While working as a drilling engineer in the shale fields of southern Texas, Tim Latimer, 34, came to a realization: The same technical advances that sparked the natural gas fracking boom could change the game for geothermal energy.
Geothermal power plants generate carbon-free electricity around the clock by circulating water through hot rocks in the Earth’s crust. But the sector has historically only been able to develop affordable facilities in areas with porous, permeable, high-temperature rock formations at relatively low depths.
A half-century ago, Los Alamos National Lab researchers demonstrated that humans could engineer around some of these geological constraints by cracking underground formations around Fenton Hill, New Mexico, to create the permeability necessary to allow water to flow freely. But creating such wells, known as enhanced geothermal systems, would remain too tricky and expensive to commercialize for decades.
Latimer recognized that the natural gas sector’s success in driving down the cost of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which uses high-pressure fluids to fracture rock, could change all that. If so, it meant companies could develop geothermal power in many more places, helping to deliver far more of a crucial component largely missing from the electricity grid: a steady form of clean power that can fill in the gaps as wind and solar sources fluctuate throughout the day and year, reducing the need for coal and gas plants.
During his MBA studies at Stanford, Latimer met Jack Norbeck, who had closely analyzed the Los Alamos experiments for his PhD work and come to a similar conclusion. Together, they formed Fervo Energy in 2017. The pair quickly earned a spot in the inaugural class of Cyclotron Road, a US Department of Energy-backed entrepreneur fellowship program, and soon after secured funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Under Latimer’s leadership as CEO, Fervo has been on a roll. Last summer, the startup said initial tests demonstrated that its first set of wells developed with these techniques, near Winnemucca, Nevada, are commercially viable. Those wells are now sending up to 3.5 megawatts of electricity onto the state’s grid (enough to power roughly 3,500 homes), most of which Google has purchased to run its operations around Las Vegas.
Last fall, Fervo also began developing Project Cape, a geothermal power plant in Utah that will generate up to 400 megawatts, most of which will power homes and businesses in Southern California. And this summer, the company announced it’s developing another geothermal plant in Nevada as part of a partnership with Google and the state’s main utility, NV Energy.
