Speaker 1: Pushkin that you're trying to find places where there's pockets
Speaker 1: of steam underground naturally occurring. You just need to drill
Speaker 1: well into it, and when you find it, if you
Speaker 1: knew exactly where to drill today, it would already be
Speaker 1: the cheapest source of heat and steam on the planet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is so tantalizing. Right. In fact, there are
Speaker 2: places around the world where there's steam not that far underground,
Speaker 2: and if only we knew where they were, we could
Speaker 2: have a lot of clean energy.
Speaker 1: And maybe where they are and maybe enough for all
Speaker 1: of our energy demands just you know tomorrow, if you
Speaker 1: knew where to.
Speaker 2: Drill just right there, we just got to figure out where.
Speaker 1: And so you know, that's the hunt. That's the search
Speaker 1: that we're on.
Speaker 2: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
Speaker 2: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 2: make technological progress. My guest today is Carl Hoyland. He's
Speaker 2: the co founder and CEO of Zanscar, a geothermal energy company.
Speaker 2: Geothermal energy has not had the kind of wild.
Speaker 3: Boom that wind and solar have had over the past
Speaker 3: decade or so, but there's a compelling case that geothermal
Speaker 3: could be a useful compliment to wind and solar because
Speaker 3: geothermal wells produce a.
Speaker 4: Constant, reliable, steady stream of energy, which is quite useful
Speaker 4: for seasons when there's not much sun or wind, and
Speaker 4: solar panels and wind turbines are not generating much power.
Speaker 4: And so recently a few geothermal startups have gotten to work,
Speaker 4: and I've talked with founders from a few of these companies.
Speaker 4: One is bringing fracking technology to geothermal. Another is trying
Speaker 4: to use a technology that comes from fusion energy to
Speaker 4: drill ultra deep holes. But Sandscar is doing something simpler.
Speaker 4: They're trying to develop new ways to identify those on
Speaker 4: the earth where there is hot steam not too far underground,
Speaker 4: just waiting for somebody to dig a well. Carl and
Speaker 4: his co founder both have PhDs in geology, and Carl
Speaker 4: told me his grandfather was the person who first got
Speaker 4: him into rocks.
Speaker 1: My grandfather was a uranium prospector and then a gold
Speaker 1: prospector for most of his life, and so I remember
Speaker 1: as a kid going down and visiting him. They lived
Speaker 1: in the high Sierras of northern California. He taught me
Speaker 1: that look, if you take this understanding you can go
Speaker 1: out and find resources, and taught me a little bit
Speaker 1: about the economic implications of how you think about resource formation,
Speaker 1: and so just fell in love with it. It was the
Speaker 1: ultimate treasure hunt to think that you could go out
Speaker 1: and find these and I wasn't thinking about the sustainability
Speaker 1: or the climate impacts or others. Just loved that you
Speaker 1: could go out and find this. Didn't undergraduate a PhD
Speaker 1: degree in this, and it was really during the PhD
Speaker 1: that I just started to really struggle with kind of
Speaker 1: the existential reality of do we need more oil and
Speaker 1: gas discoveries? Do we need more big open pits in
Speaker 1: the ground.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're a geologist, the basic career path
Speaker 2: is go find oil right for the last whatever one
Speaker 2: hundred years. If you're a geologist, then you want a job.
Speaker 2: You can definitely get a job finding oil. Is that
Speaker 2: basically the story Historically.
Speaker 1: That's where a lot of the geologists go. And there's
Speaker 1: other routes as well, But you know a lot of
Speaker 1: geologists weren't drawn into it initially for that reason. They
Speaker 1: just loved the storytelling aspect of being outdoors, the scientific
Speaker 1: discovery process, and so for me, it was really kind
Speaker 1: of thinking about, are there other ways to apply this
Speaker 1: skill set that society actually needs a lot more of
Speaker 1: and maybe that have been underinvested in. So it's really
Speaker 1: towards the end of our PhDs that my co founder
Speaker 1: and I were really looking at this landscape and thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, what could we do next, what does society
Speaker 1: really need a lot more of? And we just started
Speaker 1: speaking to as many people as we could in the
Speaker 1: industries and the power sector thinking about energy. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'd say, even when we brought up the topic of geothermal,
Speaker 1: most people would tell us that's too hard to do,
Speaker 1: it's too small a niche, and nobody really needs baseload
Speaker 1: power anymore. This was the late twenty tens, and everyone
Speaker 1: was kind of thinking, well, we've kind of solved it
Speaker 1: with solar and battery, but there were a few voices
Speaker 1: out there saying and running sophisticated models that you know what, actually,
Speaker 1: once you get above fifty percent or sixty seventy eighty
Speaker 1: percent penetration of solar and battery, you start realizing that
Speaker 1: costs start going up unless you have a dispatchable or
Speaker 1: baseload energy source.
Speaker 2: Right, So, just to be clear, it's easy relatively easy
Speaker 2: to get some solar power to display some of the
Speaker 2: power consumption with solar, but the more you get, the
Speaker 2: harder the sort of marginal unit is because the sun
Speaker 2: doesn't shine all the time in short and it's expensive
Speaker 2: to keep adding batteries.
Speaker 1: That's right, and you can start to solve the daily,
Speaker 1: the diurnal cycles, but then you deal with seasonal cycles
Speaker 1: where you start needing long duration storage and technologies that
Speaker 1: aren't mature yet. And that's where the models really started
Speaker 1: to point to you're going to need something baseload or dispatchable,
Speaker 1: and you don't have that many options. It's nuclear, it's hydro,
Speaker 1: which we're not building much more of, or it's geothermal.
