Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the first years of this century, there was
Speaker 1: a wave of technological innovation in the way people get
Speaker 1: oil and gas out of the ground. It was popularly
Speaker 1: referred to as fracking, but in fact fracking had been
Speaker 1: around for a long time. What was going on was
Speaker 1: a combination of techniques that people in the industry called
Speaker 1: the shale revolution. This boom brought down the price of
Speaker 1: natural gas, and it turned the United States into the
Speaker 1: world's biggest producer of oil and gas. It also arguably
Speaker 1: extended human being's ability to live in a fossil fuel
Speaker 1: powered world, slowed the transition to carbon free energy, and
Speaker 1: so made climate change worse. But what if you could
Speaker 1: take the technological innovations of the shale revolution and use
Speaker 1: them to generate a different kind of energy, energy that's
Speaker 1: carbon free energy, that helps get the world off of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem,
Speaker 1: the show where I talk to people who are trying
Speaker 1: to make technological progress. My guest today is Tim Latimer.
Speaker 1: He's the co founder and CEO of Fervo Energy. Tim's
Speaker 1: problem is this, how do you use innovations from the
Speaker 1: oil and gas industry to generate carbon free energy. Tim
Speaker 1: told me he started his career deep in the heart
Speaker 1: of the shale revolution.
Speaker 2: I grew up in Texas and then I went to
Speaker 2: college at the University of Tulsa, both places where you know,
Speaker 2: sort of the oil and gas industries in the blood
Speaker 2: of the people here. And I happened to graduate at
Speaker 2: the very advent of the US oil and gas shale boom.
Speaker 2: And I think probably almost everybody I knew went into
Speaker 2: the oil and gas industry out of my college class
Speaker 2: as kind of a consequence of it being a boom
Speaker 2: time in Oklahoma. And so I took a job back
Speaker 2: in what was my original hometown of Houston, started my
Speaker 2: career as a drilling engineer, and in that role, I
Speaker 2: mostly worked out on the rigs themselves as a site supervisor.
Speaker 2: So I've spent the majority of my time with the
Speaker 2: oil field, either in South Texas or West Texas, supervising
Speaker 2: field crews.
Speaker 1: So what was the turn? Why aren't you still doing that?
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting even when I joined the industry,
Speaker 2: already had some questions about, you know, what is the
Speaker 2: future in this industry in a world where we all
Speaker 2: know that climate change is a much more serious energet
Speaker 2: problem than we had previously understood. And so what I
Speaker 2: found is that the more time I spent in the industry,
Speaker 2: the more passionate I was about climate change, and the
Speaker 2: less I was seeing the industry adapt around me the
Speaker 2: way I thought was necessary to face the urgent crisis
Speaker 2: of climate.
Speaker 1: So what's the move? What do you do? Well?
Speaker 2: I was looking at clean energy, and I thought what
Speaker 2: can I do? And so when I looked at solar
Speaker 2: or wind or automotive, I thought, you know, in electric vehicles.
Speaker 2: I thought, these are all important things, but what do
Speaker 2: I have to add there? And so I was always
Speaker 2: kind of looking for my move. And then actually an
Speaker 2: early project I worked on when I was a drilling
Speaker 2: engineer in South Texas. The wells we were drilling are
Speaker 2: actually a little bit higher temperature than normal oil and
Speaker 2: gas wells, and so one of my first jobs was, hey,
Speaker 2: research how we can make high temperature drilling work. And
Speaker 2: all of the literature I found on researching high temperature
Speaker 2: drilling came from this field called geothermal, and this was
Speaker 2: about a decade ago, and to be honest, I'd never
Speaker 2: heard of geothermal before at that point in time, and
Speaker 2: I read more about it, and it was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: you drill wells, but you just produce steam and you
Speaker 2: make carbon free electricity from it. And that's where I
Speaker 2: became incredibly excited about the opportunity. I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: I can do what I already know how to do,
Speaker 2: but for a carbon free and sustainable energy resource, and
Speaker 2: that to me just seemed too good of an opportunity
Speaker 2: to pass up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, one of the most interesting things to
Speaker 1: me about what you're trying to do at a certain
Speaker 1: level is you're trying to take this innovation that came
Speaker 1: out of the fossil fuel industry, probably the most important
Speaker 1: innovation of the twenty first century in the fossil fuel
Speaker 1: industry right and use it to get energy without fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: to move us away from fossil fuels. Is there something
Speaker 1: really elegant about that?
