Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, we were recently down in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: I know, I really like DC. It has sort of
Speaker 3: like old school vibe. Yeah, I have power lunches.
Speaker 2: I like it. It seems like a good city for
Speaker 2: power lunches. It's also did you know, not to sidetrack
Speaker 2: too much. Basically all the big fast casual innovation is
Speaker 2: from DC as far as I can tell, so Sweet Green,
Speaker 2: I think we've founded Kava. We talked to one of
Speaker 2: the Both of those companies are from DC. And I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna lie. When I think of this sort of
Speaker 2: modal worker in DC, I think of someone who who
Speaker 2: eats a lot of like fast casual lunches.
Speaker 4: At their desk. Yes, okay, which is no judgment.
Speaker 2: Because that's how I eat my lunch. So I just
Speaker 2: want to make that clear. That's not a judgment done anyone, right, But.
Speaker 3: We are not actually here to talk about casual dining
Speaker 3: and takeout lunches. We were in DC for a very
Speaker 3: particular event, something very special. We were over at the
Speaker 3: Department of Energies Deploy twenty four conference.
Speaker 2: That's right, So regular listeners will have heard we've done
Speaker 2: multiple episodes in the past with the Jigger Shaw, who
Speaker 2: is the head of the Loan Programs Office at the DOE,
Speaker 2: who was the LPO part of the DOE that put
Speaker 2: on this conference. And of course the big theme that
Speaker 2: you know when you think about the Loan Program's Office
Speaker 2: is this impulse to figure out a way to solve
Speaker 2: the financing problem for early stage energy in which there's
Speaker 2: some sort of proven technology out there, but the funding ecosystem,
Speaker 2: for various reasons on familiarity, risk, et cetera, doesn't exist,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of the conversations are like, how
Speaker 2: do you solve that chicken and egg problem in energy finance?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and we do, indeed have the perfect guest. We
Speaker 3: spoke with Tim Latimer, the CEO of Fervo Energy, which
Speaker 3: is that big geothermal startup that is doing some interesting
Speaker 3: things with fracking technology. So take a listen.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to a live episode of the Odd
Speaker 2: Loss Podcast. I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway, and
Speaker 2: we are joined here by Tim Latimer, co founder CEO
Speaker 2: of Fervo Energy, advanced geothermal?
Speaker 4: What is that?
Speaker 2: And when we think about America's energy mix or America's
Speaker 2: energy portfolio, how big can advance geothermal be?
Speaker 4: Very big?
Speaker 5: That's the short answer. So, first off, great to be
Speaker 5: with y'all. I'm a regular Odd Lots listener, so it's
Speaker 5: a treat to be with y'all. Geothermal. What is geothermal
Speaker 5: and what is advanced geothermal?
Speaker 4: It's a great question.
Speaker 5: So geothermal isn't new, and even power generation from geothermal
Speaker 5: isn't new. The first power plant for geothermal came online
Speaker 5: at over one hundred years ago in Italy, so it's
Speaker 5: been something that's been around for a long time. But historically,
Speaker 5: even though it has really everything you want in an
Speaker 5: energy resource, it's carbon free, low environmental footprint, it works
Speaker 5: twenty four to seven, it's been very limited to very
Speaker 5: specific geologies. So up until very recently, the story of
Speaker 5: geothermal is you either have the geology of Iceland where
Speaker 5: steam is literally coming out of the ground, or certain
Speaker 5: hot spots like northern California or New Zealand, or you
Speaker 5: don't have geothermal, And those were kind of the only
Speaker 5: two options. So those places blessed with it had a
Speaker 5: great energy resource, but it certainly wasn't widespread. Advanced geothermal
Speaker 5: or enhanced geothermal systems is really the whole concept that
Speaker 5: you could use new technology to go to deeper resources
Speaker 5: or in permeable rock where the hot water the steam
Speaker 5: wouldn't flow on its own, and still make geothermal work.
Speaker 5: And so in enhanced geothermal systems oftentimes you're going deeper.
Speaker 5: In many cases you're doing something to create permeability in
Speaker 5: the reservoir so it can work in more places. And
Speaker 5: the key there is you get all the positive attributes
Speaker 5: of geotl thermal, but you're not limited as doing it
Speaker 5: in places like Island's geology, So the opportunity is huge.
Speaker 5: In the US today geothermal only accounts for about three
Speaker 5: gigawatts of power, so lead less than one percent of
Speaker 5: the US electric grid, but the resource potential is massive.
Speaker 5: You know, we just worked on a paper that was
Speaker 5: published as a collaboration with Princeton that actually showed pathways
Speaker 5: to get up to seven hundred and fifty gigawatts of
Speaker 5: geothermal power by mid century. So if we unlock it
Speaker 5: with the right technology, this could be an enormous resource.
Speaker 3: So you're a fracking guy. What's the technological overlap between
Speaker 3: fracking for oil and gas in like the Permian Basin
Speaker 3: or somewhere like that, versus doing fracking for geothermal in
Speaker 3: Utah or something like that. And I have to admit here,
Speaker 3: my only knowledge of drilling comes from like Bruce Willis
Speaker 3: and Armageddon, which I assume was an accurate depiction of
Speaker 3: the industry.
Speaker 4: But you tell me that's right, yeah, Armageddon.
