Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Going deep on next-gen geothermal

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Investment is on the rise in geothermal, where advances in drilling techniques are driving down the cost of generation right as the grid needs more clean, firm, dispatchable power to meet rising load growth. And enhanced-geothermal startup Fervo is leading the pack of entrants, signing agreements to provide power to Southern California Edison and Google.  So how ready are these next-generation geothermal technologies to scale? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Roland Horne, professor of earth sciences at Stanford, where he leads the university’s geothermal program. Shayle and Roland cover topics like: Geothermal’s historical challenges of limited geography and high up-front costs Three pathways of next-generation geothermal: enhanced, closed-loop, and super-deep (also known as super-critical) Knowledge transfer from the oil and gas industry Advances in drilling technology that cut across multiple pathways  Recommended resources U.S. Department of Energy: Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Next-Generation Geothermal Power Latitude Media: Fervo eyes project-level finance as it plans for geothermal at scale Make sure to listen to our new podcast, Political Climate – an insider’s view on the most pressing policy questions in energy and climate. Tune in every other Friday for the latest takes from hosts Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to also check out Living Planet, a weekly show from Deutsche Welle that brings you the stories, facts, and debates on the key environmental issues affecting our planet. Tune in to Living Planet every Friday on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want to win Catalyst merch? Tell your friends about the show. We’ll give you a unique link that you can share. For every friend who signs up with your link, you’ll get a chance to win. Sign up here.

Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. Using batch drilling also speeds up the process. That 10-year period can probably be compressed to 5, maybe even 3 or 4. What it needs next is 10 more furvos to go out and develop these projects. This week, Hot Rocks. enough set. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure,

but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made.

Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shell Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at energy impact partners. Welcome. All right. So first, big news, we have catalysts swag. How do you get it? You ask.

Great question. Well, go to latitudemedia.com slash referrals. And you'll get a unique link to send to your friends to tell them about. the show. For every friend who signs up using your unique referral code, you'll have a chance to win some of our highly coveted swag. All right, on to the show. So geothermal power is cool, right? It's clean, it's firm, it's proven. We've been using it for decades, maybe 100 years in various parts of the world. But it has two challenges historically that I think have been tough to overcome and are why, despite the fact that we do have a lot of geothermal around the world,

that hasn't really been expanding as a resource, particularly in light of the fact that there's such a focus on decarbonization, those two challenges being the first one, which is the biggest one, which is geologic. Conventional geothermal is really only available to us economically in a fairly small set of places in the world. If you just look at the United States, basically all of the geothermal that we've built in the United States is in Nevada,

or California. The second is economic. They're tied to each other, of course. You can get geothermal almost anywhere, but it's not going to be cost effective. So the question is, how can we make geothermal cheaper and cheap enough to make it a real large-scale tool in the toolkit in as many places as possible to decarbonize? So it's an interesting time now because there has been a serious resurgence in interest over the past few years, unsurprisingly, in geothermal. And that's come in the form both of development of traditional conventional geothermal, but probably more interestingly, a suite of next-gen geothermal ideas around ways to either widen the aperture of where geothermal could work or lower the cost or both. And there are multiple of them. They all carry their own

costs and advantages, but they're all sort of nearing the path to market right now, or at least some of them are. So I wanted to run through them one by one. And for this one, I brought on Dr. Roland Horn. Roland is a professor of earth sciences at Stanford University. He leads Stanford's Geothermal Program. With no further ado, here's Roland. Roland, welcome. Thank you.

Good morning. Good morning. Let's talk to geothermal. Before we get into all the newfangled next-gen geothermal concepts, can you just describe from a technology standpoint, how does traditional geothermal power work? What actually happens? what's the mechanism, and what have been the historical challenges with it?

Sure, so people have been using the heat of the earth for thousands of years, but what we're interested in, of course, I think in talking about this today, is modern applications of electricity and heating buildings and things like that, which people have been doing electricity generation now for more than 100 years. But most of the modern sort of geothermal projects started in the late 19, 1950s, and there are certain parts of the world now using conventional geothermal in very significant ways. California is actually one of them.