Speaker 2: There is, and that was something that always appealed to
Speaker 2: me in the job of oil and gas. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 2: if it wasn't for climate change and sustainability challenges, I
Speaker 2: would have never left that career because it's a very
Speaker 2: exciting thing. You're working with really bright people and solving
Speaker 2: major technical challenges and one of the things that was
Speaker 2: exciting for me is a decade ago, the advent of
Speaker 2: things like horizontal drilling was still so new that the
Speaker 2: innovations were coming out fast and furious. You know, when
Speaker 2: you work in the field, I was working a two
Speaker 2: week on, two week off rotation. You know, you go
Speaker 2: live on the rig for.
Speaker 1: Two out you live on an oil rig, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yep, and then you have two weeks off. And the
Speaker 2: number of times I came back from my two weeks
Speaker 2: off and there was a new piece of equipment out there,
Speaker 2: or a new function or a new software program that
Speaker 2: had been developed in our time off was just shocking.
Speaker 2: It was just so invigorating to work in a place
Speaker 2: where the technology advancement was happening so rapidly. And so
Speaker 2: that's one of the things that clicked for me whenever
Speaker 2: I looked at geothermal is geothermal is an industry that
Speaker 2: historically has been much smaller than oil and gas, and
Speaker 2: they just don't drill as much many wells as oil
Speaker 2: and gas. And for a variety of reasons. Right when
Speaker 2: the shale boom and fracking was taking off for oil
Speaker 2: and gas in America fifteen years ago, it became a
Speaker 2: really tough market for geothermal. So right when the drilling
Speaker 2: technology breakthroughs were coming fast and furious, no one was
Speaker 2: actually drilling geothermal wells anymore because of economic challenges. So
Speaker 2: I think as a result, there wasn't this technology transfer,
Speaker 2: this natural dissemination of information from oil and gas drilling
Speaker 2: to geothermal drilling. And I started looking at things like
Speaker 2: the cost assumptions that went into what people thought it
Speaker 2: would cost to drill geothermal well and I realized that
Speaker 2: they were somewhat frozen in time from before the advent
Speaker 2: of the shale boom, and as a result, it was
Speaker 2: using performance targets that were a decade too old, and
Speaker 2: with as fast as the innovation was happening in our sector,
Speaker 2: a decade too old and it was ten times too conservative.
Speaker 1: Huh. It would be like if you were trying to
Speaker 1: build something with AI right now and we're sort of
Speaker 1: using assumptions about AI five years ago or something exactly.
Speaker 2: To give you an example of that, you know, when
Speaker 2: you think about the year Tesla was founded in two
Speaker 2: thousand and three, nobody, not the big automotive companies, not
Speaker 2: the Department of Energy, No one assumed that electric vehicles
Speaker 2: were going to actually be a meaningful part of the
Speaker 2: energy mix. And the big reason was that they thought
Speaker 2: the battery storage was going to be too expensive. And
Speaker 2: you know what, if we had to start an industry
Speaker 2: from scratch where the only use case for batteries was
Speaker 2: electric vehicles, it would have never come down the cost curve.
Speaker 2: But what happened in the nineties. We came out with
Speaker 2: cell phones and laptops, and all of a sudden, lithium
Speaker 2: ion batteries got incredibly cheap and incredibly high quality because
Speaker 2: there was a huge manufacturing production system that grew up
Speaker 2: around providing a nice battery for your laptop and phone.