Speaker 1: And that's where we started getting excited about the geothermal
Speaker 1: opportunity and saying, okay, well, what's holding it back? Why
Speaker 1: aren't there jobs here? Why isn't anybody building? And that
Speaker 1: let us down I think a very deep rabbit hole
Speaker 1: of a fifty plus year history of geothermal energy and
Speaker 1: why it's been stagnant for decades.
Speaker 2: So let's do that fifty year rabbit hole briefly, not
Speaker 2: in real time, but like, what is that story briefly?
Speaker 1: So Briefly, there was this recognition because in some places
Speaker 1: you see geothermal energy coming out of the surface geysers, fumaroles,
Speaker 1: boiling mud pots. So we knew there was this energy underground,
Speaker 1: and the more we explored the planet, the more we
Speaker 1: realized in almost all locations, actually everywhere, as you go deeper,
Speaker 1: it gets hotter. So there were some early experiments, even
Speaker 1: going back one hundred years ago in Italy, of just
Speaker 1: putting a steam turbine at the top and getting your
Speaker 1: steam from the earth instead of.
Speaker 2: Fighting if steam is coming out of the ground, it's like, wait,
Speaker 2: we know what to do with steam. Turn a turbine
Speaker 2: and make electricity.
Speaker 1: That's right, But in an overtime realizing okay, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to drill into these in most places to get
Speaker 1: that level of steam. It took another fifty years before
Speaker 1: this started to become a more industrial scale opportunity. You
Speaker 1: start seeing a lot of this in the sixties, and
Speaker 1: then honestly, what really drove a lot of demand in
Speaker 1: the United States, which was really the leader at this time,
Speaker 1: was starting to think about the risk of relying on
Speaker 1: external sources of energy, and so the energy crisis in
Speaker 1: the late seventies really catalyzed this enormous push into geothermal energy.
Speaker 1: Not because it was carbon free, not even because it
Speaker 1: was baseload, but simply because it was a domestic energy source.
Speaker 2: We didn't fracking hadn't happened, yet, we were relying on
Speaker 2: oil from the Middle East. There was the Arab oil
Speaker 2: embargo in the early seventies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I wasn't old enough to be there, but
Speaker 1: I've definitely heard these stories of the A and B
Speaker 1: days at the gas station, and so thinking about, like,
Speaker 1: how can we source this domestically and have that independence?
Speaker 1: And this drove many the oil and gas majors and
Speaker 1: other large companies and investors into the space. And they
Speaker 1: just started exploring all over looking for more of these
Speaker 1: places where you could develop geothermal energy.
Speaker 2: And yet we are not a geothermally powered society at
Speaker 2: this moment. What happened while we were wrong.
Speaker 1: So these were pioneers, right, they're doing this for the
Speaker 1: first time. Imagine going out and you're drilling a well
Speaker 1: into some that could be five hundred, six hundred, maybe
Speaker 1: seven hundred fahrenheit. Nobody's done this before, and so they're
Speaker 1: figuring things out as they go it's incredible. They really
Speaker 1: lay the foundation for both the engineering and the science.
Speaker 1: But things start to fall apart in terms of the
Speaker 1: drivers that was motivating this is the energy crisis actually
Speaker 1: started to resolve. Oil prices came down and relations were.
Speaker 2: Better, We got oil again.
Speaker 1: It was like whatever, and then it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: oil actually is cheaper at that time, and so although
Speaker 1: they added gigawatts and geothermal was really the fastest growing
Speaker 1: source of energy at the time, fastest growing renewable, by
Speaker 1: the mid eighties you see most of that really fall
Speaker 1: apart and many of those companies shut down.
Speaker 2: And it's basically just oh, oil is cheap and abundant again,
Speaker 2: and we know how to go get oil more efficiently
Speaker 2: than we know how to go get geothermal energy.
Speaker 1: But luckily a lot of those lessons stayed. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of interest still in the background of maybe
Speaker 1: we're going to need this again one day, and so
Speaker 1: there's slow progress being made in the background, and it's
Speaker 1: not until really the late two thousands that you start
Speaker 1: to have another large driver towards ge thermal energy, and
Speaker 1: this time it's because it's carbon free. Now we're thinking
Speaker 1: about how do you decarbonize our energy systems, and you
Speaker 1: have this actually relatively low cost of carbon free energy,
Speaker 1: and you see a lot more activity and investment in
Speaker 1: the space new power plants coming online again, but this
Speaker 1: time they didn't have that same energy and exploration a
Speaker 1: spirit of that first wave. They're mostly going after the
Speaker 1: low hanging fruit, things that were already known or found.
Speaker 1: And today even most of our plants come from those
Speaker 1: two waves of development. In the US, in half of
Speaker 1: the operating fields today had been discovered initially by accident.
Speaker 2: People were like drilling for oil and they were like, wait,
Speaker 2: that's not oil, that's water or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yea, how are drilling for water on a ranch or
Speaker 1: drilling for gold? And so you have this kind of
Speaker 1: trickle of discoveries coming in that were unintended, serendipitous, and
Speaker 1: those are the opportunities that many of the developers in
Speaker 1: that late two thousands early twenty tens era jump.
Speaker 2: At, sure, like why not, it's right there.
Speaker 1: And this is looking great because in great geothermal resources
Speaker 1: they deliver at a good price, they're long lived. But
Speaker 1: by the mid twenty tens, this is when shale gas
Speaker 1: prices really start coming down, and now you have this
Speaker 1: steep competition from a low cost source of carbon emitting power,
Speaker 1: and it really undercuts geothermal at the same time that
Speaker 1: solar is coming down.