Six percent of our electricity comes from geothermal. Ten percent of electricity in Nevada comes from geothermal, conventional geothermal. And there are countries in the world. Kenya notably takes 50 percent of its national electricity from geothermal, and several others taking a quarter or a third of their electricity. So it's a very significant resource in some places which are geologically advantageous. But unfortunately, there aren't all that many of them. So it's a very important resource in places where it's accessible,

but there are many other places where we don't find it. Yeah, can you describe in a bit more detail what makes a given location geologically favorable or unfavorable for geothermal? And then again, sort of like, what is our conventional, mechanism to exploit the heat of the earth? Sure. So the resources that have been developed in the countries I mentioned, Kenya, California, and many others, Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, they're all in volcanically active margins of the world,

so-called Ring of Fire around the Pacific and East African Rift Zone, places like that. So there are places where there is recent, volcanism that brings high temperature close to the surface where it's more accessible. But also importantly, there are places because of the recent volcanism and the kind of rocks that are found there, they are fractured and very permeable. And so the three things that you need for geothermal resource are heat, water, and permeability. So it's hot everywhere to, if you can drill deep enough, and almost the entire

planet is saturated with water, you know, at depths. But the places that don't have permeability are those where we can't easily access geothermal in the conventional sense. Okay, heat water and permeability. So the locations that do have that, so take Nevada, for example, where we get the most geothermal, at least within the U.S., what do you do? I mean, you drill a well. Like, what is the infrastructure required in a conventional geothermal project? Well, um, There's actually two kinds, but speaking broadly, first of all, you drill a well to extract the water and or steam from the subsurface. You run it through a power plant. Could either be a steam turbine or a binary turbine.

I'll come back to that in a minute. If you're just taking a steam or water out of the ground, you run it through the turbine, just like a conventional power plant. And then after it's come out of the turbine, you put it back in the ground again. so the water circulates through the power plant back into the ground. In the case of Nevada, where they use binary plants a lot, the water temperature is not especially high, and therefore the thermodynamics are not very good for the turbine efficiency. And therefore, instead of running a steam turbine,

they run a binary turbine in which they put the water through heat exchanges and use a binary working fluid for the turbine itself. that actually has the advantage of being able to use a lower temperature resource. And it also means that because the water never leaves the geothermal water, never leaves the heat exchanger, there's basically no emissions at all from the subsurface out into the atmosphere of the environment. The water stays in a pipe, goes back in the ground. It never sees a slide of day. So you describe one of what I think of as the two historical challenges for geothermal,

which is just geologic suitability, which is just geologic suitability, which has been kind of limited. The other one has been cost. Can you talk a little bit about what historically have been the major cost drivers for geothermal? Yes. So geothermal is actually not outrageously expensive. You know, places, there are certain places,

including here in California, where geothermal is one of the cheapest forms of electricity. The biggest cost driver for geothermal development is uncertainty. And because it's a resource, a geological resource, the fact that you don't know exactly how big it is and how long it's going to last, that translates into uncertainty

in the sizing of the plant and the duration of its performance, etc. And that, of course, in the end, cost your money to try and gather information to be surer of the resource, and it also cost you money in terms of uncertainty for the financial industry. If you're a bank and you have a chance to lend money to a solar farm,

we know exactly how big it's going to be, or a geothermal plant where you're not exactly sure you're going to charge the geothermal plant more for their funding. Okay, so we have this significantly sized global resource of geothermal already that has not been expanding as fast as one might hope, particularly in a world that is focused on decarbonization. And so along come a variety of new approaches, next-gen geothermal approaches, that hope to solve or mitigate one or both of these challenges of the geologic suitability

question and the cost question. I think of them as being on kind of a risk spectrum. They're all new, so they're all, I guess, presumably higher risk than conventional, but they're not all as risky as each other. So I want to walk through them. And for each one, maybe just describe the technical principle and the promise, but also sort of where are we in the de-risking phase? And so the ones I think we should talk about are EGS or enhanced geothermal.

