Welcome to the Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien podcast, where we g behind the scenes of the Arizona PBS documentary series Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien.

We are discussing the challenges, the discoveries and the things you might not get from watching the TV series alone.

I'm your host, Elise Hu, and joining me is the veteran science journalist himself, Miles O'Brien.

In this episode, a revolution in the energy industry tapping the Earth's own heat for clean, renewable energy.

Miles O'Brien.

Welcome in.

Good to see you, Elise.

Great to see you.

All right.

Let's start with the proble that geothermal energy is trying to solve, which is obviously the need fo more clean, sustainable energy.

You approached the geothermal solution at mud pots in California that are kind of burping and gurgling and joked, the earth has indigestion.

A very Miles joke.

Well, you know what I was born to do, dad jokes.

I guess even before I was a dad, I was doing dad jokes.

Yeah.

So we want the grid to be greener, don't we?

And, you know, we don't have a lot of great options that are completely, baseload is the term which is 24/7, 365.

You can do you can do nuclear.

And, you know, we could have a conversation about the pro and cons of nuclear, but it is carbon free and 24/7, which is a good thing.

And then when you start getting into some of the other renewables, whether it's solar or wind, they are intermittent.

And that's that's a problem.

Right.

Because you want to we like having the lights on 24/7 Right.

So this idea of tappin into the heat beneath our feet, you know, the earth at its center i is there's a hot iron core there And as the planet has, you know, aged over the years, the heat is radiated from the core and makes its way pretty close to the surface of the planet.

But not not necessarily that close except in a few spots.

And so there are places like the Salton Sea, for example where I went to these mud pots where because it happens to be along the famous San Andreas fault that has cause all kinds of fractures beneath.

And that has allowed hot water and steam to get kind of close to the surface, relatively speaking, on the order of 1000ft or so.

And that is the place where you see geothermal energy these days, mostly, so that what, what you basically d is you tap into that hot water, it's hot enough to, you know, spin a turbine and you generate electricity.

And the earth is doing that for you.

There's nothing it's completely renewable.

It's limitless.

As long as the Earth is going we're going to have this right.

So but, you know, up until now, with places like Iceland or the Salton Sea, there's a place called The Geysers in Northern California, which is a big producer of geothermal energy.

Indonesia is a big center of and these are all places along the Pacific Rim.

The Ring of Fire, as we call it, where there's the geologic features, bring this resource close enough to the surface, but to go elsewhere up until fairly recently has been problematic.

You started to explain it, but there's an awesome clip in the episode itself.

So let's take a look at a clip that explains how geothermal works.

Geothermal is the residual heat left over from the formation of the planet, and from the decay of radioactive particle deep below the Earth's surface.

The deeper you go, the hotter it gets.

At a geothermal electric power plant, they drill down far enough to reach very hot water to generate power.

Another well injects the water back into the ground.

The wells here are between 2000 and 10,000ft deep.

The briny 600 degree water they tap into can spin enough turbines to generate power for about 300 000 homes.

It's renewable, nearly carbon free, and it's always on.

One of the big barriers to geothermal power, as you mentioned, has been scaling it.

It makes up less than 2 right now of our energy sources.

But innovators are wanting to change that.

So take us through some o the innovators in this episode, like Billy Thomas and Cindy Taff.

Yeah.

So this is where it gets into kind of one of those weird twists of irony.

You would not get this immediately if you didn't think about it.

But basically the innovations which we have seen with unconventional drilling, which is the horizontal drilling and fracking, which has unleashed all kinds of fossil fuels into our world.

And, you know, a lot of people would wish that never had been invented because they'd rathe keep those things in the ground.

But put that aside.

You know, places like the Permian Basin, which have been written off, are now just as active as they ever had been because of horizontal drilling and fracking.

Well, it turns out that all that knowledge and technology and experience that the oil and gas industry has doing that can be applied almost directl to drilling holes in the ground deep enough to reach hot enough rock to create steam, to turn a turbine and send it up to the surface to create electricity.

What you d is you one one hole goes down, you fracture the rock that is nearby, creating kind of a radiator effect.

And then another drill hole sends the hot water back up.

And the idea is that as long as you can drill deep enough to reach hot enough rock, you can, in theor do this anywhere on the planet.

Because if you drill far enough, eventually it's going to get hot enough.

That's the idea.

And so that is kind of the the seeds of a new revolution of a new kind of geothermal.

It's called enhanced geothermal, which doesn't rely on, on, you know, fractured you know, the San Andreas fault, but can be in places where there's enough heat at striking distanc for this unconventional drilling techniques in this fracking.

And that's the idea and in essence.

And what makes it appealing to a lot of people who are looking to an energy transition is that we are collectively human beings are really good at poking holes in the ground.

