The greenest reason to drill: clean geothermal power that's always on
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Before he founded the geothermal startup Fervo in 2017, Tim Latimer was a drilling engineer for the oil and gas industry — a job he loved. “Honestly, if it wasn't for climate change, I probably wouldn’t have ever changed my career,” he says this week on Zero. Now Latimer is applying his drilling know-how to Fervo’s wells, supercharging their energy production in the process. The company opened its first power plant in Nevada late in 2023, and is now in the process of opening another plant in Utah. Latimer and Akshat Rathi chat about opportunities in geothermal, the infernal permitting process, and why Fervo has its sights on expanding into Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey and the Philippines.
Explore further:
- Past episode with the National Grid’s Sanjeet Sanghera about the need to update the grid on the path to net zero
- Past episode with Bill Gates about investing in nuclear power and other green energy plants
- Past episode with BNEF’s Claire Curry about how clean energy technology startups can succeed in a difficult investment climate
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim and Monique Mulima. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshit Rati. This week, Drill Baby Drill. |
| 0:13.0 | The drilling industry has come up with some of the most creative job titles. |
| 0:20.0 | Tell me more. You could imagine. Tool pusher. has come up with some of the most creative job titles. Yeah. |
| 0:21.2 | Tell me more. You can imagine. |
| 0:23.0 | Tool pusher. |
| 0:25.2 | No. |
| 0:25.7 | Driller, Motor Man, mudlogger. |
| 0:30.0 | These are all job titles when you're out on a drilling site. |
| 0:34.4 | And without one of them, you can't get the work done. |
| 0:37.0 | You need everybody. |
| 0:38.4 | I recently got up with Tim Latimer, CEO of Fervo, a geothermal startup. |
| 0:43.8 | And we got talking about the foxy flair of oil and gas industry job titles. |
| 0:49.1 | Because he is hiring. |
| 0:51.3 | And the geothermal plants he is building requires the expertise of the mud |
| 0:55.6 | logger and the motorman among others. Geothermal power works by sending water to hot |
| 1:03.4 | rocks underground using that heat to run a turbine which creates electricity. |
| 1:13.6 | This kind of geothermal power has been around for more than a century. |
| 1:17.1 | What Tim is doing is a little bit different. |
| 1:23.7 | Fervo was founded in 2017, and it uses fracking technology from the oil and gas industry to supercharge geothermal power plants. |
| 1:27.1 | You know, drilling in a lot of ways is drilling. |
| 1:29.0 | If you're a phenomenal driller for oil and gas, you're going to do very well in geothermal. |
| 1:33.1 | And so it does create this great opportunity for us to tap into that skill set. |
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