Speaker 2: So basically you can do because of fracking, basically what
Speaker 2: is popularly called tracking right, natural gas gets really cheap
Speaker 2: and that can be the sort of complement to solar,
Speaker 2: although of course it has the problem of emitting carbon dioxide,
Speaker 2: but economically it's tough to beat.
Speaker 1: That's right, And so I think now we're in this
Speaker 1: third wave, a totally different set of economic drivers and
Speaker 1: also different technology tools that are available, and it's being
Speaker 1: driven not by any one of those, but actually all
Speaker 1: of those together. We now do care about having a
Speaker 1: domestic energy source, so that's great. We care about it
Speaker 1: being carbon free because we have to arrive at that
Speaker 1: point someday. But geothermal is also proving uniquely valuable because
Speaker 1: it's a dispatchable base load energy source day and night,
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty five days a year, and so
Speaker 1: that provides incredible resilience and stability to the grid, especially
Speaker 1: in places where you have high rates of intermittent renewables
Speaker 1: on the grid.
Speaker 2: So what's the landscape more generally, right, like the big
Speaker 2: oil and gas companies like are they geothermal curious? Like
Speaker 2: what where are they right now?
Speaker 1: I'd say they're geothermal curious. And we've seen a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of starting to dip their toes, but none
Speaker 1: of them really moving in with full force. And this
Speaker 1: is really left kind of a startup ecosystem that has
Speaker 1: had to rely on venture backing to go out and
Speaker 1: test new ideas, new technologies, and new markets for geothermal
Speaker 1: and a lot of that really started five plus just
Speaker 1: over five years ago, and you're now seeing those companies
Speaker 1: reach their first commercial scale pilots, first demonstrations, and you're
Speaker 1: starting to see the real kind of in the ground
Speaker 1: element of that work. And it's pretty incredible when you
Speaker 1: look at the amount of successes that have been had
Speaker 1: relative to how much funding has gone into it, which
Speaker 1: is actually still quite small compared to other industries.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about zanscover in particular your play where
Speaker 2: do you fit?
Speaker 1: So we're looking at this landscape, is all this heat underground,
Speaker 1: many ways to extract it, and you know, just like
Speaker 1: oil and gas, the industry looks very similar to it
Speaker 1: one hundred years ago. Half the resources were found by accident,
Speaker 1: the other half had obvious seeps at the surface.
Speaker 2: It's like in Pennsylvania one hundred and forty years ago
Speaker 2: and they're like, oh, there's oil coming out of the
Speaker 2: rock here, maybe we should put it in a barrel.
Speaker 2: That's right. It was a moment when the barrels cost
Speaker 2: more than the oil. It's one of my favorite details
Speaker 2: from that era.
Speaker 1: And so you see geothermal and you then realize, Okay,
Speaker 1: if that's how the industry is today, there must be
Speaker 1: much much more underground. And we're also looking at two
Speaker 1: major tail wings of technology. One is AI and data
Speaker 1: science is allowing us to now process huge amounts of
Speaker 1: data and become more predictive in where we drill and
Speaker 1: how we drill. And on the other side, we're seeing
Speaker 1: drilling costs come down as our technologies for drilling become
Speaker 1: more sophisticated and allows us to drill deeper and deeper
Speaker 1: into these resources. Yeah, but it's really this landscape of
Speaker 1: new technologies that hadn't been applied, and interestingly, some of
Speaker 1: those originated in geothermal in the first place. Oh I
Speaker 1: mentioned that big wave of development of the late seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties. They recognized back then actually that it was
Speaker 1: hard to find these resources, and that you drilled many
Speaker 1: dry wells where it was very hot, but there was
Speaker 1: no permeability or no water underground, right, And so they
Speaker 1: dreamed up the idea at that time of well, what
Speaker 1: if we fracked or stimulated this rock.
Speaker 2: What if we put water into the hot rock and
Speaker 2: then brought it back out exactly?
Speaker 1: And so the early experiments are fifty plus years old,
Speaker 1: and they started to identify what might be possible, and
Speaker 1: it was just kind of a slow incremental gain over
Speaker 1: the years and really hits a tipping point just in
Speaker 1: the last few years. On the other hand, they also
Speaker 1: recognized it was hard to find these resources, and so
Speaker 1: a lot of early effort into can we develop new
Speaker 1: data methods new ways of integrating that data to predict
Speaker 1: locations also started then, but only in the last few
Speaker 1: years hit that same tipping point of well we can
Speaker 1: now do it systematically in a scale.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're at a time where if you have a
Speaker 2: lot of data and want to make a prediction, you're
Speaker 2: in luck.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a good time to be that business.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about the aipiece.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's like, Okay, we're good at drilling now and presumably,
Speaker 2: at least as a species, we're better at using data
Speaker 2: to make predictions about the world. Specifically, there was a
Speaker 2: post you guys wrote, I think when you announce your
Speaker 2: series A or something a couple of years ago, and
Speaker 2: you sort of wrote like, what are your key moves
Speaker 2: your key angles, And one of them was leveraging big
Speaker 2: data and predictive modeling to discover new resources. And I
Speaker 2: noticed by the way that you didn't use the term
Speaker 2: AI there, and it was I think it was just
Speaker 2: before chat GPT came out, So I was tangentially curious.