Speaker 5: Actually I thought it was a documentary the first time
Speaker 5: I saw it, Oky, And you're right. I actually started
Speaker 5: my career as a drilling engineer in the oil and
Speaker 5: gas industry. And there's a lot of technology overlap between
Speaker 5: oil and gas and geothermal, and that's why the shale
Speaker 5: revolution and all the technological development that's happened as a
Speaker 5: result of that has had spillover effects that have moved
Speaker 5: the needle on geothermal technology. But there's also a lot
Speaker 5: that's different. And actually the origins of FERVO. I got
Speaker 5: the ideas for this when I was drilling in the
Speaker 5: Eagle for shale in South Texas, and the Eagle Ferd
Speaker 5: had been a resource that people had known about for
Speaker 5: over one hundred years, but it lacked the permeability to
Speaker 5: produce economic quantities of oil, and so it was ignored
Speaker 5: really until the late two thousands. And really it was
Speaker 5: the process of horizontal drilling where you could drill deep
Speaker 5: and then horizontally across the shale layer and the hydraulic
Speaker 5: fracturing process to create permeability that allowed those wells to
Speaker 5: be economic and kind of launched the shale boom. And
Speaker 5: I was looking at what I was doing in my
Speaker 5: career as a drilling engineer there and I learned what
Speaker 5: geothermal was at the time, and I got really excited
Speaker 5: because I realized that the technological gap of getting high
Speaker 5: floor rates out of low permeability formations really was the
Speaker 5: exact same whenever you looked at geothermal. That's what held
Speaker 5: shale back, was holding geothermal back. And the fact that
Speaker 5: these new technologies had opened up oil and gas meant
Speaker 5: it could be done for geothermal too. But the process
Speaker 5: of taking that technique and applying it to geothermal has
Speaker 5: involved an enormous amount of technical work because there's a
Speaker 5: lot different between oil and gas and geothermal. The first
Speaker 5: thing that's probably pretty obvious is we look for much
Speaker 5: higher temperatures, so you know, the Eagle Ferd when I
Speaker 5: was drolling in South Texas is actually considered very hot
Speaker 5: for an oil and gas based and on shore, but
Speaker 5: it's only like three hundred degrees fahrenheit that's considered cold
Speaker 5: for geothermal, and so we needed to figure out how
Speaker 5: to develop the tools and techniques to go much higher
Speaker 5: temperature than that. We're now doing products up to four
Speaker 5: hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit and our drilling, and that
Speaker 5: has taken an enormous amount of tech development to make
Speaker 5: that happen. And it's also turns out that the places
Speaker 5: that are hot geologically overlap very often with granite, which
Speaker 5: is a much.
Speaker 4: Harder rock type than shale.
Speaker 5: So in order to take these technologies from oil and
Speaker 5: gas and make them work in geothermal, we had to
Speaker 5: develop techniques to deal with the fact that the geology
Speaker 5: is different and it's much harder oftentimes a much more
Speaker 5: challenging engineering environment. And so our company has been around
Speaker 5: for seven years now and a lot of that work
Speaker 5: has been trying to figure out what are now solve
Speaker 5: problems in oil and gas, how do you solve them
Speaker 5: in a completely different contact, oftentimes where the rock is
Speaker 5: harder and the temperatures are hotter, and the operation of
Speaker 5: the reservoir's very different.
Speaker 2: What do you have today in operation such that you
Speaker 2: could say these tech problems are provably solved. Because obviously,
Speaker 2: as you think about the future, there are many things.
Speaker 2: You have to get the financing right, you have to
Speaker 2: get the customers lined up, you have to figure out
Speaker 2: how to scale it. But just in terms of like, okay,
Speaker 2: where we are December twenty twenty four, what can you
Speaker 2: show us if we were on a site, Let's say, Okay,
Speaker 2: we've shown that we can solve the tech set.
Speaker 4: So the gold.
Speaker 5: Standard for new tech deployment is actually an operating project, right,
Speaker 5: So since this is a deploy tech focus conference, I'll
Speaker 5: say TRL nine technology right in this level nine the
Speaker 5: final hurdle along that way, which is actually the project
Speaker 5: working in its intended environment and operating conditions. And that's
Speaker 5: something we achieved with enhanced geothermal Systems. Actually just over
Speaker 5: a year ago when we brought our first project online.
Speaker 5: So going back to twenty twenty one, we created a
Speaker 5: partnership with Google as part of their twenty four to
Speaker 5: seven Carbon Free Energy initiative, and we actually selected a
Speaker 5: site in northern Nevada, where there was an existing producing
Speaker 5: geothermal power plant there, but it had been troubled by
Speaker 5: the same challenges that had held back geothermal for decades,
Speaker 5: principally what we call dry whole risk that actually drilled
Speaker 5: a bunch of wells.
Speaker 4: Some of the wells were successful, a lot of the wells.
Speaker 5: Weren't, and so as a result, the power plant wasn't
Speaker 5: producing as much as it could based off its capacity.
Speaker 5: So we actually partnered with the operator there and we
Speaker 5: drilled a set of new wells, including the first two
Speaker 5: horizontal well pair for geothermal, and we actually created that
Speaker 5: project and brought that power online in late twenty twenty three.
Speaker 5: And so we really needed to prove a few things.
Speaker 5: One that we can actually drill and deliver those wells,
Speaker 5: even though it was through granite and much higher temperature. Two,
Speaker 5: that we could get highly productive flow rates out of
Speaker 5: those wells. And the important one and the one that's
Speaker 5: harder to prove because it takes time, is that the
Speaker 5: temperature profile and the production profile those wells would stay
Speaker 5: content over time. So one of the really exciting things
Speaker 5: for Fervo. In October we actually hit the twelve month
Speaker 5: mark where not only did we achieve all the technical
Speaker 5: objectives of the project, but it was actually producing geothermal
Speaker 5: energy connected to the grid, producing electrons for over a
Speaker 5: year and we saw no evidence of production decline in
Speaker 5: that year. So we can say with a lot of
Speaker 5: confidence now this is a completely proven technology, mainly because
Speaker 5: we've actually done it. We have a product that's producing
Speaker 5: electricity for the grid today.
Speaker 3: So what's your funding mix like at the moment, because
Speaker 3: I imagine part of the reason you want a working
Speaker 3: project that you could show everyone is so that you
Speaker 3: can issue more debt, like sort of more traditional energy companies,
Speaker 3: older energy companies, and maybe move away from equity.
Speaker 5: Yes, that's exactly right, and we've had an interesting funding
Speaker 5: journey that's probably very similar to many of the companies
Speaker 5: here at Deploy. You know, early on we were backed
Speaker 5: from many grant contributions from the Department of Energy. We
Speaker 5: partnered on many aspects of new geothermal technology development. We
Speaker 5: actually were part of the ACTIVATE program at the Lawrence
Speaker 5: Berkeley National Lab, so we were back in twenty eight.
