YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Latimer

lines on the record: 43
first: 2024-12-13
most recent: 2024-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Among the different options you have for emerging technologies is the fact that there's such a ready supply chain and workforce of skilled people who know how to execute on these projects. And we can 10x our growth rate or 100x our growth rate and not run into workforce issues because there's already such a deep bench of technical talent and technician talent that control these wells.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's actually the same exact style of drilling rigs, the most technologically sophisticated drilling rig that you can get for onshore drilling. And it's the same exact style of drilling rig that I used when I started my career over a decade ago in South Texas. And I was insisted on that because I wanted to use the best technology. And the crews there, they were just before we picked up that rig a year and a half ago, they were drilling in the Bakken in North Dakota. And so people really were drilling oil wells one day and they were drilling geothermal wells the next. And there's differences there, but the skills in the workforce is there. And this is one of the things that I think makes geothermal quite scalable. Today there's roughly 600 drilling rigs operating in North America. We're growing at a huge rate. We're going to bring on 100 megawatt projects in just 18 months from now. We're doing that with just one drilling rig. And so we can 10x our growth and still only be a single digit percentage of the oil field services market because we have such overlap with them. So among the many things that I think has advantaged geothermal.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are really cool songs. That's right. They give that great socks. So, this is actually what the rig looks like, as you can see. No, but if you call them, I'm sure they'll give them to you.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yeah. And in fact, just as an example, the drilling rig that we're using for our site right now is a Helmer campaign H&P Flex3 rig. I'm actually wearing H&P socks.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you would. I think you would. When you're running a startup, a lot of times you're trying to solve the problem of the day and you also don't have the balance sheets put down long-term orders. Not a lot of startups out there that are ordering things for you.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's being talked about, and this is one that I think is something that I just sort of expected people to look at three, four, five year lead times and say there's money to be made here. We're going to expand. But I think the transformer companies have gone through a lot of boom and busts before. So they're quite reticent there. You know, this isn't quite my area of expertise. I don't know how many new facilities are being built, but what we're hearing from our suppliers is they're doing the low-hanging fruit of adding new lines, adding extra shifts, adding extra hours. So you're starting to see the supply come up a little bit, but is it going to be enough to meet the unprecedented demand coming from all different sources that need this clinical electrical equipment? I don't know. I still think that's going to be one of the long poles in the tent for a while.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a good discipline investor. They knew the right question to ask. And it's also an irony, too, because data centers are growing. Everybody's trying to figure out the equipment for that. And then everybody's trying to get the grid going. Everybody's trying to get the generation going. Oftentimes what we hear from the transformer suppliers is the slots are taken by the data center companies that were trying to sell the power to. So it's a bit of a circular problem there, which is interesting. We didn't have a really creative solution other than ordering early. So we found a couple US-based manufacturers. We're sourcing a couple of our transformers from Taiwan as well. And there's not really a creative answer other than getting line three or four years in advance.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question, and you're right, it's highly competitive to get to, and the lead times can be multi year, especially for the larger transformers. I was in an investment meeting a couple months ago where somebody walked in, very experienced investor, and said, first question out of their gate, have you sourced your GSU transformers yet? We said, yes, we have. And he says, four out of five times the answer to that is no. Here's money. And I don't have to take the rest of the meeting.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who historically would have only played in the series ABC range who've recognized that there's a capital gap for second of a kind, third of a kind deployment, and a lot of them have raised continuity or growth funds to piggyback off their successful companies. Meanwhile, those like traditional companies, infrastructure investors that only wanted to do the 10th project realized that if they actually wanted to sell their LPs on getting a differentiated return, they needed to do something that was differentiating and step into projects earlier. So a lot of them have raised funds that will come in one click earlier. And so that valley of death is closing from both sides because you're seeing traditional private equity and growth equity and infrastructure investors create new vehicles to come in one click earlier and you're seeing the venture capitalists create continuity investments and growth estimates to carry you one click forward. And so there used to not really be capital between like the series B and the infrastructure side. And now there's still a gap. But it's”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's banks, it's private capital, it's really all of the above. If you think back 15 years ago into what they call the cleantech 1.0 bus, I think one of the failure modes there was a bunch of venture capital went into technologies that took a long time to develop. And there wasn't really a past the baton of who was the next source of capital that was going to keep these technologies going. And that's what really led to the bust. But that bust also, I think, created a bunch of people who learned hard lessons about what that was like. And a lot of them have gone out and created the ecosystem that's there. So, you know, for example, that Activate program that was at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that let us have two years to get our feet under us before we really got going as a company didn't exist in the first one. So that was really important. What we've seen is we get bigger and bigger, you know, people have talked about the missing middle or the valley of death. And that's one of the things that the LPO is very instrumental in filling. But market inefficiencies, if there's money to be made, don't last for long. And so what we're seeing right now is there's a bunch of venture capitalists.