We've been doing this for a long, long time, right?

And we have a standing army of oil and gas workers.

And this is when you're on a rig drilling for oil or hot rock.

It's the same process.

And so we have, you know, infrastructure that's kind of there already to make this happen.

So that's what makes it kind of an appealing energy transition story because it's you know, it's 24/7 It's renewable green, all those things.

And there's a standing army of people who can facilitate this transition.

And as as we start thinking about weaning ourselves of fossil fuels, you'd want these people employed anyway.

So it's an interesting kind of unintended consequence, ironic twist story, but it's actually happening.

Right.

So just to be clear, we think of fracking as fracking for natural gas, which really had a boom in the early tens in places like the Permian Basin and North Dakota.

And this kind of fracking for geothermal is deeper.

It goes farther down into the Earth.

Let's see a clip of this animation we created showing y'all how this works.

The concept is straightforward, drilled deep into extremely hot rock.

If the rock is no naturally permeable, fracture it to create an artificial underground reservoir, then pump water into those cracks.

As the water circulate through the superheated rock, it returns to the surface, ho enough to generate electricity.

It is fracking but the industry says it doesn't use toxic chemicals, just water and a more benign polymer.

Yes, Cindy Taff is really fascinating with this work.

Do you want to share any?

Yeah.

Any behind the scenes?

Getting to know her I love.

I will confess right now I love Cindy Taff.

And I would say tha to my wife, too, but now she's.

She's amazing.

So this is, first of all, in a world where not a lot ther not a lot of women on oil rigs okay lets just.

I think we know this, right?

I mean, I can say that, right?

I'm from Texas.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know how this goes.

And she spent 35 years at Shell, and she ended up rising to head their global, unconventiona and fracking drilling efforts.

That's a big damn job.

And she, you know she could have retired and gone to play golf or whatever but she just loves what she did.

She loves poking holes in the ground.

And so she was approached by, a company that wa kind of spurred along by some, some of these ideas, some other oil and gas people who she knew from Shell, who said, hey, you know, this might b an interesting next act for you.

And Cindy loves a challenge.

You know, she was there at the beginning of, of, you know, unconventiona horizontal drilling, fracking.

She helped develop all that technology.

And and so now she was faced with this idea of, wow, I can I can pursue something new and different.

And she said, you know, I she said, I remember very distinctly looking at wind and solar, you know, 20 years ago and going, that's never going to work.

And now it works.

We know it works, right?

It's it's, you know, we have to solve some of the intermittency problems but that's getting solved too.

And she she thought it would be exciting to push something like this and make it affordable and cost effective, which is, after all, the goal to create energy that we all can afford and is not cooking our goose.

All right.

Now let's talk about Jeff Tester.

Set him up for us.

Jeff Tester.

So he he was he's a he's like the the godfather of engineered geothermal.

He was at Los Alamo National Laboratory where they, you know, devised the first atomic weapons.

And he, he had the, he wasn't there during the Manhattan Project, but he came there and there were still some people there who had experience from Manhattan Project days, and they were just they were just trying all kinds of crazy ideas, and they thought, hey, what?

What do you think?

You think we can come up with hot rock geothermal?

They just started drilling one day, you know, kind of went down.

And sure enough he got involved in this project as a very young engineer and completely became a true believer and pioneer and never stopped talking about it and iteratin and developing the technology.

The Los Alamos project ended up being successful.

They were able to drill down, and before anybody had really come u with these ideas of how to frack and how to horizontal drill, they they actually experimented with it because they love blowing stuff up at Los Alamos anyway.

Right?

So it was fun for them.

And so they actuall demonstrated that you could send cold water down deep enough and it would come up hot enough to generate electricity.

Well, this is the 80s.

And that idea just didn't take hold.

There were other energy sources, other ideas about, where to go with it.

The Reagan administration was not interested in anything to do with, you know, geo thermal or anything renewable, unlike the Carter administration.

And so it kind of died on the vine.

But he went into academia and kept talking about it.

And to this day, he's like the definitive dude that people go to for advice on geothermal.

And listeners, if you're only listening to this podcast, be sure to tr and catch the episode, because there's a cool transition from Jeff Tester's interview, where he's in historical footage and transitions to modern day footage.

It was a cool effect.

Tell us how you did it and what that original historical footage was even shot for.

By the way, Elise, thank you for noticing that.

You know, as you know, when you do films like this, these are the things we just love to do.

I never know if people appreciate them.

So thank you.

Yes.

So Jeff Tester, back in the in the 70s, they did a Los Alamos, did a promotional film, shot by the lab itself talking about this whole project.

It was, you know, classi the kind of documentary newsreel you'd see when, you know, your teacher, your science teacher wanted to take a day off.

Right.