Speaker 5: Team got kind of our start through some DEE research
Speaker 5: programs and grant funding, and on the private side, it
Speaker 5: was really venture capital funding. So funds like Breakthrough Energy
Speaker 5: Ventures and Congruent Ventures stepped in and got us up
Speaker 5: early on. You know, those funds that specialized and looking
Speaker 5: at companies that were so early in their development that
Speaker 5: it was really just an idea, a PowerPoint slide, but
Speaker 5: would sit in and understand the technology with you. And
Speaker 5: then as we expanded, what we've brought in is a
Speaker 5: lot more institutional investors. We've actually gotten an investment from
Speaker 5: the oil and gas industry. Now, we raised the Series
Speaker 5: D round in February of this year. That was a
Speaker 5: two hundred and forty four million dollars Series D and
Speaker 5: that was actually led by Devin Energy, one of the
Speaker 5: leading independent oil and gas producers out of Oklahoma City,
Speaker 5: with one hundred million dollar investment. So the investment mix
Speaker 5: has changed over time. But for a lot of new technologies,
Speaker 5: there's this crossing the chasm level where you know, a
Speaker 5: venture capitalist or a Doe grant writer will sit with
Speaker 5: you and understand the ins and outs of your technology
Speaker 5: and they'll see is this feasible or not and you
Speaker 5: can actually have a good conversation around that institutional money
Speaker 5: that wants to do project debt, they don't really want
Speaker 5: understand how your technology works. They just want to see
Speaker 5: that you've done it many, many times before. And that
Speaker 5: kind of gets to the chicken and egg problem that's
Speaker 5: with this funding.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: So often when we approach those larger infrastructure sources of funding,
Speaker 5: the answer is, we'll bring us twelve months of data
Speaker 5: or bring us an independent engineering report that says zero
Speaker 5: percent chance this will ever ever fail. And that's kind
Speaker 5: of a big hurdle to jump. So we finally crossed
Speaker 5: that chasm earlier this year because we brought that project online.
Speaker 5: We announced in July one hundred million dollar construction loan
Speaker 5: from Excalibur Rural Capital. That was the first time we
Speaker 5: brought in project finance, you know, so we're finally moving
Speaker 5: away from the expensive venture capital sources of funding and
Speaker 5: down into the more sustainable, long term infrastructure style of funding.
Speaker 5: But it took us seven years from inception an operating,
Speaker 5: fully successful project and a lot more work to finally
Speaker 5: cross over that funding mixed barrier.
Speaker 2: So obviously we want to talk more about the chicken
Speaker 2: and egg problem because in a way, I mean, that's
Speaker 2: the entire premise of all of this.
Speaker 4: But just before we dive.
Speaker 2: More into that you know, you mentioned shale, and there
Speaker 2: is this story that people tell and I only maybe
Speaker 2: like fifty percent believe it or sixty percent believe it
Speaker 2: that the shale boom was like partly a tech story
Speaker 2: and partly a low interest rate story, or that a
Speaker 2: funding story. And there are various theories about how the
Speaker 2: FED helped cause the shale boom. Again, not totally sure
Speaker 2: if I buy it. That being said, for any sort
Speaker 2: of renewable or clean energy project or anything that has
Speaker 2: a lot of upfront capital costs, the rate conditions in
Speaker 2: the beginning matter quite a bit to the math. And
Speaker 2: I imagine here in twenty twenty four versus when you're
Speaker 2: seven years ago, that picture looks very different. Talk to
Speaker 2: us about the sort of I guess mathematical implications of
Speaker 2: where we are with interest rates in terms of making
Speaker 2: geothermal projects pencil up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 5: The fact that we've gone through such a big movement
Speaker 5: and interest rates over the last five years has been
Speaker 5: we've kind of gone through multiple business cycles in this
Speaker 5: sector in a very compressed period of time. You know,
Speaker 5: as interest rates started to rise a couple of years ago,
Speaker 5: there were two sectors or areas that sort of bubble
Speaker 5: to the surfaces.
Speaker 4: Being challenged by a high interest rate environment.
Speaker 5: That was number one startups that were based on very
Speaker 5: long term growth and number two, capital intensive businesses where
Speaker 5: it's a lot of capital upfront with a long payback period.
Speaker 5: That was a double whammy because we were running a
Speaker 5: capital intensive startup and so the interest rate environment was
Speaker 5: very challenging to try to get new capital to come
Speaker 5: into the space as those interest rates went up. And
Speaker 5: you know, one of the things about renewable energy, and
Speaker 5: this is true about solar and win but also true
Speaker 5: about geothermal, is these are oftentimes high capex but long
Speaker 5: payback period projects. And there are also projects that are
Speaker 5: interesting because you end up with a different profile than
Speaker 5: a lot of other energy infrastructure projects. Because you know,
Speaker 5: all of our projects we build, we have fifteen year
Speaker 5: off take agreements with locked in pricing, so we don't
Speaker 5: have to worry five years from now, what you know,
Speaker 5: it's the price of our product going to go up
Speaker 5: or down. We also don't have any fuel cost and
Speaker 5: so we're not exposed if there's a big run up
Speaker 5: in fuel costs, and so we eliminate a lot of
Speaker 5: that volatility so as a result, renewable energy projects like
Speaker 5: geothermal have always been viewed as historically much safer investments
Speaker 5: because you're not exposed to a lot of the volatility
Speaker 5: mix that impact other infrastructure investments. That's a good thing
Speaker 5: in general because it means you can bring low cost
Speaker 5: capital in the space because it's perceived as safer investments,
Speaker 5: but it also means you're spread off. The risk free
Speaker 5: rate is a lot tighter than if you were talking
Speaker 5: about a fossil fuel project or a project with more
Speaker 5: risk in it, and so when those rates move, the
Speaker 5: sort of relative impact for something with a low spread
Speaker 5: is a lot bigger. And so the interest rate environment,
Speaker 5: it hits startups and it hits infrastructure projects, particularly renewable
Speaker 5: infrastructure projects, in a big way. And that's one of
Speaker 5: the things that companies are navigating now. There's so many
Speaker 5: tailwinds looking for more and more power. We need more
Speaker 5: reliable power. We need more power period, everything from data
Speaker 5: centers to industrialization, to ensuring and manufacturing to I mean,
Speaker 5: the AI world is with driving so many of our
Speaker 5: conversations right now. So there's all these tailwinds helping the
Speaker 5: sector out, but the headwind that interest rate environment is
Speaker 5: still something that's limiting both deployments of new innovation and
Speaker 5: also broadly the renewable sector overall.
Speaker 3: I mean, presumably this is when someone like the DOE
Speaker 3: could step in and potentially help. What kind of support
Speaker 3: have you seen from the DOE so far?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we've gotten great support from the DOE.