We should talk about closed loop geothermal. We should talk about super deep, like super critical geothermal, maybe hybrid systems that are combinations of those. So I'll do it in that order, starting with EGS. Can you just describe what EGS is? a little bit about kind of where you think it is on the risk-reward spectrum? Sure. Before I do that, I should mention that actually none of these ideas are actually new.

Most of them have been around for 40, 50 years, and several of them tried already. EGS, perhaps, is the one that's been around the longest, first kind of postulated back in the 1960s at Los Alamos National Lab. And the basic idea, coming to the technical construct of the procedure, is, you know, exactly as we talked about before, the three things you need, heat, water, and permeability. The idea of an enhanced geothermal system is to take advantage of places where you don't have the permeability. So you find a place which is hot and basically provide your own permeability by fracturing the rock to create a permeable pass between the injection well and the production well

and sweep out the thermal energy from the hot rock and then basically operate it in a conventional way, a conventional geothermal way. So this is obviously taking lessons from what we've learned in oil and gas extraction via fracking and applying it to geothermal. Actually not. It precedes the fracking boom in oil and gas. So EGS systems have been developed since the 1970s, in fact.

Right, but presumably we can leverage the learnings from... That's correct. In the last few years, there has been a transfer of concept from oil and gas technology into what we might call new EGS. So EGS is a concept. It's been around a long time. But one of the reasons that it's sort of accelerated in interest as well as in practicality recently is the transfer or the adjustment of oil and gas. gas technology into geothermal.

How directly applicable do you think of the world of oil and gas fracking is to the world of EGS? Like, is it a one-for-one? You basically need to do the same thing, or there are key differences? There are some important differences. So there's obviously, there's always been a high degree of compatibility, if you like, between technology for oil and gas and technology for geothermal. But there's also some important differences.

It's not like you just take your contract from an oil and gas contractor and go do it in geothermal. There are some important distinctions between the two. One of them which also affects fracturing is the kind of rocks that you're dealing with. So oil and gas are fracturing sedimentary rocks, which tend to be more pliable, plastic. And geothermal is fracturing volcanic rocks, which are brittle and hard. And it's a somewhat different process, and it's a somewhat different result as a consequence. In some ways, it's harder, in some ways it's easier. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity.

But enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices

delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at Energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects.

Together we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so where are we today in the development of this new EGS, I guess? What has been proven in the field? What remains to be proven? Well, I think the only thing that remains to be proven is to do it at scale. So, as you may know, there's a company Fervo Energy which has been developing what we might call New EGS in Nevada and Utah. And they have intentionally, because two-thirds of the company is made up of people from oil and gas, they have taken the concepts from wall and gas specifically horizontal well drilling

which was not a thing in geothermal before and plug and purf stimulation which also was not a thing in previous EGS projects so they have gone and drilled a well pair in Nevada completed the well with casing from top to bottom again that's not what the wall way the wells are completed in geothermal normally. And then they've done multi-stage fracturing between the wells, which is common practice for or shale gas. So they have kind of proved out that technology in Nevada and put a well pair in operation already.

But now they're also doing a large-scale operation in Utah. And I'm not exactly sure what their ultimate size will be or their very big. plans, but their near-term plan is 90 megawatts, which is probably 20 times bigger than any of the former EGS projects, the old EGS projects that people have done. So let's talk about the promise here. I guess give me a sense of, okay, so this solves for permeability. You still need the heat relatively close to the surface, and you still need the water, but you don't need permeability, or at least as much permeability.