And so and he was interviewed in this thing, who knows where we would have found it, except that it was in his basement.

And he said, you know, I've got this, I've got this film here.

I have no idea what's on it.

And so we said, well, would you mind if we, looked at it and we'd be happy to digitize it for you?

And he said, sure, take it.

So we we took it to a transfer house, and this amazing newsreel was there from Los Alamos with him on it, explaining as a young ma what they were intending to do.

And so we did the nice dissolve between kind of a reverse Benjamin Button.

Right.

If you if you rewind the tape, he' Benjamin Button, right, exactly.

It's so cool that it exists.

And then you were abl to actually make use of it too, because it was probabl just sitting there in a closet.

It was, you know, at least he he knew enough.

He, he didn't have a 16mm projector.

So he was like I know there's something here.

Why don't you just look at this for me?

So it was real as a win win because he got to see a film that he had completely forgotten about, right?

What a discovery.

We also love Jamie Beard.

The quot Johnny Appleseed of geothermal.

Well, this is this is, you know what I really discovered I love about these Resolve to Solve episodes is how the sequence of events leads to change.

And so Jamie Beard is a dyed in the wool, tree hugging environmentalist who she becomes a lawyer and wants to save the environment by being a lawyer and becomes disheartene by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which actually kind of got her into environmental movement.

And then when when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened, she got even more disillusioned and left the law.

Anyway, by happenstance, she she goes to work for a company that is making capacitors, which are, you know, fancy term for a battery, essentially for a green energy solution.

Well it turns out these capacitors.

Another irony are have tremendous application on rigs.

And so here this this absolute tree hugger, you know, you name it as green as they come, finds herself in the oil patch trying to build these capacitors.

Right.

You know what irony of all ironies, right.

She's behind enemy lines.

And what you know, this is a great lesson to us all.

She meets all these guys, most of them guys, and she likes them.

And she learns to appreciate what they do and and actually becomes great, very respectful for the skills they bring to the table.

And so literally she's she' there in the trailer one night and she reads an article which summarizes a paper from Jeff Tester which says that engineered geothermal systems, i developed, could be responsible, could generate about 10% of the electrical grid of the of the United States without too much difficulty.

And she has this kind of epiphany.

She's like, well, wait a minute, who could do this best?

These guys right here who are drilling these wells.

And so she kind of did She had the Reese's peanut butter moment with the peanut butter and the chocolate.

Right.

And realized that that the oil ndustry is the key to pursuin and iterating this technology, not sticking with Los Alamos and academia, but getting companies like Shell to realize this is maybe the next chapter for an energy company.

And so she is just she just went on a complete binge on geothermal, read everything she could, and just started war dialing everybody she could find at these companies.

And she finally got some people interested in it.

And that's what led to Cindy Taff and Sage Geo Systems.

Sage is the name of Jamie's son, becoming a company.

And tha that has led to other companies.

One of them, it just went public.

And so this there's this industr is kind of blossoming and this, you know, this strange connections kind of made this happen.

It's so cool.

It's so cool.

And then we should also mention Craig Courter.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about him.

Yeah.

So yet another you know, there's lik embedded ironies in this piece and I love the strange bedfellows notion of it.

So Craig Courter is another guy.

He came out of the oil patch himself, and his family was an oil drilling family, and he knew a lot about oil well drilling and so forth.

He evolved into the utility business, and he found himself running a coal electric generating plant which burned lignite coal, which is the nastiest.

Oh, that's the worst kind.

Yes.

The worst most polluting kind.

Yes.

Polluting, It's bad for the, you know, the air, the water and the climate, you name it, it's the worst.

They strip mine it.

It's just nasty.

And so he's running this.

He's he is just dyed-in the wool fossil fuel guy.

Classic, You know Texas ****kicking kind of guy.

Right.

And, he just realizes that this, plant, needs to be retired.

It's on the order of 40 years old now.

And so what's next?

What do you do?

And he ran the numbers and realized that actually, in that part of the world, with the amount of sunshine they get, solar was actually the way to go.

But he had the problem.

Okay.

Solar.

Solar might be cost effective, but what about the problem of intermittency?

And that's when he ran into Cindy Taff.

They were at an oil well where they were.

She was showing her her project, and the two of them started talking about it, and they realized that there was another way that geothermal could be utilized.

And it's really not technically geothermal, it's really geo pressure.

So imagine, if you will, you know, why do they call it a gusher?

Right?

You hit oil and comes out of the out of the surface under pressure.

Well, it's possible to come up with a system where you, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, depending on whateve source it is that you can pump water down into a fracture reservoir many thousands of feet beneath the surface, put it under pressure.

And then when the when the those intermittent sources stop doing their job, you release it back up and it spins a turbine, which smooths out the generation.