Speaker 5: As I mentioned, we've gotten multiple grants over the years
Speaker 5: to work on anything from high temperature tools to novel
Speaker 5: data sensing methods. Earlier this year, you know, there was
Speaker 5: a provision in the bipartisan Infrastructure Law where there was
Speaker 5: eighty four million dollars earmarked for geothermal energy development. FERVO
Speaker 5: is actually the recipient of the largest grant of that,
Speaker 5: which was a twenty five million dollar grant, And so
Speaker 5: that kind of early demonstration funding can be very critical
Speaker 5: for a technology that's just taking off. I don't want
Speaker 5: to make any enemies, and there's a lot of different
Speaker 5: technologies out in the audience here. But if you read
Speaker 5: the Department of Energies Commercial lift off report for geothermal,
Speaker 5: they've got a nice chart in there where it almost
Speaker 5: looks like a data error because they put the eighty
Speaker 5: four million dollars that geothermal got up against the ten
Speaker 5: billion dollars for nuclear, and the nine billion dollars for
Speaker 5: carbon capture, and the several billions for longeration energy storage
Speaker 5: and other things. So I think other technologies benefited far
Speaker 5: more than geothermal did. But even that kind of move
Speaker 5: was sort of catalytic to get things off the ground.
Speaker 5: And then, of course the DOE has a big message
Speaker 5: and a big audience that reads these things. So actually,
Speaker 5: this lift Off report that came out earlier this year
Speaker 5: changed a lot of people's minds because one of the
Speaker 5: problems with the chicken and egg problem is there's so
Speaker 5: many investor meetings that we don't even get to have
Speaker 5: because we reach out and they say geothermal. I know, geothermal,
Speaker 5: we're not looking at that, and the media never even happens.
Speaker 5: And you have something like the geothermal lift Off Report
Speaker 5: come out that's got the DOE logo on it. They
Speaker 5: know it's been well vetted, well researched work, and all
Speaker 5: of a sudden, it may be there's some investors who
Speaker 5: may have written off geothermal. Let's say, well, maybe there's
Speaker 5: a new shot here, there's new data that we weren't
Speaker 5: aware of, And so that kind of awareness in technology,
Speaker 5: validation is pretty critical as well.
Speaker 2: So one of the obviously nice things about your technology
Speaker 2: is that it's cleaned, it's carbon free. There are some
Speaker 2: people that don't care about that, particularly March. They don't
Speaker 2: rank that particularly highly. You know, for some people the
Speaker 2: biggest priority is cheap energy. When you think about the future,
Speaker 2: how important is it that either the public sector or
Speaker 2: private sector actors who've made various commitments over the years
Speaker 2: about net zero other sounding things, how important is it
Speaker 2: that those priorities stay firm or if they're sort of
Speaker 2: changing moods where in the private sector this is not
Speaker 2: as important to us as it was a few years ago.
Speaker 4: How does that affect your outlook?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a good question, And honestly, my view on
Speaker 5: this is I don't think people actually there's not really
Speaker 5: that much of a divide. I think in what people
Speaker 5: actually want out of their energy resources. I think it
Speaker 5: can get politicized and there's a lot of food fights
Speaker 5: and political fights in this, but people want three things
Speaker 5: out of their energy resources. They want the energy to
Speaker 5: be cleaner, they want the energy to be more and
Speaker 5: then want the energy to be more reliable.
Speaker 4: And does everyone really want it to be cleaner.
Speaker 2: I'm just serious because like I get totally cheaper and
Speaker 2: reliable seem unambiguous when it comes to cleaner. I could imagine,
Speaker 2: like I could see if.
Speaker 4: I were anyone.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it is less important.
Speaker 5: I do think everybody wants it to be cleaner, and
Speaker 5: that's true if you talk to people on both sides
Speaker 5: of the aisle. I don't think it matters where it is.
Speaker 5: I think where a lot of the debates come up
Speaker 5: is where is the trade off between clean and affordable
Speaker 5: and reliable. But I think you'd be hard pressed to
Speaker 5: find anyone other than maybe some very French people who
Speaker 5: are just trying to institution.
Speaker 3: Show you stand alone on that one.
Speaker 4: I don't have an opinion here, no opinion. You're the
Speaker 4: one out there that doesn't want cleaner energy. I'm a journalist,
Speaker 4: all right, journalist. I like it. But I think that
Speaker 4: what happens is that be on where people are.
Speaker 5: Coming from, you know which side of the aisle they're on,
Speaker 5: what their priorities are. They may rank those three things differently,
Speaker 5: and then there's a lot in the macro environment where
Speaker 5: those things get ranked differently, like very clearly affordability is
Speaker 5: top of mind for everyone right right now, and so
Speaker 5: what you see is over time, depending on what's going
Speaker 5: on in the geopolitical environment, the macro environment, the political environment,
Speaker 5: those orders may get flipped. But I think what most
Speaker 5: people here are working on is something that is cleaner,
Speaker 5: is reliable, and is more affordable. And the thing is
Speaker 5: it's not going to get there overnight, but everybody's working
Speaker 5: on technologies that are on a path to tiev one
Speaker 5: of those three things on a better dimension. And I
Speaker 5: think one of the things about geothermal is we emphasize
Speaker 5: it checks all three boxes. It's cleaner, it's reliable, and
Speaker 5: we're on a cost trajectory where this is going to
Speaker 5: become one of the most affordable ways to get energy
Speaker 5: in the near future. It doesn't matter if you're talking
Speaker 5: clean or dirty, or intermittent or baseload or whatever jargon
Speaker 5: you want to put on it.
Speaker 4: Geothermal.
Speaker 5: The cost trajectory is moving so quickly that we're going
Speaker 5: to get a great answer on the affordability very very soon.
Speaker 5: And so I think emphasizing that we do those three things,
Speaker 5: and it doesn't matter what is going on in the
Speaker 5: macro environment, those three things are still the things that
Speaker 5: matter is kind of how we stay resilient through the
Speaker 5: different cycles.
Speaker 3: So you make a very and pitch, and I guess
Speaker 3: I'm kind of wondering when you go to talk to
Speaker 3: potential off take customers and you say, well, we have cheap,
Speaker 3: clean and reliable energy that ticks all the bosses boxes.
Speaker 3: Excuse me? Do they immediately jump and go like, yes,
Speaker 3: we'll take it. I imagine that can't be the case, right,
Speaker 3: because this is still new technology. They probably presumably you
Speaker 3: don't have geologists on staff who can review all this stuff.