Speaker 2: Was that deliberate or was it just everybody didn't say
Speaker 2: AI then they just said predictive modeling.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of both. You know, AI can
Speaker 1: be such a buzzword. Everyone's AI company. Now what does
Speaker 1: that really mean? And we'll talk in a little bit
Speaker 1: about there's some really sophisticated stuff happening in house here.
Speaker 1: But the other part of it is that exploration. We
Speaker 1: break into two stages, and the first part of discovering
Speaker 1: new resources in some ways can rely on more traditional
Speaker 1: data science machine learning tools from kind of five to
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. And so they're exciting, they're cutting edge
Speaker 1: and new for the industry, but they aren't necessarily the
Speaker 1: type of latest generation AI that you're seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of now, which applies more to our later stage exploration work.
Speaker 2: Say more about that. So it's like you have the
Speaker 2: whole Earth and you say where should we go? And
Speaker 2: there's kind of older technologies give you a big circle
Speaker 2: and then newer technologies give you a smaller circle or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's the simplest way to think about it.
Speaker 1: And so if that's the search that we're one and
Speaker 1: for that problem, you take all of these regional scale
Speaker 1: data sets, some from satellites, from remote sensing drones, from
Speaker 1: ground based sensors, dozens of data inputs, some of which
Speaker 1: might be the Earth's gravitational field, it's magnetic field, the
Speaker 1: resistivity of rocks, the fault lines, the geology. All of
Speaker 1: this data goes in, gets cleaned up, put into these
Speaker 1: machine learning models to then help you predict the favorability
Speaker 1: or location of a site that's worth testing or drilling.
Speaker 1: And we've taken those models and now gone out in
Speaker 1: the field and drilled many of these prospects and have
Speaker 1: been really blown away at the level of success we've
Speaker 1: been able to have in that that we've already found
Speaker 1: more new geothermal systems than the entire industry combined had
Speaker 1: done over the last thirty years.
Speaker 2: Wait say that part again. You in how long you found?
Speaker 1: How much relative to what in just the last three years?
Speaker 2: Okay? And is that real? Like if I don't know
Speaker 2: the smart question to ask you to validate that claim,
Speaker 2: but like validate that claim?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So mean. So part of this is we already
Speaker 1: just talked about people stopped looking. So part of the
Speaker 1: problem is that, like these models gave us the confidence
Speaker 1: to even look, to go out and start testing and
Speaker 1: putting money in the ground.
Speaker 2: So basically people stopped looking. And then basically AI call
Speaker 2: it machine learning if you want, got way better. And
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, what if we took these new tools
Speaker 2: and when looked again.
Speaker 1: But the other side of it is we actually have
Speaker 1: built tools that are more predictive than humans, that we've
Speaker 1: developed cheaper methods to collect the data and test, and
Speaker 1: we've gone out and when we drill these holes in
Speaker 1: several locations, we've actually hit boiling temperatures at very shallow depth,
Speaker 1: say fifty in some of these locations.
Speaker 2: And if I were like a smart, skeptical funder What
Speaker 2: would I ask you right now?
Speaker 1: You should just come out and see these sites.
Speaker 2: See this, I know, but like whatever, That doesn't mean
Speaker 2: they'd work at commercial scale exactly That what I would say.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, we know there's something there. We know there's
Speaker 1: a geothermal system, there's convection underground, hot water's coming up
Speaker 1: close to the surface. How do you know this is
Speaker 1: going to be a power plant one day? How do
Speaker 1: you know what we're going to make money with this resource?
Speaker 1: And that's where the second stage comes in.
Speaker 2: Okay, go on.
Speaker 1: So we know there's something there, Where is it? How
Speaker 1: do we drill into it? And can we go deeper
Speaker 1: and deeper into it? And that's where some of these
Speaker 1: more next generation forms of AI become really important because
Speaker 1: now you enter a data sparse space.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. So you're trying to make predictions with less data.
Speaker 1: With less data, and this is where you have to
Speaker 1: rely on a combination of things, first principles, scientific understanding
Speaker 1: to allow you to do simulations. And so we enter
Speaker 1: into the space where you're essentially creating digital twins of
Speaker 1: the subsurface.
Speaker 2: Right because you don't know what's under there. So when
Speaker 2: you say digital twin your guessing, because if you know,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't need to do the work, you'd be done exactly.
Speaker 1: But you do know physically what is possible, so there
Speaker 1: are limitations on what could be down there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so by taking into account those physics and geologic principles,
Speaker 1: you can model all of that possibility space, combine these
Speaker 1: into a framework by which you could say, if I
Speaker 1: drill here, here's what is possible probabilistically, whole range of
Speaker 1: possible outcomes. And even though I can't say one hundred
Speaker 1: percent this is the outcome, I can say with confidence
Speaker 1: that if I drill many of these wells with that
Speaker 1: same profile, this is going to be my portfolio level outcome.
Speaker 1: And that starts to become scalable. That starts to because
Speaker 1: something you can allocate capital.
Speaker 2: To, assuming your probabilistic estimates are correct, right, assuming you
Speaker 2: know the sort of AerR bars around your guesses.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: So another one of the points in that post you
Speaker 2: wrote a couple of years ago when I think it
Speaker 2: was the series A, the next one, and it seems
Speaker 2: like what we're walking up to now, so I'll mention
Speaker 2: it was leveraging stochastic geomodeling and decision signs to optimize
Speaker 2: exploration workflow for de risking. So the phrase that was
Speaker 2: interesting to me there was decision science. What is decision
Speaker 2: science and how are you using it?
Speaker 1: And so again you're entering into this data sparse problem
Speaker 1: where you're going to make a series of decisions. I
Speaker 1: might drill well here or there, five wells or three
Speaker 1: wells in this order to this depth this type of well.