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's been big changes in the last year or two. I think some of that has changed investor sentiment around geothermal, but some of it is that the ecosystem is changing. You know, if you think back a lot of times”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does always come back to transformers. I would have said permitting, and I would have said funding. Funding is becoming a much more solved issue. Permitting is something that I think we've made a lot of administrative progress on, and we're anticipating legislative progress on. So now I think about supply chain, you know, because I think we've got the money, we've got the off-take agreements, we've got everything there. You are thinking about how do we get the supply chain in place for this. Transformers being a big part of that, but there's also other pieces of equipment that are important as well.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yesterday's news, and so didn't even want to look at it. But that's shifted dramatically. We see a lot of interest from capital providers into geothermal now. And then we've actually had a lot of success on improving the permitting. And even before these bills pass through. So if you would have asked me a few months ago, I would have said transformers and high voltage electrical equipment.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question because I feel like over the seven years since we started Fervo, the answer has been different every year, which I think is the right thing. There should be an impediment. You should be knocking it down and getting on to the next one. So the early days were, there's fundamental questions on if this would even work. And that took us several years to address. And thankfully, the answer is yes. If you would have asked me a few months ago, I would have said funding was the big barrier because you still ran into that situation where people thought they knew geothermal and thought it was.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So these changes, because it's not just when the projects come online, but it's the investment horizon that you have to burden these projects with, moving it from seven years to three years can make the difference between a project being investable or not being investable. So it's a massive difference.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it would make a big difference. There's many bells that have passed, actually. This is one of our big success cases in geothermal. I used to joke that we were bipartisan in the sense that both parties ignored geothermal. Now I can say we're bipartisan because I think both parties recognize the huge opportunity there is for geothermal. So there's actually been five bills passed in the House this year for geothermal permitting reform. And the current Mansion Barroso bill that's in discussion in the Senate has a bunch of provisions in there around geothermal. And this is truly bipartisan. There's groups on”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So, and one example, there's certain early activities in the expiration phase or just doing extensions to existing projects that don't really have a huge impact, don't really change the scope of the project itself. And so if you were an oil and gas company, there's legislatively developed categorical exclusions where there's a whole category of things that if you're drilling an oil well, you don't have to go through the full process for the environmental reviews for certain kind of redundant routine things. The law that was passed in 2005 that granted that didn't just say drilling. It said specifically oil and gas drilling. So that's been interpreted to say geothermal is not included in that. So there's actually a lot of examples of places where the permitting structure, even though geothermal is a lower impact resource, it's no emission resource. It actually has a much more extensive permitting program than a lot of oil and gas doing on federal.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at how these things have been implemented over time, there's a lot of things that are redundant, or a lot of times there's just offices that are not staffed well, so you submit permits and you just never hear back. So typical time for permitting the geothermal project in the western United States is about six to eight years to permit to be able to start the project. And so that's not really commensurate with the data center companies that are banging down our door asking if we can bring in power by next year. I say, well, once we get through the eight-year permitting process, we can get there. So there's things that we're trying to do to improve that. One of the funny things about geothermal is even though we're drilling wells just like the oil and gas industry is, we haven't always benefited from the same permitting.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, permitting is definitely the long pole in the tent, not just for geothermal, but transmission, which is really important to hardening the grid and bringing new resources online and a whole host of other things. I'm not as much of an expert in those things as I am in geothermal, so I can speak to some of the challenges we have in geothermal. One thing is through a quirk of history, the best geology for geothermal is located in the western United States. The Western United States is predominantly owned by the U.S. federal government. It's not private landowners. It's actually the U.S. government that owns most of the land. And so that puts us by default into a federal permitting regime on pretty much every project that we do in a way that isn't true of necessarily other energy resources. And so we've had to go through multi-year NEPA approval processes for everything we've developed. We also simultaneously have to go through the transmission and interconnection process for that. And there's a whole host of other things that are there as well. I'll be very clear. I think these are good things. We need to be doing projects with the right environmental standards.