Speaker 3: What are those conversations actually like and what are I
Speaker 3: guess the sticking points to everyone becoming your customer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I mentioned this a little bit before,
Speaker 5: where it's a chicken and egg problem. This is a
Speaker 5: lot in a lot of ways entrepreneurship, particularly if you're
Speaker 5: doing a real hard tech development like what we're doing
Speaker 5: at Fervo is trying to solve dozens of simultaneous chicken
Speaker 5: and egg problems all at once, you know, because you've
Speaker 5: got to get the financers to believe in it, you
Speaker 5: got to get the customers to believe in it. And
Speaker 5: it's fascinating and I can talk through our journey. You know,
Speaker 5: our first off take agreement was with Google, and that
Speaker 5: went back all the way into twenty twenty one that
Speaker 5: we announced that deal. And it wasn't an accident that
Speaker 5: it was Google that did that. You know, they'd put
Speaker 5: out a white paper in twenty eighteen, and nobody was
Speaker 5: paying attention to geothermal back then.
Speaker 4: It was written off as a dead sector. But they
Speaker 4: put out a white.
Speaker 5: Paper in twenty eighteen that said they had actually achieved
Speaker 5: their one hundred percent renewable energy goal, and so they
Speaker 5: were looking at what is the next target we want
Speaker 5: to get to, and they came up with a new
Speaker 5: concept of twenty four to seven carbon free energy, which
Speaker 5: is actually hourly matching the concept of one hundred percent
Speaker 5: renewable energy. It's more of an accounting exercise where you
Speaker 5: add up how much energy use for the year, you
Speaker 5: add up how much energy you source for the year,
Speaker 5: and if those numbers are equal at the end of
Speaker 5: the year, you can consider it one hundred percent renewable energy.
Speaker 5: A much more stricter standard is twenty four to seven
Speaker 5: carbon free energy, and that's looking at, okay, where I'm
Speaker 5: actually building these facilities and when they're actually using energy,
Speaker 5: am I sourcing that electricity from clean areas? And what
Speaker 5: they were making the point on is that wind and
Speaker 5: solar had been phenomenal technologies to move the future of
Speaker 5: low carbon forward, but that we were going to need
Speaker 5: a new toolkit from storage to nuclear, to hydrogen to
Speaker 5: geothermal to get there, and I can. I'll tell you
Speaker 5: that the biggest point of market validation we had when
Speaker 5: we were raising our Series A was in this twenty
Speaker 5: page paper that Google wrote. They mentioned geothermal one time,
Speaker 5: and we're like, see what we're on the map? People
Speaker 5: are talking about it, And actually that caused us to
Speaker 5: reach out to them and we started this relationship that
Speaker 5: turned into our first development agreement with Google as an
Speaker 5: off taker, and they've now become a large customer of
Speaker 5: ours and we've announced several more deals there. But it
Speaker 5: was interesting it took a company like Google to get
Speaker 5: there because you know, in a lot of ways, the
Speaker 5: same way that financiers want to see a track record,
Speaker 5: utilities want to too. And I don't fault the utilities
Speaker 5: for this. They have an incredibly important job where they're
Speaker 5: the ones that are responsible for keeping the lights on,
Speaker 5: and so they need to make sure that if they're
Speaker 5: going to invest the time to prepare the grid and
Speaker 5: go through all the work to get an energy resource
Speaker 5: to come online, that it needs to get there. And
Speaker 5: so most utilities won't even look at something until it
Speaker 5: has a multi year development track record, and the utilities
Speaker 5: are the big power buyers. And so this is why
Speaker 5: it's a chicken and egg problem. How do you get
Speaker 5: a new tech to market when your customers require a
Speaker 5: multi year track record to develop it? But how do
Speaker 5: you get a multi year track record until you develop it?
Speaker 5: And so it was a very difficult thing to overcome
Speaker 5: in the beginning. And you're right, not everybody has geologists
Speaker 5: sitting around, but a company like Google that has access
Speaker 5: to the resources and the technical expertise that they had,
Speaker 5: was able to work with us over a multi year
Speaker 5: period to learn how our technology work, get excited about it,
Speaker 5: and that's what kind of unlocked that first operation for us.
Speaker 5: You know, now we've actually announced multiple utility deals because
Speaker 5: we've sort of crossed that chasm, But it was incredibly
Speaker 5: difficult to get there in the beginning.
Speaker 2: Part of the premise of the loan Program's office, I'd
Speaker 2: take it is that there's proven technologies that exist in
Speaker 2: the world, but a lot of traditional sources of debt
Speaker 2: financing do not have the expertise to evaluate them or
Speaker 2: evaluate the risks. What happens today or maybe two years
Speaker 2: ago or something, because now you know, you're known, you've
Speaker 2: been around for a while. You walk into a normal bank,
Speaker 2: you walk into a Wall Street bank, and you try
Speaker 2: to explain the case for a project financing for geothermal.
Speaker 2: Does that expertise exist or is it we just don't
Speaker 2: know about this. What happens if you try to walk
Speaker 2: in the door, pick up a phone call to them.
Speaker 5: You know, now it's changed because the perception of geothermal
Speaker 5: has changed. But I can tell you, you know, anecdotes from
Speaker 5: my years of this. As we as we move forward,
Speaker 5: I would one of three things would happen actually as
Speaker 5: we went and approached investors to talk to them about geothermal.
Speaker 4: One is they would ignore us. I actually literally had
Speaker 4: one time.
Speaker 5: I was an investor conference and I walked up to
Speaker 5: somebody who was actually a corporate venture capitalist for a
Speaker 5: large oil company, told him I was doing geothermal, had
Speaker 5: a startup doing that, and he literally puts his hand
Speaker 5: up and says, let me stop you right there. We've
Speaker 5: looked at geothermal not going to work. Let's say both
Speaker 5: of our time. I'll see you later.
Speaker 3: Wait, how many people think when you say geothermal it's
Speaker 3: like putting the.
Speaker 4: Heat of.
Speaker 5: I'm actually glad that you asked this. Yeah, be very clear,
Speaker 5: this is different deep geothermal. I should say this first off,
Speaker 5: I'm a big fan geothermal heat pumps or groundsource heat pumps.