Speaker 1: Or I could go collect new data. I could collect
Speaker 1: gravitational data, geologic data, seismic data.
Speaker 2: And there's a trade off, right, gathering data is costly,
Speaker 2: but not as costly as digging a dry well. And
Speaker 2: so how do you weigh that? I mean, it's that
Speaker 2: the fundamental kind of economic or technoeconomic question you're trying
Speaker 2: to answered.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. And historically we've relied on geologists who
Speaker 1: are specialized and trained in this field to be able
Speaker 1: to make those hard, subjective decisions under extreme uncertainty, and
Speaker 1: they'll recommend, Okay, this is what we should do next.
Speaker 1: But there's a few issues with that. And again I'm
Speaker 1: a geologist, so I don't mean this to shade throw shade,
Speaker 1: but it's one is not very scalable because if you
Speaker 1: want to drill thousands or millions of these wells, there's
Speaker 1: actually a very few, very expert level geologists. Yeah, only
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen globally that have drilled say a
Speaker 1: dozen exploration wells in their career.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And so you've very quickly run out of just the
Speaker 1: people power there. But the other aspect of it is
Speaker 1: it's inconsistent and it inherently has human biases, right, we
Speaker 1: can't avoid that, And so I almost always will recommend
Speaker 1: certain data types just because I love working with those
Speaker 1: data I think they're important.
Speaker 2: But there's just one rock. You're like, oh, that's my
Speaker 2: favorite rock. We've got a drill here.
Speaker 1: That's true, And with data types, I have my favorite
Speaker 1: data types. And some of that bias comes from my
Speaker 1: past experience, the projects I've worked on, the sites I've
Speaker 1: looked at, and how those were helpful or not there.
Speaker 1: But not all sites are the same, and the more
Speaker 1: you see, the more that debt shapes. And that's where
Speaker 1: AI in these advanced forms of probabilistic modeling allow us
Speaker 1: to think much bigger picture and incorporate all of the
Speaker 1: known sites and even the unknown physical possibilities into those decisions.
Speaker 2: And so, in basic terms, when you set up a
Speaker 2: geothermal power plant, how does it work? What's going on?
Speaker 1: In very basic terms, we're drilling wells underground, just like
Speaker 1: you might do for water or oil and gas, but
Speaker 1: we're tapping into pockets of very hot water. And as
Speaker 1: you bring that to the surface, we can extract the
Speaker 1: heat from that water and put it into a closed
Speaker 1: turbine system that's going to flash to steam drive a turbine,
Speaker 1: and then that turbine will drive a generator that produces
Speaker 1: electricity for the grid. And as our hot water cools
Speaker 1: because we're extracting the heat, we then reinject that cooled
Speaker 1: water back into the system where it has time to
Speaker 1: reheat before coming back up your production. Well, so these
Speaker 1: are really closed loops of circulating water underground to extract heat,
Speaker 1: and then a closed loop where you're running the turbine system.
Speaker 2: I can of run forever. Dumb question.
Speaker 1: Every one of our utility scale operating geothermal fields is
Speaker 1: still operating today, including the ones that aree hundred years old.
Speaker 2: Are they colder than when they started?
Speaker 1: Many of them are colder, but many of them have
Speaker 1: actually stayed relatively stable and consistent, especially the deeper fields,
Speaker 1: and a few have increased in temperature, so you have
Speaker 1: the ability to think of these resources as potentially generational
Speaker 1: resources that could last hundreds of years, maybe even thousands,
Speaker 1: if sustained and managed properly, because it is actually being
Speaker 1: recharged over time. The Earth is creating new heat through
Speaker 1: radioactive decay and other processes, and that heat is part
Speaker 1: of what really makes geothermal renewable resource.
Speaker 2: So where are you now?
Speaker 1: So let's see. We started the company about five just
Speaker 1: over five years ago, raised our first venture capital just
Speaker 1: over four years ago, and at the time it was
Speaker 1: really just two of us, my co founder and I
Speaker 1: thinking about this big opportunity, this big need, and the
Speaker 1: technologies that we were seeing and helping develop in the
Speaker 1: lab and seeing a pathway to commercialize them. Now and
Speaker 1: just that time, we've raised sixty five million inequities, and
Speaker 1: we've also recently applied our technology to even known operating
Speaker 1: fields that had been underappreciated and underutilized and have since
Speaker 1: become the eighth largest producer of gethermal power in the nation.
Speaker 2: Is this the new Mexico well or field?
Speaker 1: That's exactly right?
Speaker 2: Tell me that story. There was a well sort of
Speaker 2: neglected on the Wayne site in New Mexico that you
Speaker 2: got involved in what happened there.
Speaker 1: It's a site that had been discovered by accident and
Speaker 1: it was just in the middle of a desert valley
Speaker 1: where a rancher had come out and drilled a water
Speaker 1: well and it just about one hundred feet hit steam.
Speaker 1: And that was a long time ago, and so I'd
Speaker 1: been known about for a while and developers came in
Speaker 1: and developed it for various purposes, including for electricity, about
Speaker 1: ten fifteen years ago. But they never went deeper than
Speaker 1: that zone. They really kind of drilled into the shallow
Speaker 1: top of the system and it was hard to go
Speaker 1: much deeper. They drilled some dry wells in a few places,
Speaker 1: and it really just left them saying, Okay, let's just
Speaker 1: stay here with what we know. And the problem with
Speaker 1: that is when you're producing from the very tops of
Speaker 1: these systems, you can run into issues temperature decline or
Speaker 1: maybe not in a pressure support. And they actually ran
Speaker 1: into a lot of those issues. So by the time
Speaker 1: we came and acquired the field last year, it was
Speaker 1: now significantly underperforming and was at serious risk of being
Speaker 1: shut down within the coming months.