Speaker 2: And so the innovation Tesla had was, OK, everybody was
Speaker 2: using decade old assumptions on battery technology, but there's been
Speaker 2: a boom in battery technology driven by consumer electronics. What
Speaker 2: if we just tape them all together and put them
Speaker 2: in a car. And so it's amazing how often you
Speaker 2: see innovations where you know, if geothermal had to completely
Speaker 2: reinvent the way that wells were drilled to be successful,
Speaker 2: it'd be really tough to do. But whenever we can
Speaker 2: look at an industry like oil and gas that drills
Speaker 2: one hundred times as many way else the geothermal industry does,
Speaker 2: and then cherry pick the innovations from that to advance
Speaker 2: our cost curve forward. It can be have dramatic results.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about geothermal energy. I mean,
Speaker 1: what it is is kind of right there in the name,
Speaker 1: but let's start there. Anyways, what's geothermal energy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the name, you know, basically means earth and hot,
Speaker 2: and that's sort of the basic premise of what we're
Speaker 2: going for. You know, the world is very big, and
Speaker 2: the world is very hot, and the deeper you go,
Speaker 2: the hotter it gets, and so you know, the energy
Speaker 2: content in the heat of the Earth is so large
Speaker 2: that it's essentially inexhaustible. And so geothermal really has been
Speaker 2: around for millennia. You know, you can go and visit
Speaker 2: these you know, Roman baths all over Europe or elsewhere
Speaker 2: that were built on thermal hot springs, and if you
Speaker 2: think about it, that's geothermal energy at work. You're swimming
Speaker 2: in a nice heated pool because the hot water is
Speaker 2: flowing up from the heat of the Earth. And then
Speaker 2: around one hundred years ago in Italy, actually in Tuscany,
Speaker 2: the very first geothermal power project worked where some a
Speaker 2: brilliant team came up with the idea that, you know,
Speaker 2: if there's steam coming out of the ground because it's
Speaker 2: really hot here, what if we use that to power
Speaker 2: a turbine and make electricity. So the first ever electricity
Speaker 2: from geothermal came from tapping into some of these natural
Speaker 2: steam vents over one hundred years ago. And that's sort
Speaker 2: of the idea of geothermal as it's advanced. You know,
Speaker 2: you know, the number of spots where steam literally comes
Speaker 2: out of the ground on its own is a little
Speaker 2: bit limited. So people began using the idea of drilling
Speaker 2: and so starting back in New Zealand and the northern
Speaker 2: California in like the nineteen fifties and sixties, people started
Speaker 2: drilling wells in areas where they knew the geology was hotter,
Speaker 2: which replaces that are basically so hot that steam is practically,
Speaker 2: you know, bursting to come out of the ground, and
Speaker 2: then you drill into those areas. And that was really
Speaker 2: what the industry took off on, and you know, began
Speaker 2: sixty years ago with that kind of geothermal development, and
Speaker 2: it's progressed now to be and twenty five countries all
Speaker 2: over the world there's twenty five countries more that have
Speaker 2: geothermal projects and development. As a total percentage of the
Speaker 2: energy mix, it's less than one percent of the world
Speaker 2: energy mix, so it's still not huge, but it's really
Speaker 2: meaningful in certain markets.
Speaker 1: Like there just aren't that many places where everything lines
Speaker 1: up so that with this sort of twentieth century technology
Speaker 1: you can get energy from the heat of the earth
Speaker 1: in an efficient and useful way. Right, it's quite limited
Speaker 1: in the end.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly what we found with geothermal is that as
Speaker 2: we tapped those really low hanging fruit resources and stuff
Speaker 2: that was shallow and hot and highly productive. As we
Speaker 2: tapped that and we tried to move to deeper resources
Speaker 2: that maybe wouldn't flow as much or not be as hot,
Speaker 2: the technology wasn't there to be able to still produce
Speaker 2: that power and to do so economically, because drilling is
Speaker 2: costs are very dependent by how deep you have to go.
Speaker 2: And as we started tapping the shallow geothermal resources and
Speaker 2: having to move on to the deep ones, the technology
Speaker 2: couldn't keep up, and those deeper resources became uneconomics. So
Speaker 2: the industry, at least in the United States kind of
Speaker 2: stalled out. In the nineties, once these natural hotspots had
Speaker 2: been tapped and really really had been a bit of
Speaker 2: a period of stagnation ever since then.
Speaker 1: And I understand that by the time you wanted to
Speaker 1: start a company, you know, to make geothermal energy, harvest
Speaker 1: geothermal energy, it was sort of out of fashion, right,
Speaker 1: People had kind of given up.
Speaker 2: It was very much out of fashion. And so early
Speaker 2: on I was looking for funding. And I remember going
Speaker 2: to an investor conference, an energy investor conference, and I
Speaker 2: walked up to somebody that I knew was a big
Speaker 2: investor in the space, and I introduced myself to him,
Speaker 2: and this would have been about twenty seventeen, and I said, Hey,
Speaker 2: I'm Tim. I'm working on Fervo Energy. It's a startup
Speaker 2: I co founded that does geothermal energy. And he holds
Speaker 2: his hand up and says, I'm going to stop you
Speaker 2: right there and save us both some time. I'm not
Speaker 2: interested in geothermal energy. Thanks for the converse, and walked away.
Speaker 2: And that was a lot of the sentiment around what,
Speaker 2: you know, what what was the future for geothermal is is?