Speaker 5: Really cool technology, but has nothing to do with what
Speaker 5: we do. So those are, you know, good for home heating, cooling,
Speaker 5: or larger buildings, shallower wells where you're using the ground
Speaker 5: as a heat exchange. To be clear, we drill wells
Speaker 5: that are thousands of feet deep and they won't exactly,
Speaker 5: they're not going to go in your basement. And then
Speaker 5: we reach rock that's four hundred degrees fahrenheit, and then
Speaker 5: we produce energy from that. What we're doing is actually
Speaker 5: recirculating that geothermal brine through the reservoir and then capturing
Speaker 5: the heat at the surface through an organic ranking cycle
Speaker 5: system to produce electricity by spinning a turbine. And so
Speaker 5: we're not going to go in your basement because for
Speaker 5: an example, the project we're building in Utah right now
Speaker 5: is a four hundred megawap project, and this is enough
Speaker 5: power to power a city sized energy demand, So it
Speaker 5: wouldn't go well in your basement. But I'm glad you
Speaker 5: asked that because actually I can tell that the tightest
Speaker 5: turning because up until maybe a year ago, the most
Speaker 5: common website request we got was hey, can you do this.
Speaker 4: In my backyard?
Speaker 5: Because people don't think of geothermal power. It's a quirk
Speaker 5: of history that they're named the same way.
Speaker 3: One other thing we definitely wanted to talk to you
Speaker 3: about is permitting reform. So you know, when Donald Trump
Speaker 3: says he's going to make everything easier in terms of regulation,
Speaker 3: or when Elon Musk says that nowadays, what do they
Speaker 3: mean exactly? What does that mean from your perspective making
Speaker 3: things easier?
Speaker 5: Yeah, permitting is definitely the long pole in the tent,
Speaker 5: not just for geothermal, but transmission, which is really important
Speaker 5: to hardening the grid and bringing new resources online and
Speaker 5: a whole host of other things.
Speaker 4: I'm not as much of an expert.
Speaker 5: In those things as I am in geothermal, so I
Speaker 5: can speak to some of the challenges we have in geothermal.
Speaker 5: One thing is through you know, a quirk of history,
Speaker 5: the best geology for geothermal is located in the Western
Speaker 5: United States. The Western United States is predominantly owned by
Speaker 5: the US federal government. It's not private landowners, it's actually
Speaker 5: the US government that owns most of the land, and
Speaker 5: so that puts US by default into a federal permitting
Speaker 5: regime on pretty much every project that we do in
Speaker 5: a way that is true of necessarily other energy resources,
Speaker 5: and so we've had to go through you know, multi
Speaker 5: year NEPA approval processes for everything we've developed. We also
Speaker 5: simultaneously have to go through the transmission or an interconnection
Speaker 5: process for that. And there's a whole host of other
Speaker 5: things that are there as well. I'll be very clear,
Speaker 5: I think these are good things. We need to be
Speaker 5: doing projects with the right environmental standards. But whenever you
Speaker 5: look at how these things have been implemented over time,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of things that are redundant, or a
Speaker 5: lot of times there's just offices that are not staffed well.
Speaker 5: So you submit permits and you just never hear back.
Speaker 5: So typical time for permitting the geothermal project in the
Speaker 5: Western United States is about six to eight years to
Speaker 5: permit to be able to start the project. And so
Speaker 5: that's not really commensurate with the data center companies that
Speaker 5: are banging down our door asking if we can bring
Speaker 5: in power by next year. I say, well, once we
Speaker 5: get through the eight year permitting process, we can get there.
Speaker 5: So there's things that we're trying to do to improve that.
Speaker 5: One of the funny things about geothermal is even though
Speaker 5: we're drilling wells, just like the oil and gas industry,
Speaker 5: is we haven't always benefited from the same permitting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they have some exclusions, that's right.
Speaker 5: So in one example, you know, there's certain early activities
Speaker 5: in the expiration phase or just doing extensions to existing
Speaker 5: projects that don't really have a huge impact, don't really
Speaker 5: change the scope of the project itself. And so if
Speaker 5: you were an oil and gas company, there's legislatively developed
Speaker 5: categorical exclusions where there's a whole category of things that
Speaker 5: if you're drilling in oil well, you don't have to
Speaker 5: go through the full process for the environmental reviews for
Speaker 5: certain kind of redundant routine things. The law that was
Speaker 5: passed in two thousand and five that granted that didn't
Speaker 5: just say drilling, it's a specifically oil and gas drilline.
Speaker 5: So that's been interpreted to say geothermal is not included
Speaker 5: in that. So there's actually a lot of examples of
Speaker 5: places where the permitting structure, even though geothermal is a
Speaker 5: lower impact resource, it's a no emission resource, it actually
Speaker 5: has a much more extensive permitting program than a lot of.
Speaker 2: Oil and gas doing on federal permitting reform build that's
Speaker 2: currently being talked about. Would that change it to what
Speaker 2: would be ideal for you? Well, would under let's say
Speaker 2: this bill passes at some point, what does the timeline
Speaker 2: then look for?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it would make a big difference. You know, there's
Speaker 5: many bills that have passed. Actually, this is one of
Speaker 5: our big success cases in geothermal. I used to joke
Speaker 5: that we were bipartisan in the sense that both parties
Speaker 5: ignore geothermal. Now I can say we're bipartisan because I
Speaker 5: think both parties recognize.
Speaker 4: The huge opportunity there is for geothermal.
Speaker 5: So there's actually been five bills passed in the House
Speaker 5: this year for geothermal permitting reform, and the current Mansion
Speaker 5: Barrosso bill that's in discussion in the Senate has a
Speaker 5: bunch of provisions in there around geothermal. And this is
Speaker 5: truly bipartisan there's groups on both sides of the aisle
Speaker 5: that have sponsored these bills and it's gotten great votes,
Speaker 5: and so it depends on which bill we're talking about. Generally,
Speaker 5: it does provide parity on these things, and it does
Speaker 5: actually remove a lot of the redundant permitting. And there's
Speaker 5: been good studies out there by ENRAAL the National Renewal
Speaker 5: Energy Laboratory that says these reforms can probably take the
Speaker 5: permitting process from six to eight years down to two
Speaker 5: to four years. And so it's not again, it's not
Speaker 5: like we're doing these projects with no environmental review. But
Speaker 5: I can tell you when I go out in the
Speaker 5: market and try to raise capital to do a new project,
Speaker 5: I say, hey, give me the money today, we'll start
Speaker 5: drilling in twenty thirty one. That's a little bit less
Speaker 5: of a compelling pitch. Then give me an you're.
