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The discovery of thousands of chemical warfare weapons off of Pearl Harbor could cause problems for the state’s highly touted interisland cable project, designed to bring renewable energy from the neighbor islands to Oahu.

Two years ago, the state energy office identified Kaneohe and Pearl Harbor as the prime sites for bringing cables into Oahu. Those spots were picked based on cost, distance, environmental impacts and the locations of undersea telecommunication cables.

But the Pearl Harbor route may not work anymore because thousands of mustard gas bombs are laying on the seafloor in the path of the cable. The military dumped about 16,000 mustard bombs off Oahu’s southern coast, according to military records and University of Hawaii research presented at a last week hosted by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The meeting brought together various federal and state agencies, as well as researchers, to discuss regulatory and environmental issues surrounding the cable project, from running lines through whale sanctuaries to potential impacts of electromagnetic fields on marine life.

UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology’s 2010 on the routes concluded that “additional information is clearly needed in order to determine whether a landing in or near (Pearl Harbor) is even a viable option.”

Those studies have yet to be done, according to Alexander Shor, associate dean for research at SOEST.

Meanwhile, Hawaiian Electric Co. is a proposal request soon for the undersea cables, which must be capable of bringing 400-megawatts or more of renewable energy to Oahu. It’s the state’s largest clean energy project to date, and the state says it could supply up to 20 percent of Oahu’s electricity needs.

The converter station at Kaneoehe, which UH says is a viable path, is only capable of handling 200 megawatts of renewable energy, according to Christian Hackett, a senior developer at Pattern Energy, which is planning to bid on the cable system. So an additional route will have to be found for the rest of the energy.

Navigating the Bombs

Shor said that the munitions present a major problem for a cable because the specific locations of the mustard bombs are unknown, making it difficult to precisely route a cable around the ordnance.

If the bombs, which have been there since the 1940s, are disrupted while laying a cable, they could potentially burn workers or harm the ocean ecosystem.

“The equipment you are using, when you bring it back up on a ship, could potentially be contaminated and get on people,” said Shor, adding that disturbing the bombs could also release mustard agent into the water column.

The area off Pearl Harbor was not just a military dumping ground. The coastal waters also contain large deposits of equipment, chunks of asphalt and concrete and other refuse dropped into the ocean by workers building Honolulu International Airport, according to UH research. There are also large mounds of coral and chunks of the ocean floor that were dredged up so that ships could dock in the harbor.

“There’s all sorts of stuff out there,” said Shor. “For many, many years, it was just easy to dump things offshore. It wasn’t illegal until recently.”

Mark Glick, head of the state energy office, said that the findings wouldn’t prevent the renewable energy project from going forward. Cable developers can propose other sites for cables to come ashore, and further studies could show that Pearl Harbor is still a possibility, he said.

Hugh Baker, a partner at Hawaii Infrastructure Partners, which also plans to bid on the cable project, said that it would be very difficult to bring the cable into Pearl Harbor and that the company was exploring other routes. But he said that the risk would ultimately be assessed in studies after the RFP comes out and evaluated by the cable contractor.

“The question is, can you get a contractor to actually do it and guarantee it, and can you get insurance on it,” he said.

Once paths are determined, actually laying the cables is relatively easy, according to Hackett. He estimates that it would take three months at the most, to bury the cables on the ocean floor.

“It’s not high risk,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons there are thousands of megawatts of conversion. The technology has been around for decades and decades.”