Speaker 2: That was sort of the reaction that we got on
Speaker 2: energy conferences. It was a bit of a bit of
Speaker 2: a punchline.
Speaker 1: Because people had tried it and it seemed like it
Speaker 1: didn't work exactly. So how do you how do you
Speaker 1: how do you get going in that environment? How do
Speaker 1: you get from the guy putting his hand in your
Speaker 1: face to actually building a company?
Speaker 2: I realized that there was such a gap between how
Speaker 2: quickly the technology for drilling had advanced an oil on
Speaker 2: gas and what the geothermal industry was used to that
Speaker 2: people just didn't know what the performance was really like.
Speaker 2: And I remember having some very bizarre conversations where people
Speaker 2: would tell me things like you can't drill horizontally, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, I just got off a rig, you know,
Speaker 2: a few weeks ago where that's what I was doing,
Speaker 2: and we were doing it for the thousandth time, like,
Speaker 2: and it was just amazing the gap and understanding of
Speaker 2: technology there, and so I knew we were onto something.
Speaker 1: Do you think part of that is like the culture gap?
Speaker 1: I mean that even if the technical skills are kind
Speaker 1: of overlapping, the culture gap between people who were fracking
Speaker 1: on an oil rig in West Texas or whatever and
Speaker 1: the people who are trying to geothermal start up in
Speaker 1: Northern California, they're just not talking to each other, because
Speaker 1: why would they No.
Speaker 2: I think that's I think that I think there's a
Speaker 2: lot of that. You know, one piece of advice I
Speaker 2: got from a mentor early on who'd invested in a
Speaker 2: bunch of different sectors is that if you want to
Speaker 2: be the leader in a sector, you need to be
Speaker 2: at the geographic center of where that sector works. You know,
Speaker 2: if you're starting an AI company, you're probably going to
Speaker 2: be really well served to be in the Bay Area.
Speaker 2: If you're starting a medical device or pharmaceutical company, you're
Speaker 2: going to be well served to be in Boston. If
Speaker 2: you're starting a drilling company, you should probably be in Houston.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I found is when
Speaker 2: we started Fervo, there was zero geothermal companies in Houston.
Speaker 2: They were all in places all over the world, but
Speaker 2: in America they were not. None of them were close
Speaker 2: to Houston.
Speaker 1: And Houston is like the intellection rual center of this
Speaker 1: shale fracking drilling revolution. Right, there's this incredible innovation coming
Speaker 1: out of there. It is like the Bay Area for
Speaker 1: AI or something exactly right.
Speaker 2: All the big companies, all the big suppliers, some of
Speaker 2: the best research institutions, whether you're talking about in Houston,
Speaker 2: like the University of Houston or Rice, or in the
Speaker 2: area like the University of Texas or Texas A and
Speaker 2: M all kind of centered around this intellectual hub of
Speaker 2: subsurface that is in Houston. And there was no geothermal
Speaker 2: here and no geothermal presence here. And I think it
Speaker 2: is Yeah, you could say it's cultural, but it's also
Speaker 2: just geographical. There weren't the same number of water cooler
Speaker 2: conversations or people bump into each other and in the
Speaker 2: hallway in these other areas where that knowledge share can happen.
Speaker 2: And so that was actually something being somebody from Houston
Speaker 2: and I actually part of my journey. We did move
Speaker 2: out to the Bay Area to start the company, and
Speaker 2: that's where we founded the company, but always with a
Speaker 2: lens of making Houston the headquarters because we wanted to
Speaker 2: be in and the center of that intellectual hub.
Speaker 1: Well why start the company in the Bay Area?
Speaker 2: Then, briefly, it's gets to an interesting question speaking about geography.
Speaker 2: I mean the Bay areas where startups happen, you know,
Speaker 2: And it sort of is interesting even to this day.
Speaker 2: And Houston has an actually incredible and vibrant and growing
Speaker 2: innovation ecosystem.
Speaker 1: You need, like the hybrid DNA you need, the startup
Speaker 1: DNA in the Bay Area, and the fracking DNA of Houston.
Speaker 1: Basically you do.
Speaker 2: That's part of the magic. And the amount of capital
Speaker 2: available for people with wild ideas that could change the
Speaker 2: world is still so concentrated in the Bay Area.
Speaker 1: That's the It's like when they ask the guy, why
Speaker 1: do you rob banks, and he said, that's where the
Speaker 1: money is. That's why the Bay Area. That is exactly right,
Speaker 1: and that said, right now, where are you talking to
Speaker 1: me from?