how wide an aperture does that open up geographically relative to conventional geothermal? Yeah, that's a good question. So actually, that's one of the focal areas of our research here at Stanford. We've been looking at, you know, specifically the continental United States to look at what is accessible with current drilling technology at current drilling costs to provide EGS electricity at a cost which is competitive to, other sources. The average cost of electricity in the US is somewhere around $80 a megawatt hour

and conventional geothermal is basically at that cost today. What we want to achieve is EGS at that same price. We've estimated that about half of the United States is accessible

for EGS at $80 a megawatt hour. Okay, so that's It's EGS. And that is, it seems to be the nearest term of the list that we're going to go through. As you said, Fervo already has a well-pair that produced some power. They're actively in development on a 90-mag-watt. Ultimately, I think, a 400-magwatt project. Let's go to the next one on the list, which is closed-loop. So can you start with just explaining the principle of closed-loop and the promise that it would offer? And then we could talk about the technical development and the

risk. Sure. So the idea in closed-loop is kind of of similar, you're making your own permeability in places where there are none, but the difference is in closed loop is that they want to drill a hole or multiple holes through the hot rock and connect them up to each other. So you're basically making either YouTube or it's more complicated than YouTube than making a network of holes, almost like drilling kind of a truck radiator in the subsurface with drilling technology and basically passing the fluid through the hot rock through drilled holes instead of through fractures. And what's the promise?

What would that enable? Well, it's very much like EGS. The idea is that you want to sweep heat out of the rock. It's also, much as I described, for EGS, a question of how much it's going to cost you. So at the moment, it's rather more expensive to drill holes than it is to drill a small number of holes and fracture between them.

And therefore, studies that Enral and others have shown that it's actually quite difficult to get the cost of closed loop down to the kind of numbers that you need to compete with other sources. One of the challenges is that unlike fracturing where you actually can drive a fracture for a long distance, so the EGS system recovers the heat from the rock. in a convective manner, you're actually sweeping water past large surface areas of fractures and getting your heat that way out of large volumes of rock. In a case of a drilled hole, the surface area of the hole is quite small, and therefore you depend a lot on conduction of thermal energy through the rock.

And rocks actually are not very good thermal conductors. Rocks are kind of insulators, actually. and therefore the effect is that you are cooling down a volume around the rock, you get that heat, but you don't get any more than that because it's hard for the heat to make its way through the rock to the well. So that means you have to drill a lot of holes. So the system, they're drawing a closed-loop system, sort of the first commercial pilot or whatever in Germany right now,

which they're planning 80 kilometers of holes, if I remember that number correctly, which is feasible, but quite expensive. Yeah, so you think of the challenge with closed loop as being not a technical one, can they do it so much as an economic one? Can you do it economically, given the number of kilometers of holes you have to drill?

That's correct. And would it offer the same or more or less, like say it worked and say it were economic, how do I think about, the aperture that that opens up geographically. It doesn't really make a great deal of difference, except, I mean, you still have to find the hot rock. You don't get around that issue.

You don't necessarily have to have rock with water in it anymore. You can do it through dry rock, but the large isn't much dry rock in the world. So in terms of geographically, it wouldn't be much different than anywhere else. But again, it's not a question of do it or not do it. It's a question of do it at what price. If you have a place which is super hot, then obviously you're going to get more energy and therefore it would lower the price

because you wouldn't need quite as many kilometers of wells to do it. Okay, so let's talk about, then let's move up the spectrum of risk and potentially reward and talk about super deep. So you mentioned before, the entire Earth has plenty of heat, if you go down deep enough. So the basic idea of super deep is just go down deep enough, essentially.

And then you've got a version of conventional, theoretically, anywhere, it's just a function of depth, right? Correct. The concept of super deep is a little different from that, in that what they're talking about is going to places which are super hot. So you're quite right. You drill deep enough, you can find temperatures that you can make use of. But the concept of super-deep, super-critical geothermal is to drill to very high temperatures and therefore just get a lot more energy out per well.

