watchdog groups took issue with the charge per kilowatt hour, which is more than double what Maui Electric Co. pays wind farms and for fossil-fuel generated power.

Doug McLeod, vice president of the Maui Tomorrow Foundation, said the price is high because the county advertised the project as “gas turbine to dry sludge,” which solicited just one bid from Anaergia. He added that there seemed to be “a lot of very strange aspects” in the deal that he believed was not the most cost-effective for taxpayers or the safest for the environment.

“When you look at this price 29 cents that is well more than double the current market price for solar power,” McLeod said Thursday. “It would seem to be a lot more than other renewable options, but we don’t know that because the county didn’t ask” for alternatives.

McLeod, who also runs an energy consulting firm and is the former county energy commissioner, said many solar companies did not bother to meet with the county to discuss the project because of the clear restrictive language that favored Anaergia. He believed only Pacific Biodiesel showed interest.

Raff Corwin also questioned why the county did not seek separate solutions for disposing of biosolids and producing energy. She wondered why the treatment plant proposal needed to combine both aspects into one and was concerned about air quality and odors produced by the plant.

“I still haven’t gotten a clear answer as to why these two needs had to be combined,” she said. “It sounds like we’re going to have a huge amount of dry sludge and green waste no longer turned into composting material.”

In 2014, Anaergia, a California-based company, signed a separate 20-year contract with Mayor Alan Arakawa’s administration to build a waste conversion facility at the Central Maui Landfill.

Anaergia and county officials acknowledged that the wastewater treatment plant waste-to-energy project would be related to the landfill project because it would provide dried sludge for the landfill waste conversion project. But they maintained the contracts for the projects were separate.

McLeod said he is skeptical of the landfill waste-conversion facility, which has yet to have an EIS preparation notice published. Anaergia had previously tried to build an energy plant using wastewater in 2015 but was shot down by the Public Utilities Commission.

“These contracts people think they’re free with minimal upfront cost, but they will cost the county money in the end,” McLeod said. “There’s obviously a lost opportunity.”

As for EKO, the company’s current contract with the county ends in June, but the two sides will likely extend until the end of 2019, plant manager Rubens Fonseca said Thursday. The company has 20 workers.

The composting operation was established to extend the life of the landfill by diverting green waste and sludge.

“I hate to see this product that has been offered to landscapers and farmers here almost 23 years going to be gone,” he said.

* Chris Sugidono can be reached at csugidono@maui news.com.