Speaker 2: I'm in Houston, Texas net right now in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: and our third year of existence as a company. We
Speaker 2: still have an office in the Bay Area and a
Speaker 2: lot of great people that work there. But we made
Speaker 2: the decision that now it's time to scale up. Now
Speaker 2: it's time to start drilling these wells. Now is the
Speaker 2: time where it's most important that we're located here in Houston,
Speaker 2: and so I relocated back here and our corporate headquarters
Speaker 2: are here in Houston.
Speaker 1: In a minute, Tim and his company build a real
Speaker 1: geothermal power corner. So where are you now? I mean,
Speaker 1: you have this thesis several years ago, which is basically
Speaker 1: if we bring the technology from the shale boom, if
Speaker 1: you're fracking technology to bear on geothermal, we can make
Speaker 1: it work.
Speaker 2: Where are you now, Yeah, we're making it work. That's
Speaker 2: where we are now. So in twenty twenty two, we
Speaker 2: drilled three wells at a site in northern Nevada as
Speaker 2: part of a development agreement with Google Google pay It
Speaker 2: played a major catalytic role in this. Google is one
Speaker 2: of the first people to bring up an awareness of
Speaker 2: something that is a recognition in the market that's benefitted
Speaker 2: Fervo a lot, which is that solar and wind are
Speaker 2: going to be the workhorses of a decarbonized electric cred
Speaker 2: but cannot do the job all on their own, and
Speaker 2: we need a complementary resource like geothermal that can work
Speaker 2: twenty four to seven to complement wind and solar so
Speaker 2: we can get all the way to decarbonized electric cred.
Speaker 2: And I think the exciting thing for us as a
Speaker 2: company is we began that project in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: We published results from a very successful test phase of
Speaker 2: that project a just over the summer, and after the
Speaker 2: results of that test phase, we move forward with commissioning
Speaker 2: that project and that product is now producing electricity. We've
Speaker 2: now just finished and brought onto the Electric cred our
Speaker 2: very first ever electricity producing project using advanced geothermal technology.
Speaker 1: Great, so you have this project in Nevada that just
Speaker 1: turned on, just started producing real electricity for real people
Speaker 1: in the last few months. Right, Yes, how does it work? Like,
Speaker 1: just tell me what's going on there? How's it work?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So the way our kind of geothermal works. And
Speaker 2: again I told you earlier that we had the tech
Speaker 2: fifty years ago to do these perfect shallow hot productive resources,
Speaker 2: but it's always been a struggle to make the other deeper,
Speaker 2: less productive resources work.
Speaker 1: Most of the world, the vast majority.
Speaker 2: Of the most of the world, every place that's not Iceland, basically.
Speaker 2: And so what we do differently is we drill our
Speaker 2: wells deeper, for one. And then when we drill these
Speaker 2: wells deeper, not only do we drill them down vertically,
Speaker 2: but we then drill them horizontally as well. So to
Speaker 2: give you some depths to think about the project that
Speaker 2: we did in Nevada, we drilled that well eight thousand
Speaker 2: feet straight down and then four thousand feet horizontally.
Speaker 1: Wow, so like a mile and a half down and
Speaker 1: almost a mile over, So like an L. I should
Speaker 1: be thinking of a capital L.
Speaker 2: Yes, a giant capital L. And then we but a
Speaker 2: second giant capital L right next to it in parallel.
Speaker 2: So a few hundred feet away is another well that's
Speaker 2: as deep in parallel.
Speaker 1: Two l's running parallel giant under the.
Speaker 2: Two big pipes in the ground. Exactly how big the
Speaker 2: pipes themselves are seven inches across.
Speaker 1: Not big long, but narrow long.
Speaker 2: But narrow that I think about them like really big
Speaker 2: pipes that we've stuck into the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, and it's just rock all the way through there.
Speaker 1: You're just going down and over in the rock.
Speaker 2: It's rock all the way through there. And importantly for us,
Speaker 2: it's hot rock.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, hot, right, that's the key, both geo and thermal.
Speaker 1: Then what happens?
Speaker 2: Okay, so let me tell you how this works. Now,
Speaker 2: we just have the pipes in place, and the pipes
Speaker 2: go through the rock. And what we end up doing
Speaker 2: to create the geothermal electricity, you know, because those rocks
Speaker 2: are hot, but the he just won't move on its own.