Speaker 2: So you buy this little power plant. It's a little
Speaker 2: power plant right in New Mexico, and what do you do?
Speaker 2: What happens?
Speaker 1: So we enter in and within a few months, through
Speaker 1: a transition agreement, we take over full operations of the
Speaker 1: facility and we start right away investing in. We're going
Speaker 1: to drill this new well, and we're going to do
Speaker 1: some upgrades and improvements to the facility along the way,
Speaker 1: But most importantly, we need a new source of steam.
Speaker 1: And with our modeling, we'd identified as zone at depth
Speaker 1: that the data was helping confirm and point to us,
Speaker 1: and we engineered, permitted, and then ended up drilling and
Speaker 1: constructing a new well using all the latest oil and
Speaker 1: gas drilling technologies, so PDC bits, directional drilling assemblies, mud motors,
Speaker 1: and we drilled directionally down to this zone and we
Speaker 1: go more than four times deeper than the prior production zone.
Speaker 1: And along the way, you don't know if you're going
Speaker 1: to hit it yet because these can be pretty narrow,
Speaker 1: isolated pockets.
Speaker 2: This is good, this is good drama. You're spending a
Speaker 2: lot of money, presumably.
Speaker 1: Spending a lot of money. Your investors are calling you,
Speaker 1: You know, how's it going? We know yet even the
Speaker 1: plant staff are asking that, right because this is this
Speaker 1: is serious and very personal to them.
Speaker 2: How long does it take this drilling process?
Speaker 1: So this first we all took over thirty days to drill.
Speaker 1: We have over thirty people on site day and night
Speaker 1: through that entire time.
Speaker 2: And how are you getting information? Like are you is
Speaker 2: there some dashboard you look at it is somebody calling you.
Speaker 1: Combination of all the above and then also just time
Speaker 1: on the ground, you're.
Speaker 2: Just standing there looking down the hole. You can't say anything.
Speaker 1: But modern oil and gas drilling really is pretty incredible
Speaker 1: with the technology that's been developed and applied to it,
Speaker 1: and so you're getting real time data as you go,
Speaker 1: all put into modern software tools to watch that. You
Speaker 1: start getting early indications as your drill bit starts hitting
Speaker 1: these zones, you start seeing evidence of fractures or you know,
Speaker 1: possible reservoirs, but you don't actually know if you've hit
Speaker 1: what you need to repower the facility to really have
Speaker 1: a success until you test it with a flow test.
Speaker 1: And so with that you're actually going to kick off
Speaker 1: the well, let steam come out, flow it into a
Speaker 1: separator and measure the flow rate and the temperature over
Speaker 1: a period of time, and that we were on the
Speaker 1: ground floor. You're standing around, it's you know, high stakes,
Speaker 1: I nervousness, and you just you can see and feel
Speaker 1: this energy coming out of the well and you start
Speaker 1: seeing the readings the temperature, the flow rate, and at
Speaker 1: a certain point in that process, we all looked at
Speaker 1: each other knew that it had hit and that feeling
Speaker 1: is incredible, and yes, that was a We went from
Speaker 1: we have no idea to we know, this is it
Speaker 1: and there might be a lot more down there.
Speaker 2: What happened at that moment when it was clear that it.
Speaker 1: Worked, just massive size of relief and excitement, not just
Speaker 1: that I don't.
Speaker 2: Know if you jump in the air, like lie down
Speaker 2: on the.
Speaker 1: Ground, that both of those definitely happened. Some of us jump,
Speaker 1: some of us lie down, just kind of collapsed. A
Speaker 1: lot of enter and work over the past month. But
Speaker 1: even more exciting, I think it was not just that
Speaker 1: this plant was going to be recovered, that this plant
Speaker 1: was going to have multiples to orders of magnitude more
Speaker 1: resource potential ahead of it, but that the process we
Speaker 1: applied was systematic. Right, this is an approach that we
Speaker 1: could apply to other fields. It was repeatable, it was scalable,
Speaker 1: and so for us it was the two pieces of
Speaker 1: the puzzle. Can you find more resources orders of magnitude
Speaker 1: more than the industry had found historically, and can you
Speaker 1: go deeper and find more resource within each of those resources,
Speaker 1: And so thinking about what that means about the potential
Speaker 1: size and scale of this opportunity, I think was really
Speaker 1: the most exciting part.
Speaker 5: We'll be back in just a minute. What do you
Speaker 5: have cooking immediately?
Speaker 2: What are you working on now?
Speaker 1: We are really ramping up the deployment of these technologies
Speaker 1: at both discovery and de risking. And the best way
Speaker 1: to show this repeatability to really financial sectors that have
Speaker 1: become wary and nervous of geothermal investment is to show
Speaker 1: not just the size and scale, but to show real
Speaker 1: proof cases. So this example in New Mexico, I think
Speaker 1: is a great example of that. Look, we can come
Speaker 1: in and do this work, but now moving towards greenfield
Speaker 1: development and bringing on multiple new projects, developing them even
Speaker 1: in parallel, and showing that scalability and repeatability, we think
Speaker 1: is a critical next step for the industry to re
Speaker 1: earn that trust from financial markets to come in and
Speaker 1: underwrite these.
