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Tim Latimer Profile picture
@TimMLatimer
Jul 18 • 17 tweets • 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
1/Today I am thrilled to announce, after years of work, our team @fervoenergy has developed a major advancement in geothermal, proven it at the field scale, and is set to deliver commercial next-gen geothermal decades ahead of schedule. THREAD. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
2/The Fervo journey began 10 years ago when I was still working in the oil and gas industry as a drilling engineer. I loved the work, but I was passionate about climate change. I saw all the tech advancement around me and realized that it could be used for geothermal energy. Image
3/The US had gotten dramatically better at drilling since the shale revolution began, and I knew that drilling costs were the major barrier to geothermal deployment. Innovations like the PDC drilling bit, like I wrote about here, had changed the game.
4/With dramatically lower drilling costs, it would now be possible to drill down to depth and then drill horizontally for enhanced geothermal, significantly increasing the productivity of the resource, and enabling development anywhere. Image
5/Unfortunately, I found almost no one who agreed. There were, however, a few folks in Stanford’s geothermal program working on that idea. So I headed there for grad school, and co-authored this paper on drilling innovation’s impact on geothermal.
https://t.co/uSaUUmM0Xxpangea.stanford.edu/ERE/db/IGAstan…
Image
6/This paper is the basis of Fervo’s work: geothermal has long been held back by drilling costs. We just got a lot better at drilling. Let’s make this work together. Dr. @JackNorbeck from Stanford’s Geothermal Program agreed, and we launched Fervo in 2017.
7/The last six years have been quite a journey. I never expected how much skepticism and pushback we would receive for what we thought was an obvious idea. So we set out to systematically prove this was a truly revolutionary, and viable, way of doing geothermal.
8/We’ve been fortunate to get support along the way, from customers to philanthropists to VCs to the DOE, who’ve believed in our vision and worked tirelessly to help us make it a reality with over $200m in investment, most recently from Devon Energy. axios.com/pro/climate-de…
9/But by and large geothermal has been left out of the conversation. It’s often not included in grid modeling forecasts, when it is, it’s viewed as too early stage or too far away, and receives the least government support of any energy resource.
10/For example in this CPUC/E3 study below, EGS is categorized as a “TRL” 5 technology. That’s out of a scale of 1-9. In this Energy Futures Study, it forecasts first commercialization in 2035. Not picking on these studies, most don’t even include geothermal!
Image
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11/This is mostly because of a self-fulfilling prophecy that enhanced geothermal can’t work. Well, that changes today. @FervoEnergy is pleased to announce the production test results of our commercial pilot. https://t.co/5QukH1BuGefervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-a…
Image
12/We’ve successfully completed and tested the world’s first next-gen geothermal system. To do this, there were dozens of technology challenges that we were able to overcome years ahead of schedule by leveraging advanced technology from the oil and gas industry. Image
13/@Energy and @SecGranholm recently launched the “Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot” which details steps for a dramatic increase in geothermal deployment in the United States. nrel.gov/news/features/…
@ENERGY @SecGranholm 14/We’ve been thrilled to partner with @energy and pioneering research work like @utahforge for years. It is thanks to their support, and support of our suppliers, investors, and partners, that we have been able to prove enhanced geothermal is ready for rapid deployment.
@ENERGY @SecGranholm @utahforge 15/And the world desperately needs it. Study after study show the need for clean firm power. Climate change is rapidly worsening. We need a reliable, affordable, grid. Geothermal is that missing piece of the puzzle.
@ENERGY @SecGranholm @utahforge 16/We could not be more thrilled to announce these results. We are already at work on our next projects, orders of magnitude larger than our pilot. More to come on that soon. Cost-effective, clean, firm, reliable geothermal is at our fingertips, and we’re ready to rock and roll.
@ENERGY @SecGranholm @utahforge 17/There will be a lot of opportunities to learn more. We are hosting Fervo Tech Day in Houston, TX tomorrow to release more detailed results. For the academics out there, here is a preprint on EarthArXiv. And stay tuned for a @drvolts pod on Friday!
eartharxiv.org/repository/vie…

