WAILUKU - A less-than-hoped yield for a well drilled by Maui Land & Pineapple Co. at Piiholo has put the company and Maui County water officials at odds over a deal to use the water.
The agreement called for ML&P to develop the well and then turn it over for operation to the county, which would receive a portion of the water it produced. But county water officials say the well is not producing enough water for the agreement to go forward, while Maui Pine disagrees.
Pump tests done last year showed a maximum yield of 1.2 million gallons of water per day from the well, according to data reported to the state Commission on Water Resource Management.
That's 800,000 gallons short of the 2 million gallons per day ML&P set as its target when it applied for its well construction permit in 2004.
County Water Director Jeff Eng called the results "disappointing," and said the well's yield would not be enough to meet all the commitments made in Maui Land & Pineapple's 2006 agreement with the county.
ML&P could look at options for improving the yield, but the county would not accept the well under the current circumstances, he said.
"If there are no further discussions or any more effort to complete the well or determine its output, I would think we would terminate the agreement," Eng said.
But Maui Land & Pineapple Senior Vice President Ryan Churchill said the company had a different view.
"We are in disagreement with the county on the yield," he said.
He said ML&P had completed development of the well and was working with the county to complete the terms of the agreement.
The 2006 agreement between the county and ML&P specifies that tests on a pilot hole would have to show a capacity of at least 1 million gallons per day in order for the drilling of the well to proceed. But it doesn't appear to set a minimum number of gallons per day that the completed well would have to produce in order for the deal to go forward.
Eng and Churchill would not comment on the specific points of disagreement between the company and the county.
Maui Pine filed a well-completion report with the Commission on Water Resource Management in December 2008, indicating drilling was complete. But Charley Ice, a commission hydrologist, said the company has not yet installed a permanent pump to make the well operational, and allowed a pump installation permit to expire in June without seeking an extension.
Last year, the company received approval from commission staff to drill the well deeper into the aquifer than is usually allowed, in hopes of improving the yield, Ice said.
"They went as deep as they could, without getting the results they wanted," he said.
Maui County and Maui Land & Pineapple signed the Piiholo Well agreement in late 2006, a few weeks before then-Mayor Alan Arakawa left office.
The contract was already in place when Eng became water director in 2007, and he has said previously that he felt the county could have gotten a better deal out of the arrangement, and that in future deals with private well developers, he'd like to see the county get a larger share of the water.
Under the agreement, ML&P was to develop the well, then turn it over to the county, which would own and operate it.
County standards call for wells to be pumped at 45 percent of their maximum capacity. According to the agreement, ML&P would receive 75 percent of that amount, while the county would receive 25 percent.
The agreement allowed for Maui Pine to take up to 120,000 gallons per day of its water allocation, not from the system that would be fed by the new Piiholo Well, but from the county's Upper Kula water system.
If the well had produced a maximum capacity of 2 million gallons per day as the company originally hoped, that would have provided ML&P with 675,000 gallons per day, and the county with 225,000 gallons per day.
Maui Pine was expected to use its allocation for its own projects and had promised to provide water for the proposed 170-home Kauhale Lani subdivision in Pukalani when it sold the land to developer Pukalani Associates in 2005.
The county had planned to use its share to provide water to some of the hundreds of landowners on a waiting list for water meters Upcountry.
But with the well's maximum capacity at only 1.2 million gallons per day, ML&P's allocation would be 427,680 gallons per day, and the county would get just 142,560 gallons per day.
Ice said he believed Maui Pine was able to get a slight improvement in yield by drilling about 50 feet deeper to bring the well to a total depth of 1,960 feet, but the improvement was not enough to meet the company's original expectations.
ML&P could apply for another variance to drill the well even deeper, but that could be risky, because if it did not produce the desired results, the company could be required to backfill the deepest portion.
Drilling a well isn't like poking a straw into a juice box, Ice said, because the layer of volcanic rock hundreds of feet below the island's surface doesn't have a homogenous consistency, but can be dense in some places and porous in others. Some wells Upcountry have turned out to be very productive, while others have been disappointing, he said.
"It's a hit-and-miss situation," Ice said.
* Ilima Loomis can be reached at iloomis@mauinews.com.