Speaker 2: Sure, you got to just go find some bare piece
Speaker 2: of earth and build an economic geothermal power plant there.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the broad.
Speaker 1: Step, and that's what we're doing next.
Speaker 2: Specifically, you got one, you got financing, like where are you?
Speaker 1: So we have the financing to start the development and
Speaker 1: we've done a lot of that development work already, a
Speaker 1: number of projects in the interconnection cueues with resources already
Speaker 1: identified that have that potential, and so really the next
Speaker 1: stage is taking that through the rest of the development
Speaker 1: process to get it ready for bankable project finance.
Speaker 2: Is there like a rate limiting step? Is there one
Speaker 2: that's almost there? Is there something you got to figure out?
Speaker 1: The rate limiting step now in terms of power development
Speaker 1: is really interconnection and permitting. Historically these are very slow, but.
Speaker 2: That's just anything you're going to build has that problem.
Speaker 2: That's not a geothermal problem. That's just the grid is
Speaker 2: a pain in the ass problem. I guess it's unsurprising,
Speaker 2: but like it's uninteresting and it makes me sad about
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: But there's been progress. I mean really there is now
Speaker 1: for the first time I think real by partisan support
Speaker 1: for accelerating permitting of energy projects and accelerating how we
Speaker 1: can bring these projects onto the grid or in some
Speaker 1: cases even off the grid. And as you mentioned, I
Speaker 1: think we're in this just kind of totally different market
Speaker 1: environment than even when we started the company just a
Speaker 1: few years ago, where look, for the last twenty five years,
Speaker 1: energy demand growth has been basically flat, and so when
Speaker 1: you were thinking about building renewable energy projects like geothermal,
Speaker 1: you were almost always looking at turning something else off.
Speaker 2: It was zero sum zerio.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're going to turn off that net gas facility
Speaker 1: and turn on these renewables. Right now, we're in an
Speaker 1: environment where we're probably gonna have to rebuild the entire
Speaker 1: amount of capacity another time over.
Speaker 2: Right, there's going to I mean, if scaling with AI continues,
Speaker 2: there's going to be a tremendous amount of demand for
Speaker 2: electric power.
Speaker 1: That's right. And so from a carbon emissions point of view,
Speaker 1: the short term downside is that you have a lot
Speaker 1: more natural gas being built than anybody expected. But one
Speaker 1: of the kind of unique upsides is that you now
Speaker 1: have demand for geothermal and even nuclear and long duration shorts,
Speaker 1: these other technologies that is no longer well you're competing
Speaker 1: against the marginal cost of something else that's already built.
Speaker 1: It's you're competing with new build natural gas and coal.
Speaker 2: Which is more expensive. That's good for you.
Speaker 1: That's good for us. At that point, we actually compete
Speaker 1: quite well today and then have a pathway to coming
Speaker 1: down the cost curve and the learnings curves that will
Speaker 1: put geothermal into a much more competitive position even in
Speaker 1: just a few years.
Speaker 2: If you don't dig any dry wells, then it's a
Speaker 2: great business, right. It seems like that's the key is
Speaker 2: don't miss that's right. So let's talk about politics for
Speaker 2: ninety seconds. It's an interesting moment politically for geothermal energy. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a bad moment politically, I'll say it. You don't
Speaker 2: have to say it for solar power and for electric
Speaker 2: vehicles and for wind power for sure, But it seems
Speaker 2: not bad for geothermal energy, which is maybe a pleasant surprise,
Speaker 2: I don't know. Tell me about what's happening politically, like
Speaker 2: with the federal government and geothermal power right now.
Speaker 1: This is where geothermal has been fortunate to be in
Speaker 1: this very bipartisan position. On one hand, we are a
Speaker 1: small footprint, you know, small materials impact, zero emission technology,
Speaker 1: which obviously the left loves right. That fits very much
Speaker 1: into how do we decarnaize the grid and achieve these goals?
Speaker 1: Whereas it also is an energy industry that can rely
Speaker 1: on our existing American workforce. You can transition them from
Speaker 1: oil and gas. The technology is ready to go. You're
Speaker 1: not rebuilding a workforce from scratch like you have to
Speaker 1: do for offshore wind.
Speaker 2: Or it's appealing because it looks and feels like oil
Speaker 2: and gas.
Speaker 1: It's drill, baby, drill here in America on American soil.
Speaker 1: So it has all of the things that the right
Speaker 1: and the left can actually come together on and see, oh,
Speaker 1: this actually benefits all of our shared objectives.
Speaker 2: And in fact, in the budget bill that just passed,
Speaker 2: the geothermal basically subsidies survived, right, whereas other subsidies for
Speaker 2: other kinds of carbon free electricity did not.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: What are you worried about? Like, what do you think
Speaker 2: might go wrong?
Speaker 1: So we worry a little bit about the small n
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with probabilities that have these long tail distributions.
Speaker 2: Basically bad luck. There's the eighty percent chance the thing
Speaker 2: will work, and you hit the twenty percent.
Speaker 1: Loser exactly and so what happens if you have all
Speaker 1: of the pieces in place, things should have worked, You've
Speaker 1: built this technology, and those first ten projects or five
Speaker 1: projects just happen to fall on the low end of
Speaker 1: that distribution. In the markets are like, Okay, you tried,
Speaker 1: We're done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a bummer.
Speaker 1: And so that's true in what we're doing. It's also
Speaker 1: true in what the broader geothermal industry is doing. So
Speaker 1: I mentioned what really sets Sandscar part is this ability
Speaker 1: to unlock conventional geothermal resources that don't require fracking or stimulation.