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More from @TimMLatimer

Tim Latimer Profile picture
Feb 27
1/There is a major pipeline of talent moving from O&G to renewables, and hiring talented people from O&G has been core to @fervoenergy mission and strategy from the start. Fervo Development Geoscience Lead Emma McConville featured in the NYT on this trend.
nytimes.com/2023/02/27/bus…
2/I started my career in O&G as well. But in the time since I left the industry, the O&G workforce has been reduced 20%, and struggles with the booms and busts and a growing awareness of climate change has led a lot of folks to look into a transition to renewables.
3/And they are a great fit. Some of the most talented people I've ever worked with are from O&G, and we are proud to have hired a large contingent from the industry at Fervo and to be in demand as the employer of choice for many people looking to transition to clean energy.
Read 4 tweets
Tim Latimer Profile picture
Feb 23
1/Excited to share some BIG news on a new effort at @fervoenergy to optimize direct air capture (DAC) of carbon by addressing the energy needs of DAC systems, funded by @ChanZuckerberg: hybrid geothermal + DAC facilities. A THREAD.
washingtonpost.com/climate-soluti…
2/First up, the case for Direct Air Capture (DAC) and negative emissions technologies. Nearly every serious climate scenario requires us to transition to net negative emissions to control climate change. It’s just the reality at this point. carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-ip… Image
3/It’s also clear that no one solution on carbon removal will be large enough to solve the problem itself. There are a lot of options--and we may need all of them. @orbuch has the definitive write up of the challenge and options here. orbuch.com/carbon-removal/ Image
Read 15 tweets
Tim Latimer Profile picture
Feb 18, 2022
One conundrum of hardtech companies: even though most major startup successes have been systems level innovations, it’s so much easier to communicate a widget level innovation that those ideas still attract more funding from VCs and public research grants alike.
Lots of examples here but I can just imagine early days of Tesla. The idea that watching the cost curve of Li-ion batteries and seeing that it would intersect with a tipping point for affordable cars if you engineered the hell out of it is hard to communicate.
Much harder than if there was some magical chemistry breakthrough or equivalent. And I’m sure they got all the usual questions. “Can’t anyone just do this? What’s new here?” But years ahead insight, coupled with awesome engineering, is it’s own hardtech breakthrough.
Read 5 tweets
Tim Latimer Profile picture
Feb 8, 2022
1/I get asked a lot why geothermal seems to suddenly be getting a lot of attention. There’s a market/policy reason and a tech reason. A short THREAD.
2/Market/policy: despite the rhetoric, up until 3 years ago few people actually took deep decarbonization seriously. Low level targets were all people thought could be achieved. 100% clean electricity standards and 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy commitments have expanded the ambition.
3/This expanded ambition is important because study after study shows that if you want a true carbon free grid, instead of just 60-80%, you need to have a clean firm power resource like geothermal as a portion of the grid mix.
Read 6 tweets
Tim Latimer Profile picture
Sep 19, 2021
1/I recently read American Prometheus, about Robert Oppenheimer, to get some insight into rapid, large scale science innovation. Oppenheimer famously led the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb. A lot of interesting lessons, so, a THREAD.
2/The first reflection I had, which is counterintuitive and really wasn’t what I expected: the Manhattan Project was actually much smaller scale than I expected. What made it so successful wasn’t some outlandish budget, at least in modern terms.
3/Let me explain. The Manhattan Project spent ~$2B, or ~$20B ($4B/yr) in today’s dollars. An enormous amount, to be sure, but comparatively, smaller than the DOE budget today ($46B/yr) or even individual company R&D like Amazon (42B/yr). sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL346…
Read 22 tweets
Tim Latimer Profile picture
Jun 4, 2021
1/Nearly everything we take for granted in the modern world is the result of government funded research and public-private partnerships. @apoorv_bh89 recently laid down this challenge. Challenge accepted.

How the McRib came from gov research, a THREAD:
2/The weird but true story of the government-backed McRib goes back, way back, to the days of WWII. Supplying soldiers in combat with healthy and tasty food to keep them going in trying conditions has been a challenge for millennia.
3/WWII meant delivering a lot of things, including food, on a size and scale that had never been done before. The military partnered with the private sector to provide better and better options for combat meals. Famously, this produced the M&M. militarytimes.com/off-duty/2016/…
Read 13 tweets

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