HOUSTON — America's new clean-energy future could be built on an unlikely foundation: the technology and experience of big oil companies.
At least, that's the hope of representatives of big oil companies, tech startups, scientists and climate groups meeting in Houston this week to launch a series of $10 million summits.
Their goal: to use oil and gas technology – an industry whose products are a major driver of the breakdown of the Earth's major natural systems – to build a new mainstay of America's power sector.
That new power is geothermal energy, which harnesses heat deep within the earth to generate electricity.
The Department of Energy claims that geothermal, which offers a way to produce carbon-free energy on demand without major technological breakthroughs, could power up to 260 million homes by the middle of this century.
In April, The authorities predictedA public and private investment of just $25 billion over the next few decades—less than the cost of recent nuclear projects—could begin to snowball the innovations that make that future a reality.
Those benefits, along with a wave of federally funded research that has demonstrated early-stage geothermal technology, have helped spur the launch of a vibrant Texas startup scene. On Tuesday, Houston-based startup Fervo announcedRaised $100 millionFor a contracted project to deliver 400 megawatts of geothermal energy to the Nevada power grid by the second half of the century.
And last month, Sage Geosystems, also based in the city, signed a deal with Meta to provide underground energy storage to power corporate data centers and to feed electricity directly into the Texas power grid, both efforts to use geothermal-related technology to compete in Texas' burgeoning battery storage market.
Geothermal resources lie beneath the surface in other parts of the country, waiting to be tapped. In June, geothermal energy advocacy group Project Innerspace released a widely disseminated map showing the vast geothermal energy potential across the United States.
The current summit has a particular focus on next-generation geothermal, which uses hydraulic fracturing technology to drill artificial reservoirs into hot, dry rock thousands of feet underground.
This is an approach that offers significant, yet unproven advantages in the current energy landscape: next-generation geothermal power can produce electricity when solar and wind power are unavailable, and it does not have the mineral supply chain issues of batteries, the river dependency and seasonal volatility of hydropower, or the price fluctuations and pollution of fossil fuels.
It also offers the only current means, other than nuclear power, of generating electricity on demand in the specific locations where it is needed without warming the climate.
However, despite its clear potential, the industry faces obstacles and bottlenecks that prevent it from fully developing. (GEODE) ConsortiumThe initiative, which launched this week, aims to bring together representatives from industry, policy and academia to identify these challenges and determine how to address them.
The consortium has brought together “the best minds in the energy industry,” said Jamie Beard, founder and director of Project Innerspace, which co-runs the Department of Energy-funded project.
Among them were representatives of the first generation of geothermal startups, including companies like Sage, Ferbo and Bedrock Energy, scientists from national labs like Los Alamos and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and labor leaders from organizations like the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the International Union of Electrical Workers.
Also in attendance were representatives from major oil companies, including Oxy, BP, Devon and Chevron, some of whose executives see geothermal, which relies heavily on drilling, as the most attractive renewable source for their companies as they seek to expand their energy portfolios away from fossil fuels.
As it stands, the geothermal sector struggles with a problem common to all emerging industries: difficulty raising sufficient funding for projects, no matter how promising, that are yet to prove themselves.
As the GEODE working group concluded this week, much of the industry's handicap has to do with a lack of track record, an obstacle that faced wind power in the early 2000s and solar power in the 2010s.
Because the first commercial geothermal projects are still in their early stages, there isn’t enough data to convince investors to invest in new projects that would help provide more data. And without a clear demand for geothermal jobs, workforce training programs won’t be able to produce the skilled workers that would enable the sector to expand and, as a result, create more jobs.
Other potential issues relate to the sector's current reliance on water, which is a problem in Texas and the West, home to some of the nation's best geothermal resources, but where rivers and groundwater are declining at the same time.
Geothermal also faces cultural and social challenges, including concerns about earthquakes and water pollution, public distrust and aversion to oil and gas companies, and worries that the new geothermal drilling revolution will repeat the environmental destruction and injustices of the shale boom that began in the mid-2000s.