Speaker 2: What we do is we actually pump cold water down
Speaker 2: the injection well, and then that injection well has about
Speaker 2: one hundred different ports in that water can flow out
Speaker 2: and it flows across the rock over to the production well.
Speaker 1: They're like holes in the side of the pipe basically yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: and the water goes out of the pipe. Now in
Speaker 1: my mind, it's just rock down there. Yeah, So like
Speaker 1: what happens? What, like what's going on there? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Water can always flow through rock. I mean, this is
Speaker 2: the same way that oil is produced or water wells work.
Speaker 2: Water can always flow through rock. In our case is
Speaker 2: we have actually created these fractures that go from one
Speaker 2: well to the other. So think about these giant cracks
Speaker 2: in the rock that now that water flows through. So
Speaker 2: it connects the injection well to the production well and
Speaker 2: its own isolated system. So it goes out the ports,
Speaker 2: flows through the rock hundreds of feet and in that
Speaker 2: hundreds of feet it heats up and the wells. We're
Speaker 2: doing it around four hundred degrees fahrenheit, So by the
Speaker 2: time that cold water reaches the other well, it's already
Speaker 2: heated up to about four hundred degrees fahrenheit. Even though
Speaker 2: it's four hundred degrees fahrenheit, we actually produce it still
Speaker 2: in a water in a liquid phase.
Speaker 1: Wo, So it's highly pressure as water that can be
Speaker 1: four hundred degrees and not yet.
Speaker 2: Steam exactly, and so then it gets to the surface
Speaker 2: it's hot water. And then what we do is we
Speaker 2: actually can pump that water over to the electric the
Speaker 2: power plant that we have at this site, and then
Speaker 2: we take the water and we run it through a
Speaker 2: heat exchanger, so that heat then goes into the power cycle,
Speaker 2: and then we collect the cold water after it's giving
Speaker 2: up all of its heat again and pump it right
Speaker 2: back down the injection well. So all we're doing is
Speaker 2: circulate in the same water over and over and over again.
Speaker 2: In the system. It goes down cold, heats up in
Speaker 2: the rock, comes up hot. We then gather that heat
Speaker 2: at the surface to create electricity, and then we pump
Speaker 2: the cold water back again, and we do that for
Speaker 2: decades and decades and decades. And the key here is
Speaker 2: we're getting this heat not by burning something, not by
Speaker 2: burning natural gas or coal, but by the natural heat
Speaker 2: of the earth itself. And so it's a zero emission technology.
Speaker 1: Great, and you have a sort of small version working
Speaker 1: now right.
Speaker 2: It's on the order of around two to three megawatts
Speaker 2: of production, and so it's not big when it comes
Speaker 2: to power infrastructure. But that's still enough electricity to power
Speaker 2: several thousand homes worth of electricity generation. But it really
Speaker 2: is just the beginning of what we are planning to
Speaker 2: do as we scale this technology.
Speaker 1: So if that's the beginning, what's the middle This summer?
Speaker 2: Actually, after we had these really successful results from our
Speaker 2: first ever pilot, we move forward to a site in
Speaker 2: southwest Utah and we broke the ground on our next project,
Speaker 2: which is going to be roughly one hundred times bigger
Speaker 2: than our first project.
Speaker 1: So how do you increase the power output by one
Speaker 1: hundred x? What do you got to do to do that?
Speaker 2: We drill more wells. Well one thing. The wells that
Speaker 2: we're going to drill now are going to be bigger,
Speaker 2: for one, and so we're going to get actually more
Speaker 2: power output for every well that we drill, and then
Speaker 2: we're going to drill more of them. And I tell
Speaker 2: you one thing that's exciting about this in terms of
Speaker 2: again a sustainability standpoint, one of the really attractive things
Speaker 2: about geothermal power is the actual land you need to
Speaker 2: do it is very minimal compared to almost any other
Speaker 2: type of energy resource.
Speaker 1: It's a low footprint on the ground, but a big
Speaker 1: footprint under the ground exactly.
Speaker 2: So it's a very you know, you can be at
Speaker 2: a very small pad that's only a few acres, but
Speaker 2: then underneath you are can be dozens of wells that extend,
Speaker 2: you know, across miles and miles.
Speaker 1: What are you worried about in that next project?
Speaker 2: What are we worried about? You know, it's interesting, I'd
Speaker 2: say the first thing is policy support. You know, geothermal,
Speaker 2: as you noted when you were asking me how it
Speaker 2: works earlier, nobody knows about it. Nobody knows how it works.
