Tam Latimer has raised more than $400 million to pursue his green dream of unlocking limitless zero-carbon thermal energy from Earth’s crust.

_{By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff}

Tim Latimer has always liked digging. “When I was 7 years old I deci-ded I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and just kept digging for a week,” he recalls. “I had seen some TV show about a cool tunnel clubhouse, and I wanted to make my own.” Later, as a teenager, he watched in 2008 as the Sandy Creek Energy Station—the last large coal-fired plant built in the United States—broke ground five miles from his home in tiny Riesel, Texas, and grew to tower over the flat rural landscape. “That became a very visual reminder. Energy is vital to our lives, but there’s positives and negatives with that kind of development.”

Those twin obsessions—digging deep and creating energy—have taken Latimer, still just 35 and an alumnus of the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, to the cusp of what could turn out to be either a breakthrough in the quest for zero-carbon-emitting energy or an expensive pipe dream.

As chief executive and cofounder of Houston-based Fervo Energy, he has raised more than $400 million for a plan to liberate practically unlimited geothermal energy (generated from the heat of Earth’s core) from superhot rocks at least 8,000 feet underground by employing the same “fracking” techniques used to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock. Fervo’s investors include Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, traditional oil-and-gas producers, Mark Zuckerberg and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate change–focused venture capital fund organized by Bill Gates and backed by a pack of fellow billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio and Reid Hoffman.

Over the next three years, Fervo plans to use a 166-foot-tall drilling rig to punch a total of 80 boreholes (a.k.a. wells) in the Escalante Desert near Milford, Utah. Each of these holes—Fervo has already drilled 20—is about ten inches in diameter and goes down a mile and a half, then horizontally for nearly another mile. This is tough drilling through solid granite rock that’s close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Once a hole is drilled, high-pressure water mixed with sand is blasted down it to open fractures in the rock.

Friends In High Places

One of the earliest investors in Fervo was fracking-services giant Liberty Energy. “I am a believer in the idea and in the team,’’ Liberty CEO Chris Wright told Forbes in an interview before he was tapped by President-elect Trump to become Secretary of Energy.

_{You can read more about Wright and his views on climate change and alternative energy here.}

Fervo uses sensors to pinpoint where those fractures have spread and then drills the next well so that its expected fractures intersect with those created by the first. At that point, with a pair of wells ready, Fervo injects cold water down one, which floods into the cracks in the rocks. The water takes the heat out of the rock and becomes steam, which flows back up through the second well to the surface for use as thermal energy to run a turbine. Each pair of wells creates a closed loop, recycling the cooled and condensed water down into the first well to be reheated.

In October, less than four years after leasing the land, Latimer received crucial federal permits to scale Fervo’s Utah project, known as Cape Station. There, he aims to produce 2,000 megawatts (two gigawatts) of zero-carbon geothermal power at a cost of “several billion” by 2030, he hopes. That’s enough for more than 2 million homes.

Fracked geothermal “is going to be as revolutionary for clean energy as it was for oil and gas,” Latimer says. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory figures such hot rocks could generate 12% of the United States’ electri-city by 2050.

It won’t be cheap—at least not at first. But Latimer hopes to repeat the plummeting cost curve of solar power, which over the last 15 years has gotten 80% cheaper. At six cents per kilowatt hour (including capital costs and the benefit of federal subsidies), solar now beats coal at 12 cents or natural gas at eight cents, according to calculations by Lazard. Professor Samuel Noynaert of Texas A&M University, who has studied geothermal for decades, points to a Department of Energy estimate that it will take some $25 billion to get advanced geothermal efforts to commercial liftoff and another $250 billion to scale to about 100 gigawatts—enough to power Texas.

With 20 wells done, Fervo has cut the drilling time for each from 70 days to 21 and reduced drilling costs by half. Latimer projects Cape Station’s costs will eventually come down to 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour, which would make it competitive with new utility-scale solar and wind projects.

Maybe AI will speed things up. Data center reliability is why tech giants—many of which have made public commitments to renewable energy—are suddenly hot for nuclear power. Google has contracted for new reactors from startup Kairos. Microsoft aims to reboot Three Mile Island; Amazon paid $650 million in March for a data center co-located with a Pennsylvania reactor. But geothermal energy might be a better long-term option. Like nuclear, geothermal is produced around the clock, not just when the sun shines or the wind blows. Bonus: It’s safer and there’s no nasty waste.

Fervo has presold 115 megawatts of its power under a long-term contract with Google’s data centers and another 320 megawatts to Southern California Edison. Cape Station is strategically sited near a wind farm with 165 turbines, so there are already high-voltage transmission lines at the ready.

It also helps that Milford, Utah, is near the eastern edge of the Ring of Fire, a belt of volcanoes that arc across the Pacific Ocean, so hot rocks are relatively close to the surface. Plus, there are no concerns about endangered species, historic burial sites or Nimby activists in Milford (pop. 1,800), which is hungry for jobs. One big risk: if President-elect Trump makes good on his campaign pledge to kill green energy subsidies contained in the landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, scrambling the economics of the plan.

In 2008, Latimer headed off to the University of Tulsa to study mechanical engineering. By his senior year, the big talk in the petroleum-centric engineering departments was about novel fracking techniques enabling wildcatters to get rich extracting oil and gas from shale rock formations.