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. They're not going to go in your basement, and then we reach rock that's 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and then we produce energy from that. What we're doing is actually recirculating that geothermal brine through the reservoir and then capturing the heat at the surface through an organic Rankin cycle system to produce electricity by spending a turbine. And so we're not going to go in your basement because, for an example, the project we're building in Utah right now is a 400 megawatt project. And this is enough power to power a city-sized energy demand. So it wouldn't go well in your basement, but I'm glad you asked that because actually I can tell that the tide is turning because up until maybe a year ago, the most common website request we got was, hey, can you do this in my backyard? Because people don't think of geothermal power. It's a quirk of history that they're named the same way.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is deep geothermal, I should say this first off, I'm a big fan geothermal heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, really cool technology, but has nothing to do with what we do So, those are good for home heating, cooling, or larger buildings, shallower wells where you're using the ground as a heat exchange. To be clear, we drill wells that are thousands of feet deep in the execution.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it's changed because the perception of geothermal has changed. But I can tell you anecdotes from my years of this as we move forward. One of three things would happen actually as we went and approached investors to talk to them about geothermal. One is they would ignore us. I actually literally had one time I was at an investor conference and I walked up to somebody who was actually a corporate venture capitalist for a large oil company told him I was doing geothermal, how to start up doing that and he literally puts his hand up and says, let me stop you right there. We've looked at geothermal not going to work. Let's save both of our time. I'll see you later.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Google to get there because, in a lot of ways, the same way that financiers want to see a track record, utilities want to, too.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much energy you use for the year, you add up how much energy you source for the year, and if those numbers are equal at the end of the year, you can consider it 100% renewable energy, a much more stricter standard is 24-7 carbon-free energy. And that's looking at, okay, where I'm actually building these facilities and when they're actually using energy, am I sourcing that electricity from clean areas? And what they were making the point on is that wind and solar had been phenomenal technologies to move the future of low carbon forward, but that we were going to need a new toolkit from storage to nuclear to hydrogen to geothermal to get there. And I can tell you that the biggest point of market validation we had when we were raising our Series A was in this 20-page paper that Google wrote, they mentioned geothermal one time. And we're like, see, we're on the map. People are talking about it. And actually, that caused us to reach out to them. We started this relationship that turned into our first development agreement with Google as an off-taker. And they've now become a large customer of ours. And we've announced several more deals there. But it was interesting it took a come.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I mentioned this a little bit before where it's a chicken and egg problem. In a lot of ways, entrepreneurship, particularly if you're doing a real hard tech development like what we're doing at Fervo, is trying to solve dozens of simultaneous chicken and egg problems all at once, you know, because you've got to get the financers to believe in it. You've got to get the customers to believe in it. And it's fascinating. I can talk through our journey. Our first off-take agreement was with Google, and that went back all the way into 2021 that we announced that deal. And it wasn't an accident that it was Google that did that. You know, they'd put out a white paper in 2018, and nobody was paying attention to geothermal back then. It was written off as a dead sector. But they put out a white paper in 2018 that said they had actually achieved their 100% renewable energy goal. And so they were looking at what is the next target we want to get to. And they came up with a new concept of 24-7 carbon-free energy, which is actually hourly matching. The concept of 100% renewable energy, it's more of an accounting exercise where you add a”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the near future, it doesn't matter if you're talking clean or dirty or intermittent or baseload or whatever jargon you want to put on it. Geothermal, the cost trajectory is moving so quickly that we're going to get a great answer on the affordability very, very soon. And so I think emphasizing that we do those three things, and it doesn't matter what is going on in the macro environment, those three things are still the things that matter is kind of how we stay resilient through the different cycles.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No opinion. You're the one out there that doesn't want cleaner energy. I'm a journalist. All right, journalist. I like it. But I think that what happens is that depending on where people are coming from, you know, which side of the aisle they're on, what their priorities are, they may rank those three things differently. And then there's a lot in the macro environment where those things get ranked differently. Like very clearly, affordability is top of mind for everyone right now. And so what you see is over time, depending on what's going on in the geopolitical environment, the macro environment, the political environment, those orders may get flipped. But I think what most people here are working on is something that is cleaner, is reliable, and is more affordable. And the thing is, it's not going to get there overnight, but everybody's working on technologies that are on a path to achieve one of those three things on a better dimension. And I think one of the things about geothermal is we emphasize it checks all three boxes. It's cleaner, it's reliable, and we're on a cost trajectory where this is going to become one of the most affordable ways to get in.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think everybody wants it to be cleaner. And that's true if we talk to people on both sides of the aisle. I don't think it matters where it is. I think where a lot of the debates come up is where is the trade-off between clean and affordable and reliable? But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone other than maybe some very French people who are just trying to instigate you.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. And honestly, my view on this is I don't think people actually, there's not really that much of a divide, I think, in what people actually want out of their energy resources. I think it could get politicized and there's a lot of food fights and political fights in this. But people want three things out of their energy resources. They want the energy to be cleaner. They want the energy to be more affordable. And they want the energy to be more reliable.