Speaker 2: Paying you know so for plus whatever for all those
Speaker 2: years exactly.
Speaker 5: So this is these changes because it's not just when
Speaker 5: the projects come online, but it's the investment horizon that
Speaker 5: you have to burden these projects with. Moving it from
Speaker 5: seven years to three years can make the difference between
Speaker 5: a project being investable or not being investable.
Speaker 4: So it's a massive difference.
Speaker 3: This might be an unfair question, but if you were
Speaker 3: going to sort of like choose the biggest impediment to
Speaker 3: scaling up geothermal at the moment, I mean there's financing,
Speaker 3: which we talked about, there's getting customers on board. Presumably
Speaker 3: there's some aspect of the technology that could be improved
Speaker 3: as well. Give us that hierarchy, like what's number one
Speaker 3: in terms of impediments.
Speaker 5: Oh, it's a good question because I feel like over
Speaker 5: the seven years since we started Fervo, the answer has
Speaker 5: been different every year, which I think is the right thing.
Speaker 5: There should be an impediment, you should be knocking it
Speaker 5: down and getting out of the next one.
Speaker 4: So the early days where there's.
Speaker 5: Fundamental question if this would even work, and that took
Speaker 5: us several years to address, and thankfully the answer is yes.
Speaker 5: If you would have asked me a few months ago,
Speaker 5: I would have said funding was the big barrier, because
Speaker 5: you still ran into that situation where people thought they
Speaker 5: knew geothermal and thought it was yesterday's news and so
Speaker 5: didn't even want to look at it.
Speaker 4: But that's shifted dramatically.
Speaker 5: We see a lot of interest from capital providers and
Speaker 5: did geothermal now and then we've actually had a lot
Speaker 5: of success on improving the permitting even before these bills
Speaker 5: passed through. So if you would have asked me a
Speaker 5: few months ago, I would have said transformers in high
Speaker 5: voltage electrical equipment.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it always comes back to transformers.
Speaker 5: It does always come back to transformers. I would have
Speaker 5: said permitting, and I would have said funding. Funding is
Speaker 5: becoming a much.
Speaker 4: More solved issue.
Speaker 5: Permitting is something that I think we've made a lot
Speaker 5: of administrative progress on and we're anticipating legislative progress on.
Speaker 5: So now I think about supply chain, you know, because
Speaker 5: I think we've got the money, we've got the off
Speaker 5: take agreements, we've got everything there. You are thinking about
Speaker 5: how do we get the supply chain in place for this?
Speaker 5: Transformers being a big part of that, but there's also
Speaker 5: other pieces of equipment that are important as well.
Speaker 3: Joe, it's so crazy that we basically had four years
Speaker 3: of transformers.
Speaker 2: Right as of the most recent ISM manufacturing report, electrical
Speaker 2: components have been in shortage for fifty straight months, so
Speaker 2: four years and two months. I actually would love to
Speaker 2: talk more about that, just on private sector financing, specifically,
Speaker 2: what is the ecosystem that's emerged that wasn't in place.
Speaker 2: If you said, okay, a year ago or two years ago,
Speaker 2: that would have been the big thing. What does it
Speaker 2: look like today on the private sector side, such that
Speaker 2: you can raise capital for these projects?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean there's been big changes in the
Speaker 4: last year or two.
Speaker 5: I think some of that is changing investors sentiment around
Speaker 5: you etermal, but some of it is that the ecosystem
Speaker 5: is changing. You know, if you think back a.
Speaker 2: Lot of times, banks is it private, is private cats.
Speaker 5: Banks, it's private capital, It's it's really all of the above.
Speaker 5: You know, if you think back fifteen years ago into
Speaker 5: the what they call the clean tech one point out bust.
Speaker 5: I think that one of the failure modes. There was
Speaker 5: a bunch of venture capital went into technologies that took
Speaker 5: a long time to develop, and there wasn't really a
Speaker 5: past the baton of who was the next source of
Speaker 5: capital that was going to keep these technologies going, And
Speaker 5: that's what really led to the bust. But that the
Speaker 5: bust also, I think created a bunch of people who
Speaker 5: learned hard lessons about what that was like, and a
Speaker 5: lot of them have gone out and created the.
Speaker 4: Ecosystem that's there.
Speaker 5: So you know, for example, that Activate program that was
Speaker 5: at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that let us have
Speaker 5: two years to get our feet under us before we
Speaker 5: really got going as a company didn't exist in the
Speaker 5: first one, so that was really important. What we've seen
Speaker 5: is we get bigger and bigger. You know, people have
Speaker 5: talked about the missing middle or the value of death,
Speaker 5: and that's one of the things that the LPO is
Speaker 5: very instrumental in filling. But you know, market in efficiencies,
Speaker 5: if there's money to be made, don't last for long.
Speaker 5: And so what we're seeing right now is there's a
Speaker 5: bunch of venture capitalists who historically would have only played
Speaker 5: in the series ABC range who've recognized that there's a
Speaker 5: capital gap for second of a kind, third of a
Speaker 5: kind deployment, and a lot of them have raised continuity
Speaker 5: or growth funds to piggyback off their successful companies. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: those like traditional companies that infrastructure investors that only wanted
Speaker 5: to do the tenth project realized that if they actually
Speaker 5: wanted to sell their LPs on getting a differentiated return,
Speaker 5: they needed to do something that was differentiating and step
Speaker 5: into products earlier. So a lot of them have raised
Speaker 5: funds that will come in one click earlier, and so
Speaker 5: that value of death is closing from both sides, because
Speaker 5: you're seeing traditional private equity and growth equity and infrastructure
Speaker 5: investors create new vehicles to come in one click earlier,
Speaker 5: and you're seeing the venture capitalists create continuity investments and
Speaker 5: growth estimates to carry you one click forward. And so
Speaker 5: there used to not really be capital between like the
Speaker 5: Series B and the infrastructure side, and now there's still
Speaker 5: a gap, but it's getting converged on from both sides.
