Enercon, Quay residents face off over drilling

CLOVIS — A group looking to conduct a deep drilling experiment in Quay County explained Thursday night what it hoped to do over the next few months, should the project continue. Quay County residents came along with plenty of dissent, and every indication they wanted the project to end.

The High Plains Patriots' meeting at the Clovis-Carver Public Library covered the possible creation of a 5-kilometer-deep borehole.

High Plains Patriots President Carolyn Spence said the Patriots asked Enercon for a presentation after local media reported on the project.

"We're next-door neighbors," Spence told the crowd of about 70. "We want to be informed."

The session was moderated by Todd Hathorne, who frequently speaks at HPP meetings on various topics.

Atlanta-based Enercon and DOSECC Exploration Services of Salt Lake City were hired in December by the Department of Energy to study the feasibility of a deep borehole test in Nara Visa. The project includes five phases, and is in the first phase of public outreach.

Marc Eckels of Enercon said each phase ends with a decision on whether the next phase should happen.

The next four phases include drilling the boreholes at four different sites, narrowing the sites down to two, choosing a final site and then conducting experiments on emplacement technology.

Eckels said there wasn't much reference material for this type of borehole, because it goes into crystalline rock and granite while other drilling to such depths largely goes into sedimentary rock. Only four other holes have been drilled as deep in the same surface, Eckels said — three in Europe and one in Asia.

"There aren't a lot of holes that deep in crystalline rock or granite," Eckels said. "There are so few of these holes in the world that we don't know enough about them to make broad generalizations."

Eckels said no nuclear waste will be disposed at the Quay County site, but many of the people in attendance with cardboard signs marked, "NO," didn't believe him.

Nobody in the forum audience spoke in favor of the project, but a few hands were raised when Hathorne asked for a show of hands to who supports the project. About half of the hands were raised when Hathorne asked who was against it, and a dozen or so hands raised to the category of wanting to learn more about the project.

Hathorne also asked if anybody believed "the nuclear genie was going back into the bottle," to which no hands raised. He noted that nuclear waste disposal will be a problem as long as there are nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

At the conclusion of the project, Eckels said the borehole would either be plugged, or repurposed into an observatory to possibly be used by Tucumcari's Mesalands Community College. Eckels said there is no deal in place with Mesalands, but the matter has been discussed "on a theoretical basis."

The Q&A session began with a format of written questions only, with one person per question, and later shifted to letting the person speak so the spirit of the question was voiced. At many points throughout the event, Hathorne reminded people if they were disruptive they would be asked to leave. Nobody's behavior escalated to that level.

Questions posed to Eckels included the following:

• Each meeting held on the project has had crowds with the majority opposing it; doesn't that prove the community doesn't support the project? Eckels noted there was dissent, but said the city and county are made up of more than just the people attending the forums.

• Has Eckels ever worked with a project of this type? He said he had not, and most of his deeper drilling experience came with oil and gas.

• Is density of population factored into DOE's location choices? Eckels said it wasn't listed as a factor, but he thought it was a fair assumption lower population densities were attractive locations because the drilling would impact fewer people.

• Aren't resolutions against the borehole project by both the Tucumcari city commission and Quay County Commission adequate in showing public disapproval? Eckels said the evaluation process was still ongoing.

• Given there is a significant risk in transporting the material, doesn't it make more sense to store nuclear waste closer to where it's initially created? Eckels thought that was a fair point, and, "there's a good chance that's ultimately what happens." He said the project could provide data that would help replicate similar boreholes elsewhere in the country.

Many questions, Hathorne said, were better answered by the Department of Energy instead of Eckels. Regarding those questions, Eckels said, the hope is to have a meeting in the summer in Tucumcari with the DOE attending.