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even that kind of move was sort of catalytic to get things off the ground. And then, of course, the DOE has a big message and a big audience that reads these things. So actually this liftoff report that came out earlier this year changed a lot of people's minds because one of the problems with the chicken and egg problem is there's so many investor meetings that we don't even get to have because we reach out and they say geothermal, I know geothermal, we're not looking at that. And the meeting never even happens. And you have something like the geothermal liftoff report come out that's got the DOE logo on it. They know it's been well vetted, well researched work. And all of a sudden it may be there's some investors who may have written off geothermal that say, well, maybe there's a new shot here. Maybe there's new data that we weren't aware of. And so that kind of awareness and technology validation is pretty critical as well.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we've gotten great support from the DOE. As I mentioned, we've gotten multiple grants over the years to work on anything from high temperature tools to novel data sensing methods. Earlier this year, there was a provision in the bipartisan infrastructure law where there was $84 million earmarked for geothermal energy development. Fervo was actually the recipient of the largest grant of that, which was a $25 million grant. And so that kind of early demonstration funding can be very critical for a technology that's just taking off. I don't want to make any enemies. I know there's a lot of different technologies out the audience here, but if you read the Department of Energy's commercial liftoff report for geothermal, they've got a nice chart in there where it almost looks like a data error because they put the $84 million that geothermal got up against the $10 billion for nuclear and the $9 billion for carbon capture and the several billion for long duration energy storage and other things. So I think other technologies benefited far more than geothermal did.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are navigating now, there's so many tailwinds looking for more and more power. We need more reliable power, we need more power, period, everything from data centers to industrialization to onshoring or manufacturing to.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We build. We have 15 year off take agreements with locked in pricing. So we don't have to worry five years from now what is the price of our product going to go up or down. We also don't have any fuel cost. And so we're not exposed if there's a big run up in fuel cost. And so we eliminate a lot of that volatility. So as a result, renewable energy projects like geothermal have always been viewed as historically much safer investments because you're not exposed to a lot of the volatility mix that impact other infrastructure investments. That's a good thing in general because it means you can bring low cost capital in this space because it's perceived as safer investments, but it also means you're spread off the risk free rate is a lot tighter than if you were talking about a fossil fuel project or a project with more risk in it. And so when those rates move, the sort of relative impact for something with a low spread is a lot bigger. And so the interest rate environment, it hits startups and it hits infrastructure projects, particularly renewable infrastructure projects in a big way. And that's one of the things that companies”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. And the fact that we've gone through such a big movement in interest rates over the last five years has meant we've kind of gone through multiple business cycles in the sector in a very compressed period of time. You know, as interest rates started to rise a couple years ago, there were two sectors or areas that sort of bubbled to the surface as being challenged by high interest rate environment. That was number one, startups that were based on very long-term growth. And number two, capital intensive businesses, where it's a lot of capital up front with a long payback period. That was a double whammy because we were running a capital intensive startup. And so the interest rate environment was very challenging to try to get new capital to come into the space as those interest rates went up. And, you know, one of the things about renewable energy, and this is true about solar and wind, but also true about geothermal, is these are oftentimes high CapEx but long payback period projects. And they're also projects that are interesting because you end up with a different profile than a lot of other energy infrastructure projects because all of our projects”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the first time we'd brought in project finance. So we're finally moving away from the expensive venture capital sources of funding and down into the more sustainable long-term infrastructure style of funding. But it took us seven years from inception, an operating fully successful project, and a lot more work to finally cross over that funding mix barrier.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An energy at one of the leading independent oil and gas producers out of Oklahoma City with a hundred million dollar investment. So the investment mix has changed over time. But for a lot of new technologies, there's this crossing the chasm level where a venture capitalist or a DOE grant writer will sit with you and understand the ins and outs of your technology. And they'll see, is this feasible or not? And you can actually have a good conversation around that. Institutional money that wants to do project debt, they don't really want to understand how your technology works. They just want to see that you've done it many, many times before. And that kind of gets to the chicken and egg problem that's with this funding. You know, so often when we approach those larger infrastructure sources of funding, the answer is, we'll bring us 12 months of data or bring us an independent engineering report that says 0% chance this will ever, ever fail. And that's kind of a big hurdle to jump. So we finally crossed that chasm earlier this year because we brought that project online. We announced in July $100 million construction look from a”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's exactly right. And we've had an interesting funding journey that's probably very similar to many of the companies here at Deploy. You know, early on, we were backed from many grant contributions from the Department of Energy. We partnered on many aspects of new geothermal technology development. We actually were part of the Activate program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. So we were back in 2018, got kind of our start through some DOE research programs and grant funding. And on the private side, it was really venture capital funding. So funds like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Congruent Ventures stepped in and got us up early on. You know, those funds that specialized in looking at companies that were so early in their development that it was really just an idea or a PowerPoint slide, but would sit in and understand the technology with you. And then as we expanded, what we've brought in is a lot more institutional investors. We've actually gotten investment from the oil and gas industry now. We raised a Series D round in February of this year that was $244 million Series D. And that was actually led by Dev.