So again, it's technically feasible to do that, but the economics are advantageous because you get more energy out of your investment in drilling the one well. And talk to me about depth. How deep are traditional geothermal wells? how deep would you need to go to get this kind of economic benefit? Talk a little bit about the role of supercritical. What would this actually have to look like? Yeah, so conventional geothermal world is actually very quite a lot in depth. Again, it depends on the resource thereafter,

but it's not unusual. You could think of 7,000, 8,000 feet as being perhaps normal or average. I'm not exactly sure what you would. I mean, it's a big range. So 7,000 and 8,000 feet, that's 2 kilometers. EGS, you're talking about 4 to 5 kilometers maybe. And super deep or super hot, we're probably talking about those same kind of depths.

Four kilometers in a conventional kind of continental crust doesn't get you to supercritical temperatures. But if you're drilling in kind of conventional place, where they've drilled geothermal in the last 50 years. If you drill deeper into those places, then you get to super deep, super hot. So they drilled a couple of supercritical wells in Iceland already. They drilled one in Japan, or perhaps more.

And they've attempted to do it in Liderrello in Italy, too. And in principle, if you go like 10 kilometers down, you've basically got sufficient heat anywhere, essentially, right? That's the dream of this version of geothermal. is drill deep enough and it opens up the entire world. I would probably characterize the first two, EGS and closed loop, more in that category. You drill deep enough, you can get sufficient temperature anywhere.

What's referred to is super deep, super hot, they're more after not sort of anywhere, but super high temperature in good places. They're trying to capitalize on the thermodynamics, of high temperatures. And the basic point here is that if you compare a conventional geothermal power plant or even EGS or closed loop, they're at modest temperatures. We're talking about 200 degrees centigrade, 250, you know, 300 for a good one. If you compare that to a coal-fired plant or a nuclear plant, they have temperatures which are hugely greater than that. They're 8, 900 degrees centigrade.

and that brings them into a thermodynamics space which is much more efficient. So they get much more energy out of their generators, turbines and generators at those high temperatures. So the idea of super deep, super hot is to get up towards those temperatures in geothermal also and therefore you get a much more efficient conversion to electricity. So it's not so much to geothermal anywhere, but better geothermal in the places where it's already good. And talk a little bit about the technical challenge of doing that. Like why aren't we already doing it? Well, part of it is the reasons that we started with, which not everywhere as geologic, they're advantageous to find those kind of temperatures. But it's also quite challenging

from the point of view of the actual practice of drilling and completing the well. So, you know, oil and gas wells, conventional geothermal wells, you know, a high, you know, a high, you know, a high temperature oil well would be 200 degrees, that would be very high. High temperature geothermal well, 300 degrees. We're now talking about 500 degrees, and that requires a whole lot more technical capability in the drilling and the materials, in the cementing and completion and the handling of the fluids. So supercritical water actually is able to contain tremendous amounts of dissolved materials.

Therefore, you can have not just very, very hot water, but hot water which can be very acid. And therefore, you're not only producing a fluid that you convert energy from, but it's very corrosive. It's very difficult to handle it. It becomes a materials problem. So I'm reminded of the videos they showed of the supercritical well that they produced in Iceland, called IDTP 2, it basically produced black steam. And the reason it produced black steam is it was producing the steel casing together with the steam. It was just corroding the casing and producing it at the surface. So you've got a real, I guess it's an engineering challenge of a sort, as you said,

a materials challenge of like how do we actually drill and use stuff that is going to survive these types of temperatures and this type of environment for decades? That's correct. I mean, handling supercritical water is something that conventional power plants, nuclear plants, do all the time. But basically, they do it with pure water. And the case for geothermal, that's no longer true. You're dealing with water, which has got dissolved minerals that's in the equilibrium with the rocks in subsurface for millions of years. And it's got a lot of stuff dissolved in it.

And it's nowhere near as benign. Okay, and so you've alluded to this a little bit, but I guess just to round it out, to where are we in the development of the super deep world? Some wells have been drilled, as you said. What has been proven, what remains to be proven? Yeah, so I think it's basically a matter of developing that technology to be able to handle these kind of fluids. And that is what the geothermal industry has been doing

progressively over the last 50 years. It's just a question of doing it in a new way or to handle new problems. I mean, we have been producing geothermal fluids with high dissolved solids in the salt and sea here in California for decades, and it does require the development of technology, and they're in the process of doing that. So again, it comes down to scientific concepts to try to overcome the technical challenges in a way which is cost-effective. So, for example, if you have a very high pH or high, low pH fluid, very acid, you could obviously dump sodium hydroxide into it to neutralize it. That's actually done in some geothermal fuels.