Speaker 2: Before I read some random paper ten years ago, I
Speaker 2: didn't know about it. And as a result, it's sort
Speaker 2: of this forgotten renewable and we end up in a
Speaker 2: situation where again and again it gets left out of
Speaker 2: the same incentive schemes and government grants and supportive policy
Speaker 2: that almost any other energy resource you have. We're structuring
Speaker 2: to compete with technologies that get significantly more government funding
Speaker 2: and policy support.
Speaker 1: Tell me about price, Like this project you're working on
Speaker 1: in Utah, Like what's it going to cost to get
Speaker 1: electricity out of that project? And how does that compare
Speaker 1: to other sources? Of electricity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we'll end up investing well over a billion
Speaker 2: dollars in this project in southwest Utah. But it's a
Speaker 2: very sizable project. It's four hundred megawatts from a price standpoint.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting to think about the electric grid because
Speaker 2: everyone always thinks about the electric grid. Is electricity, it's
Speaker 2: a commodity. Well it sort of isn't It isn't. The
Speaker 2: thing about electricity is that when people want electricity, they
Speaker 2: want it now, right, and so the reliability is incredibly
Speaker 2: important for electricity. So it's one thing to produce electricity,
Speaker 2: it's an entirely different thing to produce electricity when it's needed.
Speaker 2: So whenever you look at how utilities construct portfolios, they
Speaker 2: find that you know, of course you want solar, and
Speaker 2: of course you want wind, and of course you want
Speaker 2: batteries because those are very low cost resources. But you
Speaker 2: also need stuff that works when those resources don't, and
Speaker 2: historically in this country that has been coal or natural gas. Increasingly,
Speaker 2: less coal and more natural gas. But if you want
Speaker 2: to do it both keep the lights on and do
Speaker 2: it in a sustainable and carbon free way, we need
Speaker 2: to find a substitute for that natural gas part of
Speaker 2: the portfolio as well. And so all this to say,
Speaker 2: whenever you look at a portfolio approach, geo thermal offers
Speaker 2: things that other energy resources don't. It's always there when
Speaker 2: you need it, and it doesn't produce carbon emissions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I feel like you're telling me it's more expensive,
Speaker 1: but you can use it when it's dark out and
Speaker 1: the wind isn't blowing. Is that what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that's right. And what you find
Speaker 2: is that a little bit of what we sell. You know,
Speaker 2: if you are trying to figure out for your business,
Speaker 2: or for your city, or for your utility, you know
Speaker 2: what's the least cost way to provide electricity. It turns
Speaker 2: out buying twenty percent of your electricity from US, even
Speaker 2: at a premium price, ends up allowing you to have
Speaker 2: a much lower overall cost because it provides these really
Speaker 2: high valuable attributes to the grid.
Speaker 1: And you don't have to have like a gas peaker
Speaker 1: plant that you build and only use a few hours
Speaker 1: a year or whatever.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly what else.
Speaker 1: You worried about. You're about to build a billion dollar plant.
Speaker 1: Surely your worries cannot solely be outward facing.
Speaker 2: So we always joke about the fact that we really
Speaker 2: smashed two types of companies together. We're and so we
Speaker 2: hire a lot of people from renewable energy developers, and
Speaker 2: we hire a lot of people from oil on gas,
Speaker 2: and we smash us together in one big company to
Speaker 2: execute these goals.
Speaker 1: It's like the hippies and the roughnecks basically, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what that's Yeah, you could you could say
Speaker 2: that maybe that'll be our next like holiday party theme.
Speaker 1: Or something like that. I like it.
Speaker 2: I like it, the hippies and the roughnecks, and we
Speaker 2: try to make it work. But the reason I say
Speaker 2: this is, yeah, we're about to we're in the process
Speaker 2: of doing a billion dollar plus project. But the nice
Speaker 2: thing is that everybody that we've hired to work on
Speaker 2: our team has done projects of that size and scale before.
Speaker 1: When you're going to turn on this big plant in Utah.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty six is the first time we'll be making
Speaker 2: electricity from this facility. So it's going to come online
Speaker 2: in a few phases. That full four hundred megawatts will
Speaker 2: be done by twenty twenty eight. We'll be producing our
Speaker 2: first electricity there. Really in just a couple of years.
Speaker 2: Looking at the date now, I guess it's almost twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four already, which I find hard to believe. So
Speaker 2: just around the corner, twenty twenty six, we'll be making
Speaker 2: first electricity from our facility in Utah.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 1: I want to finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: What's the best thing about working on an oil rig.