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the gold New tech deployment is actually an operating project, right? So since this is a deploy tech focus conference, I'll say TRL9, technology readiness level 9, the final hurdle along that way, which is actually the project working in its intended environment and operating conditions. And that's something we achieved with enhanced geothermal systems actually.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's only like 300 degrees Fahrenheit. That's considered cold for geothermal. And so we needed to figure out how to develop the tools and techniques to go much higher temperature than that. We're now doing projects up to 440 degrees Fahrenheit and are drilling, and that has taken an enormous amount of tech development to make that happen. And it also turns out that the places that are hot geologically overlap very often with granite, which is a much harder rock type than shale. So in order to take these technologies from oil and gas and make them work in geothermal, we had to develop techniques to deal with the fact that the geology is different and it's much harder, oftentimes a much more challenging engineering environment. And so our company's been around for seven years now, and a lot of that work has been trying to figure out what are now solved problems in oil and gas. How do you solve them in a completely different context, oftentimes where the rock is harder and the temperatures are hotter and the operation of the reservoir is very different.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a drilling engineer there, and I learned what geothermal was at the time, and I got really excited because I realized that the technological gap of getting high flow rates out of low permeability formations really was the exact same. Whenever you looked at geothermal, that's what held shale back. That's what was holding geothermal back. And the fact that these new technologies had opened up oil and gas meant it could be done for geothermal too. But the process of taking that technique and applying it to geothermal has involved an enormous amount of technical work because there's a lot different between oil and gas and geothermal. The first thing that's probably pretty obvious is we look for much higher temperatures. So, you know, the Eagleford, when I was drilling in South Texas, is actually considered very hot for an oil and gas basin on shore.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yeah, Armageddon actually, I thought it was a documentary the first time I saw it. Great. And you're right. I actually started my career as a drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry. And there's a lot of technology overlap between oil and gas and geothermal. And that's why the shale revolution and all the technological development that's happened as a result of that has had spillover effects that have moved the needle on geothermal technology. But there's also a lot that's different. And actually, the origins of Fervo, I got the ideas for this when I was drilling in the Eagleford Shale in South Texas. And the Eagleford had been a resource that people had known about for over 100 years, but it lacked the permeability to produce economic quantities of oil. And so it was ignored really until the late 2000s. And really, it was the process of horizontal drilling where you could drill deep and then horizontally across the shale layer and the hydraulic fracturing process to create permeability that allowed those wells to be economic and kind of launch the shale boom. And I was looking at what I was doing in my career.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enhanced geothermal systems is really the whole concept that you could use new technology to go to deeper resources or impermeable rock where the hot water or the steam wouldn't flow on its own and still make geothermal work. And so an enhanced geothermal systems, oftentimes you're going deeper. In many cases, you're doing something to create permeability in the reservoir so it can work in more places. And the key there is you get all the positive attributes of geothermal, but you're not limited to just doing it in places like Iceland's geology. So the opportunity is huge. In the US today, geothermal only accounts for about three gigawatts of power, so less than 1% of the US electric grid. But the resource potential is massive. We just worked on a paper that was published as a collaboration with Princeton that actually showed pathways to get up to 750 gigawatts of geothermal power by mid-century. So if we unlock it with the right technology, this could be an enormous resource.”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very big. That's the short answer. So, first off, great to be with y'all. I'm a regular odd lots listener. So it's a treat to be with y'all. Geothermal, what is geothermal and what is advanced geothermal? It's a great question. So geothermal isn't new. Even power generation from geothermal isn't new. The first power plant for geothermal came online actually over 100 years ago in Italy. So it's been something that's been around for a long time. But historically, even though it has really everything you want in an energy resource, it's carbon-free, low environmental footprint. It works 24-7. It's been very limited to very specific geology. So up until very recently, the story of geothermal is you either have the geology of Iceland, where steam is literally coming out of the ground or certain hot spots like Northern California or New Zealand, or you don't have geothermal. And those were kind of the only two options. So those places blessed with it had a great energy resource, but it certainly wasn't widespread. Advanced geothermal or”
2024-12-13 · Odd Lots · Tim Latimer on Solving the Financing Problem for Geothermal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source