“I wanted to work in what seemed to be the boom,” he says.

He snagged an entry-level job as a drilling engineer on a rig working the Eagle Ford shale field in south Texas. Production was exploding, but the rock was so hot (300 degrees Fahrenheit) that it kept frying the drilling gear and sensors used by Latimer’s rig. His boss tasked him with finding equipment that could better survive the heat.

“I had never heard of geothermal before,” Latimer admits. He started reading up. For decades, energy giants such as Chevron and Getty Oil had tried to exploit geothermal energy but couldn’t figure out how to do it at scale. Lati-mer came across a 2006 analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggesting that new drilling methods needed to be developed to make geothermal energy commercially viable.

He recalls laughing out loud. He was already using simi-lar methods to frack shale oil rock. “The first thought I had was this idea is so obvious, someone must have done it already,” he says. He started asking around. Turns out his fellow oil frackers didn’t care about geothermal, and the geothermal folks didn’t appreciate how much drilling technology had advanced. “It was like they were living in a different decade,” marvels Latimer, an eighth-generation Texan.

He became fixated on applying fracking technology to hot rocks and wrote an essay about his new mission that earned him admission to Stanford, where he simultaneously pursued an MBA and a master’s degree studying geothermal engineering. There he met Jack Norbeck, who was writing a Ph.D. thesis on how to tap geothermal without causing earthquakes.

In 2017, after finishing their respective degrees, the duo launched Fervo, with Norbeck, now 37, as chief technology officer. They were quickly accepted into the prestigious

Cyclotron Road program at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The two-year fellowship offers entrepreneurs a chance to work with experts on their startups.

The DOE was already studying geothermal’s promise. In 2015, it considered five possible locations for a first-of-its-kind Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) and was persuaded to build it in Milford by Joseph Moore, a University of Utah prof who was experi-menting with geothermal fracking as an academic pursuit. As a federal entity, FORGE published all its findings publicly, saving Fervo years of work and millions of dollars. “It was a big accelerator for us,” Latimer says.

Latimer cribbed another valuable lesson from the shale oil boom: Lease early and lease often. So, while still in Cyclo-tron Road, he used a couple million in funds from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others to lease 600 acres adjacent to FORGE from ranchers, the feds and Utah’s Trust Lands Administration.

In 2022, Fervo raised $138 million—money it used in part for a pilot project at a Nevada geothermal plant that was producing too little steam. Latimer and Norbeck revived the plant by drilling and fracturing a pair of 7,700-foot-deep wells. It was the first time the paired-well technique, which had been explored theoretically, was put to work in the field, according to Latimer.

This past February, Fervo raised another $244 million at an estimated $850 million valuation. The biggest checks came from Houston energy billionaire John Arnold, who invested a reported $30 million, and Oklahoma City–based Devon Energy, which put in $100 million and now has a 17% stake. Latimer won’t say what share he retains, but Forbes estimates his stake is worth at least $50 million.

It’s no surprise that with such big ambitions, Latimer faces lots of risks. The law Trump wants to repeal offers geothermal developers tax credits equal to 30% of invested capital for projects started by 2032. Alternatively, they can choose a transferable 2.75-cent tax credit for every kilowatt hour of electricity produced over 10 years. Lati-mer insists that Fervo will be all right under Trump so long as any federal policy changes don’t put it at a disadvantage rela-tive to other renewable energy sources.

Fervo is not the only game in town. Houston-based Quaise Energy has raised $96 million to pursue a novel drilling technology, developed at MIT, that involves blasting the deep granite with high-energy waves—think a microwave oven times 10,000. Sage Geosystems, run by former Shell executive Cindy Taff, is perfec-ting a single-well approach that provides on-demand power. The startup is building a pilot plant near San Antonio and has sold Meta on an up-to-150-megawatt system.

The biggest nontechnical challenges to developing geothermal projects are permitting, water and land. Each well requires millions of gallons of water, and even with a closed-loop system like Fervo’s, water is lost to evaporation and leaks. (On the plus side, geothermal can use stormwater, untrea-ted wastewater, even saltwater.) The vast western tracts managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management—about 70% of Utah alone—offer plenty of potential geothermal sites. As for permitting, geothermal, with its green hue, should face fewer Nimby issues than oil-and-gas fracking, though Sage’s Taff admits some would consider enormous drilling rigs to be eyesores regardless.

Fracking can also cause minor earthquakes. So far, though, sensors at FORGE have picked up tremors no greater than magnitude 1.9—well below the threshold of concern. Could it be disrupting the heat at Earth’s core? That’s a far-fetched worry, since volcanoes naturally vent far more energy than humans could ever hope to capture. Heated to 9,000 degrees by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, the core should stay hot for a few billion more years.

As a practical matter, the production of a geothermal well could decline by about 10% over five years, according to Taff. That means Fervo will have to keep drilling to maintain energy output. This is no big deal, Lati-mer says—at Eagle Ford, fracked wells might come online gushing 1,000 barrels of oil per day only to fall off to 600 bpd a year later.

“Heat moves through rock very, very slowly. Over time, if we were to not produce, the heat would return to that area,” he says. And he has a simple solution to the problem of not enough heat: “Go deeper.”

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