But if you're having to expend 1,000 tons of sodium hydroxide a day, that's going to cost you some money. So obviously, in any of these contexts, no matter how we're doing geothermal, we're drilling. And I think in addition to these different paradigms for geothermal, there also seems to be a fair amount of innovation on the drilling side itself. Can you talk a little bit about what we're seeing in terms of drilling technology innovation being applied to geothermal? Yes, you're quite right. So drilling is actually one of the biggest advances we've seen over the last couple of years. And some of that has been borrowed or carried over from the advance.

This is from oil and gas, the so-called factory drilling or batch drilling that they do for shale oil or shale gas is now being applied to geothermal. And that has brought down the cost considerably, and that of course helps all of these technologies. So further again in their EGS project in Utah is doing batch drilling where they're actually drilling eight wells at a time, well not quite eight at a time. they're drilling the first segments eight at a time and then the second segments eight after and that has brought their drilling times down by a factor of two or three and that of course reduces the cost tremendously there's also been

the borrowing of technologies in terms of PDC polycrystalline diamond bits which have been used not for the first time in geothermal but they haven't convention been used very much in geothermal before, and that's allowed them to also gain long bit runs, which means they don't have to trip out so often. That saves money, and also to get the wells drilled faster, which also, of course, saves them a lot of money. So unconventional drawing practice for the normal geothermal industry has actually basically helped or will soon bring geothermal drawing costs down perhaps to.

half what it was five, ten years ago. And that really opens up many new areas because, again, you're just trying to hit that $80 a megawatt hour target. If you cut your drilling costs down, then you can hit it in more places. Okay, so stepping back, how do you see this developing this new wave of geothermal from a timing perspective? Obviously, we talked a little bit about Fervos project that is hopefully going to be 90 megawatts and then a few hundred megawatts in the next few years.

but what is the timescale under which you think of this in a broader context? Like, when could this, geothermal is already a small portion of electricity generation in the United States, larger in some other countries. How quickly can we ramp up development of geothermal in a broader geology such that it makes a difference on our path to decarbonization of power? That's a very good question. I can give you a partial answer. So the conventional geothermal that we've been developing over the last 50 years

typically takes like 10 years lead time to do the exploration and the feasibility studies and the preliminary drilling and all of those kind of things to actually bring a project to fruition. The fact that in EGS you don't have to do as much exploration because you're not looking for all of those perfect conditions means you can do that. part of it quicker. Using batch drilling also speeds up the process and using standardized power plants actually would make it faster too. So that 10-year period can probably be compressed to five, maybe even three or four. So we're coming to that sort of level of speed up now. What it needs next is 10 more furvos to go out and

develop these projects. So we still have to have some sort of, you still got to have a place which has the right kind of geology. If you've got, you've got rocks which are broken up too much, it's going to be difficult to do the drilling. They do have to be hot. And you only find out how hot they are when you drill your first well. So there still is some geological exploration required, but just not quite so much. People have to go out, companies have to go out and do that. We already do have quite a lot of, you know, the planet characterized already. People looked for oil and gas or they looked for conventional geothermal, decided it wasn't quite advantageous enough. But places that might not have been good enough for conventional geothermal

might be just fine for EGS. So there are projects or there are areas, places that are done and ready to go, that just need people to go out and do it. All right, that'll be our take-home message. Go ahead and go out and do it. Roland, thank you so much for your time. All right, thank you. Dr. Roland Horn is a professor of earth sciences at Stanford University, and he leads Stanford's geothermal program.

This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitude Media.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Pralude Beck's visionary is accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at PriludeVentures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquan, theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shayal Khan, and this is Catalyst.