Speaker 2: There's no substitute to actually physically seeing your progress when
Speaker 2: you work. You know, I grew up in the countryside
Speaker 2: and we would farm, and I worked on a rig
Speaker 2: and we do things, and I can tell you it's
Speaker 2: a little funny sometimes to do work and just have
Speaker 2: like a PowerPoint presentation and email at the end of
Speaker 2: the day to show it, and you know there's things
Speaker 2: going on out there, but you can't see it. To
Speaker 2: be able to start your shift and say, you know,
Speaker 2: when I started, we were seven thousand feet deep, and
Speaker 2: when I got off shift, we were eight thousand feet deep,
Speaker 2: and I can see the difference that we've made is
Speaker 2: something that like, you know, that's that's a really nice
Speaker 2: tangible thing about the work that I always appreciated.
Speaker 1: What's the worst thing about working on an oil rig.
Speaker 2: It's hard to be away from home. You know. You
Speaker 2: spend weeks out there sometimes without without coming home, and
Speaker 2: you end up building a great community of people that
Speaker 2: you work with, your co workers. But you know, there's
Speaker 2: no substitute for seeing your friends and family and sleeping
Speaker 2: in your whole, in your own bed.
Speaker 1: When I typed Fervo into my phone, I was just
Speaker 1: like making some notes when I was preparing for this interview.
Speaker 1: It auto corrected it to Gerbo. You have an idea,
Speaker 1: what's going on with that? What is Gerbo?
Speaker 2: I don't know about Gerbo. I can tell you Fervo.
Speaker 2: We picked the name because it's a It's a word
Speaker 2: that means energetic and boiling, which is kind of what's
Speaker 2: our what our business is in what language? All of
Speaker 2: them really any Romance language.
Speaker 1: So it's like fervent. Does the word fervent come.
Speaker 2: From the same exactly, fervent. We're in the business and
Speaker 2: making steam, so our name is steam.
Speaker 1: If you were not working on geothermal energy, what would
Speaker 1: you be working on?
Speaker 2: Good question. I am obsessive about urban design and transportation.
Speaker 2: I think you start working in energy, then you start
Speaker 2: working in climate and it becomes a foray to thinking, Wow,
Speaker 2: what we could design our cities so much better in
Speaker 2: a way that would be more sustainable and fun and
Speaker 2: and uh, you know, even though I live in Houston, Texas,
Speaker 2: which is famous for our driving, I bike to work
Speaker 2: every day. I live right by our light rail line,
Speaker 2: and I'm just obsessed with ways we can design our
Speaker 2: cities better. And if I wasn't doing for oh, I'd
Speaker 2: probably be doing that.
Speaker 1: Okay, last one, what's one thing you understand about geology
Speaker 1: about the Earth that most people don't? Oh?
Speaker 2: Ah, can I half answer your question?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, anything you want.
Speaker 2: So here's a question. Here's the thing about geology not
Speaker 2: on the Earth that I've become obsessed with. Fascinating project
Speaker 2: that NASA ran a couple of years ago where they
Speaker 2: actually drilled into Mars and installed a seismometer in Mars,
Speaker 2: and as a result, we know way more about Mars
Speaker 2: geology than we did a couple of years ago, and
Speaker 2: they detected regular and frequent Mars quakes there, which were
Speaker 2: totally unexpected. And so just in the last couple of years,
Speaker 2: we've completely rethought our understanding of Mars geology, and it
Speaker 2: seems to be much more geologically active than we thought
Speaker 2: even two or three years ago, and I don't know,
Speaker 2: maybe to make a bit of a business proposition for it.
Speaker 2: Geologically active means that it probably has a higher thermal
Speaker 2: gradient than we've anticipated. So my team always has to
Speaker 2: remind me to focus on Earth first. But it's a
Speaker 2: funny thing to think about. You know, if we ever
Speaker 2: make it to Mars, geothermal might be the way to
Speaker 2: be the way to make our power workout there.
Speaker 1: I love it. I love the fifty year vision. Well,
Speaker 1: it's great to talk with you. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 1: Jim Latimer is the co founder and CEO of Fervo Energy.
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Joey Fishground and Edith Russilo.
Speaker 1: It was edited by Karen Chakerji and engineered by Sarah Bruguier.
Speaker 1: You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem. Mhm mm hmm.