Speaker 1: These are just naturally occurring pockets that doesn't require any
Speaker 1: water consumption, that they're low and they're out there.
Speaker 2: One of the other geothermal founders I talked to, I
Speaker 2: think it was Carlos Arake at Quays said that for him,
Speaker 2: the measure of success for the field is when big
Speaker 2: oil and gas companies get into the geothermal business, because
Speaker 2: they are the ones with the capital and the staff
Speaker 2: and the know how who if they want to do it,
Speaker 2: they could do it at giant scale now essentially, and
Speaker 2: in his worldview, it's like that's what we need, that's
Speaker 2: how you get a ton of geothermal energy really fast.
Speaker 2: What do you think of that.
Speaker 1: I think I agree with it other than the need
Speaker 1: aspect of Okay, like I do agree if they entered in,
Speaker 1: it would accelerate things significantly. Nobody's better positioned than them
Speaker 1: to deploy this type of technology, this type of workforce,
Speaker 1: on these types of resources deals, subservice uncertainty, and top
Speaker 1: side infrastructure together at scale.
Speaker 2: Right, Like, they're so big, they're really big companies all
Speaker 2: around the world.
Speaker 1: In that is part of the problem. They are so
Speaker 1: big all around the world, and they have a clear,
Speaker 1: proven business model, and diversifying and changing out of that
Speaker 1: has been a real challenge and maintaining focus on any
Speaker 1: new business areas. And so despite the progress that all
Speaker 1: of these startups have demonstrated, you're still seeing very little
Speaker 1: actual kind of in the groundproof from them or even
Speaker 1: capital entering in. And so I think that's what has
Speaker 1: shifted from you over the last few years as a
Speaker 1: recognition that you know what, we're going to be able
Speaker 1: to do this with or without them, And I hope
Speaker 1: they joined sooner. But we are finding that there are
Speaker 1: capital sources out there, and there are sophisticated groups that
Speaker 1: have subservice understanding that can really accelerate investments into these technologies,
Speaker 1: and so I think there's still a pathway to do
Speaker 1: this on the time skills that we talked about.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to do the lightning round. What's your
Speaker 2: favorite rock?
Speaker 1: My favorite rock is an eclogite, which is a rare
Speaker 1: rock that represents rock that was once at the surface
Speaker 1: and has been brought down very deep, sometimes one hundred
Speaker 1: plus miles underground through tectonic activity, where many of the
Speaker 1: minerals and elements have changed shape into things that are
Speaker 1: more stable a high pressure and high temperature, and then
Speaker 1: it was brought back to the surface. And these were
Speaker 1: some of the early points of evidence for plate tectonics
Speaker 1: actually occurring.
Speaker 2: What do they look like?
Speaker 1: They have bright green and red minerals in them, and
Speaker 1: so sometimes they're called a Christmas tree rock.
Speaker 2: What's the most underrated geologic epoch.
Speaker 1: At least for the Western United States really the Tertiary period,
Speaker 1: which is this I think it was twenty to forty
Speaker 1: million years ago where the entire western Us underwinter transformation.
Speaker 1: Rather than the plates starting they'd been colliding for a
Speaker 1: very long time, they actually start polling apart, and it's
Speaker 1: this pulling apart that stretches the Earth's crust and leads
Speaker 1: to the formation of this huge, broad region of high
Speaker 1: elevated temperatures and geothermal activity. That is really what has
Speaker 1: driven all of the activity today for geothermal energy and
Speaker 1: makes this not just the best place in the US
Speaker 1: to develop geothermal but one of the best in the world.
Speaker 1: Almost no other areas had that long history of twenty
Speaker 1: plus million years of stretching and thinning to create that
Speaker 1: much geothermal heat near to the surface.
Speaker 2: Best volcano you want to do, worst volcano, worst volcano,
Speaker 2: I would accept.
Speaker 1: No, they're always the best and the worst, because there's
Speaker 1: this age that comes from the also incredible and so
Speaker 1: actually for me, one of the best volcanoes is this
Speaker 1: volcanic region in kind of central western Japan, few hours
Speaker 1: west of Tokyo, in the heat of Mountains, sometimes called
Speaker 1: the Japanese Alps, and it's an area where you've not
Speaker 1: only had volcanic activity, but the mountains have been uplifting
Speaker 1: so fast and eroding that you've brought some of the
Speaker 1: geothermal heat just right to the surface. And as they
Speaker 1: tunnels into that rock, there's some of the highest geothermal
Speaker 1: gradients anywhere on the planet and really takes a unique
Speaker 1: combination of tectonic plate activity to drive that kind of action.
Speaker 1: Have you been there?
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 1: We did a study out there a number of years ago.
Speaker 2: What's it like?
Speaker 1: It's beautiful, you know, sort of has this tropical feel,
Speaker 1: incredible plants. But you're hiking up in the mountains. You
Speaker 1: feel like, if you're here in the US, you'd be
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere. And all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you look over and there's a nice elderly couple out
Speaker 1: hiking way up this high elevation, just waving to you
Speaker 1: as they go by, And so it's it's both I think,
Speaker 1: beautiful but also appreciated by the people around it.
Speaker 2: Carl Hoyland is the co founder and CEO of Zanscar.
Speaker 2: Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
Speaker 2: are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
Speaker 2: show was produced by Trinamnino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
Speaker 2: was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Briguerra.
Speaker 2: I'm Jacob gold Stein and we'll be back next week
Speaker 2: with another episode of What's Your Problem?
Speaker 5: MHM