Speaker 3: I want to talk more about transformers. Actually, yeah, where
Speaker 3: are you getting those from? Because I imagine as a
Speaker 3: relatively new company with at least heretofore limited funding, it
Speaker 3: might be hard to get on the wait list for
Speaker 3: this very desirable equipment. And I get the sense that
Speaker 3: big utility providers are probably you know, number one in
Speaker 3: the line, or they already have a lot of existing
Speaker 3: transformers that they can kind of move around. How are
Speaker 3: you actually sourcing those?
Speaker 4: It's a good question, and you're right.
Speaker 5: It's highly competitive to get to and the lead times
Speaker 5: can be multi year, especially for the larger transformers. You know,
Speaker 5: I was in an investment meeting a couple months ago
Speaker 5: where somebody walked in, very experienced investor and said, first
Speaker 5: question out of their gate, have you sourced your GSU
Speaker 5: transformers yet? We said, yes, we have, and he says
Speaker 5: four out of five times the answer that's no, And
Speaker 5: I don't have to take the rest.
Speaker 4: Of the meeting investor to ask that.
Speaker 5: It is a good discipline investor. They knew the right
Speaker 5: question to ask. And it's also an irony too, because
Speaker 5: data centers are growing, everybody's trying to figure out the
Speaker 5: equipment for that, and then everybody's trying to get the
Speaker 5: grid going. Everybody's trying to get the generation going. Oftentimes,
Speaker 5: what we hear from the transformer suppliers is the slots
Speaker 5: are taken by the data center companies that we're trying
Speaker 5: to sell the power to. So it's a bit of
Speaker 5: a circular problem there, which is interesting. We didn't have
Speaker 5: a really creative solution other than ordering early. So we
Speaker 5: found a couple of US space manufacturers. We're sourcing a
Speaker 5: couple of our transformers from Taiwan as well, And there's
Speaker 5: not really a creative answer other than get in line
Speaker 5: three or four years in advance.
Speaker 2: Is any more manufacturing capacity being built anywhere.
Speaker 5: It's being talked about, and this is one that I
Speaker 5: think is something that I just sort of expected people
Speaker 5: to look at three, four or five year lead times
Speaker 5: and say there's money to be made here, We're going
Speaker 5: to expand. But I think the transformer companies have gone
Speaker 5: through a lot of boom and busts before, so they're
Speaker 5: quite reticent there.
Speaker 4: This isn't quite my area of expertise.
Speaker 5: I don't know how many new facilities are being built,
Speaker 5: but what we're hearing from our suppliers is they're doing
Speaker 5: the low hanging fruit of adding new lines, adding extra shifts,
Speaker 5: adding extra hours. So you're starting to see the supply
Speaker 5: come up a little bit. But is it going to
Speaker 5: be enough to meet the unprecedented demand coming from all
Speaker 5: different sources that need this clinical electrical equipment.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I still think that's going to be
Speaker 4: one of the long poles in the tent for a while.
Speaker 3: If Joe and I started making transformers because it's so easy,
Speaker 3: could we exchange transformers for equity in up and coming
Speaker 3: power companies and solve the chicken and egg problem?
Speaker 5: I think you would. I think you would when you're
Speaker 5: running a startup. A lot of times you're trying to
Speaker 5: solve the problem of the day, and you also don't
Speaker 5: have the balance sheets put down long term orders. Not
Speaker 5: a lot of startups out there that are ordering things
Speaker 5: four years in advance, so definitely a missing part of
Speaker 5: the market.
Speaker 2: This is a really good idea. Yeah, what about the
Speaker 2: labor component? How much skills transfer is there? We talked
Speaker 2: about the tech transfer from hill to geothermal.
Speaker 4: Is there a labor transfer as well? Yes? Yeah.
Speaker 5: And in fact, just as an example, the drilling rig
Speaker 5: that we're using for our site right now is a
Speaker 5: Helmber campaign H ANDP Flex three rig.
Speaker 4: I'm actually wearing H ANDP Si cool suck.
Speaker 5: That's right, socks, So this is actually what the rig
Speaker 5: looks like.
Speaker 4: So you can see.
Speaker 5: No, but if you call them, I'm sure they'll give
Speaker 5: them to you. So yeah, And it's actually the same
Speaker 5: exact style of drilling rigs, the most technologically sophisticated drilling
Speaker 5: rig that you can get for on shore drilling. And
Speaker 5: it's the same exact style of drilling rig that I
Speaker 5: used when I started my career over a decade ago
Speaker 5: in South Texas. And I was insistent on that because
Speaker 5: I wanted to use the best technology and the crews there.
Speaker 5: They were just before we picked up that rig a
Speaker 5: year and a half ago, they were drilling in the
Speaker 5: back end in North Dakota, and so people really were
Speaker 5: drilling oil wells one day and they were geothermal wells
Speaker 5: the next. And there's differences there, But the skills in
Speaker 5: the workforce is there, and this is one of the
Speaker 5: things that I think makes geothermal quite scalable. Today there's
Speaker 5: roughly six hundred drilliing rigs operating in North America. We're
Speaker 5: growing at a huge rate. You know, we're going to
Speaker 5: bring on one hundred megawat projects and just eighteen months
Speaker 5: from now, we're doing that with just one drilling rig.
Speaker 5: And so you know, we can ten x our growth
Speaker 5: and still only be a single digital percentage of the
Speaker 5: oil field services market because we have such overlap with them.
Speaker 5: So among the many things that I think has advantaged
Speaker 5: geothermal among the different options you have for emerging technologies,
Speaker 5: is the fact that there's such a ready supply chain
Speaker 5: and workforce of skilled people who know.
Speaker 4: How to execute on these projects.
Speaker 5: And we can tenx our growth rate or one hundred
Speaker 5: x our growth rate and not run into workforce issues
Speaker 5: because there's already such a deep bench of technical talent
Speaker 5: and technician talent that control these wells.
Speaker 3: So if they remade Armageddon, Bruce Willis would be a
Speaker 3: geothermal driweller instead of an oil rig driller.
Speaker 2: That's right, excellent, Tim Latimer. That was fantastic, Thank you
Speaker 2: so much, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: So that was our conversation with Tim Latimer, the CEO
Speaker 3: of Fervo Energy, recorded live at the does Deploy twenty
Speaker 3: four event. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at
Speaker 3: Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Follow our guest Tim Latimer, He's at Tim m Latimer.
Speaker 2: Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash Ol
Speaker 2: Bennett at Dashbot and cal Brooks at cal Brooks. Thank
Speaker 2: you to our producer Moses Adam from our odd Lads content.
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