This boom made the United States one of the world's leading oil and gas producers, but the supply of oil and gas was dependent on wells and pipelines.I often wentIt is buried underground without the consent of the landowners, causing water pollution, cancer risks,Social conflict.
GEODE aims to get ahead of these kinds of problems. Through a year of meetings held around the country, the organization aims to get a clear picture of the technical, social and financial issues holding back the industry and explore how existing knowledge about oil and gas can help solve those challenges.
If approved in future budgets by Congress, the program could then raise up to $155 million in Department of Energy grants. To companies and research institutions aiming to solve these problems.
The ultimate goal is to create a never-before-seen demonstration series of new geothermal technologies by the end of the decade.
It is based on a productive model of public-private partnerships that have helped bring geothermal power to a level where large-scale commercial trading is possible. For example, Fervo's recent transaction relied heavily on and contributed to:A study conducted in southern UtahFrom the Frontier Observatories for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) program.
Many of the industry's rapid advances in recent years have relied on a decades-old tradition of knowledge transfer between oil & gas and geothermal.
For example, diamond cutter drill bits currently used in oil and gas drillingOriginally developedFederal researchers conducted geothermal power research in the 1980s, but today the oil industry expertise that can help with geothermal ranges from the highly technical, such as how to do horizontal drilling, to the more institutional.
Oil and gas companies have spent decades learning how to finance big, risky projects and how to bring together diverse teams of geologists, engineers and surveyors to drill wells quickly—all things that geothermal developers need to do to keep costs down and projects attractive to investors.
In an interview with The Hill on Thursday, Felvo CEO Tim Latimer praised the GEODE effort, in which his company is a part.
“The oil and gas industry has a lot of technical resources that can be systematically applied to the geothermal sector,” Latimer told The Hill, “and we're really excited to have a consortium to drive that forward.”
Chad Timken of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), which co-runs GEODE, told The Hill that while there was some “mistrust” at first, “as the days went on, it became, 'yeah, we have a lot in common.'”
In a perhaps contradictory statement for the climate movement, Timken noted that knowledge transfer can go both ways: “There are some very hot reservoirs out there that oil and gas aren't touching because we don't have the technology to drill that deep,” he added.
“The goal of the summit is to transfer technology from oil and gas to geothermal,” he said. “But it's also asking, 'What can oil and gas get from geothermal that can benefit the geothermal industry?'”
SPE spokeswoman Dana Otilio said that although Timken coordinates GEODE, he does not speak for the entire organization and that his “ad hoc, casual and personal” comments “do not represent an SPE position.”
“As SPE's spokesperson, I can assure you that SPE has no hidden motives or alternative plans regarding its involvement in GEODE other than converting its oil and natural gas knowledge into geothermal energy,” Otilio added.
Ferbo's Latimer said in an interview Thursday that the consortium also wants to focus beyond exploration and drilling – areas where recent advances have rapidly reduced costs – to ways to produce electricity from geothermal wells more efficiently and at lower cost.
Ferbo is seeking help in that area because, as company executives noted in a presentation last week, the largest costs the company faces today are “on the ground” costs.
“We need more efficient cooling technologies that don't use water, more efficient real-time monitoring, and production and injection pumps designed for geothermal,” he said.
In addition to technical challenges, the group will have to deal with political ones.
“You have a situation where you have two industries that haven't necessarily gotten along well in the past, or two ideologies that don't seem to mesh very well together,” SPE's Timken said.
Beard, the Project Innerspace director, argues that while geothermal energy is currently a form of energy that enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support, it risks being torn apart by America's political polarization unless the sector actively tackles the divide between the renewable and oil and gas worlds.
That's why part of the initial $10 million that GEODE participants pledged to launch the summit was dedicated to hiring a conflict management group with experience working in war zones from post-war Guatemala and Northern Ireland to post-apartheid South Africa.
“We come from different cultures, different levels of trust, different levels of respect,” Harvard psychologist Josh Green said in a speech at the end of the second day.
“If this was successful, I think it was because there was a collaborative culture that embraced the whole group.”