You get electrical generation 24/7 by using the Earth as kind of like a battery.

So Cindy Taff and Craig Courter come together to build this right near what is to be the former lignite coal plant in Christine, Texas.

So, you know, here I was, we had this classic Texa barbecue with all these people who spent all their time burning, you know, coal to make electricity and and, you know, of course, we got some ribs on the, on the grill and all this stuff.

And here we are talking about green energy sources.

And I'm like, this is there is I have landed on a different planet here.

This is really and it was, it was really interesting.

Well, yeah, it was really interesting.

But what you realize though is that when you strip away all the political nonsens about it is that renewables are on a cost per cos basis, are are competitive now and there are some thing that need to be solved like this intermittency issue.

And if you look at it with a with a cold eye towar the bottom line, as Craig did, and taking aside the politics, he realized this really is is the way to go to replace a lignite plant which is the worst kind of plant there is.

So it does seem like, at least from the episode Miles, that oil and gas professionals are mostly eager to collaborate on this form of renewable energy.

Is that pretty accurate across the board, or is there debat kind of old versus new tensions?

You know, we're still in a, you know, in a stage where the fossil fuels are going to be hard to it's going to be hard to convince ExxonMobil to wean itself of the fossil fuel industry.

It's so incredibly profitable.

Right.

How do you how do you match the profit of pulling oil out of the ground, refining it, getting into into your, you know, gas tank?

I mean, it's money is mad at several levels along the way.

And the idea that that this is going to be as profitable, I think is a is a little bit of a hard sell for them.

So, you know, I think it's going to it' still going to take some time.

It's coming around theyre interested.

And there is great interest in utilizing this workforce in a different way.

But when you start looking at their bottom line, you know, always follow the money at least, right?

You know the bottom line was Cindy Taff when she was at Shell.

They they had did a bunch of studies on geothermal, and she was ready when she was running their unconventional program there to shift into geothermal then.

And they canceled the whole thing.

Yeah, she was discouraged.

She was.

So so, you know, I don't want to be too sanguine about it because, you know, it's kind of like Kodak invented the digital camera and they were scared to death of it.

They put it up on the shelf and said, let's don't tell anybody about this because we want to sell paper, film, you know, developer, fixer.

This is a good business.

And so it's very hard for old businesses to, to make these transitions to almost require startups.

But what Jamie Beard would tell you is if you don't have the, the scale of the oil industry behind it, it will never make i so or it will take too long to make it so.

This is the kind of it's in it's it's, you know, there is a project right now in Utah.

They're building a 500 megawatt engineered geothermal, system and power plant there.

And assuming that proves itself out, then I think this might get a little more momentum.

Very cool.

Let's go behind the scenes.

Any challenges that you and your team faced in telling this story?

Well, the hardest part was frankly dealing, we began this story before the election of Donald Trump, 2, and so the idea that this, this lignite coal plant was going to convert to solar immediately came into question because that money was from the Inflation Reduction Act, et cetera.

And, you know, would that money dry u and would this transition occur?

I originally imagined this story as a buddy film between Cindy Taff and Craig Courter, these two unlikely hardcore Texas fossil fuel warriors just marching forwar into the world of green energy.

And and unfortunately, the, the the whole, process of building solar at in Christine, Texas got a little bit sidetracked.

It's still technically they'r still headed in that direction.

But, you know the political environment is not conducive, as we know, to to this kind of energy right at the moment.

We had to kind of do a little bit of ziggin and zagging to anticipate that.

So Craig, the buddy fil with Craig and Cindy became more one more person, which was Jamie Beard.

And then we met Jeff Tester and I was like, oh, you know this is like an ensemble, right?

That we're doing here Its a Quartet.

Right.

And yeah, and you know, I originally thought of this whole series as, you know, finding one individual and telling their story.

But the best stories are when it's kind of this, you know, unlikely, you know, building of ideas off of each other, and that makes it more potent and interesting.

Yeah.

Well, it's a fun watch.

And for viewers and listeners who are interested in this new form of energy, where would you direct them?

I would suggest go to Jamie Beard's Jamie Beard is interesting.

She didn't go into a particular company.

She has stayed as a, you know, kind of an outside nonprofit observer.

So and she has a an entity called Project InnerSpace, which is there to facilitat this transition as best she can.

I call her the Johnny Appleseed of Geothermal.

So go to Project InnerSpace.

You'll get a good overview of what's going on in the world of engineered geothermal.

Well, Miles, I learned so muc not only in this conversation, but throughout all of our conversations for this series and just from watching your adventures.

Thank you so much for all your work and for sitting down with me to talk through all of it.

Elise, it was such a pleasure.

I hope we get a chanc to do something like this again.

Maybe there'll be a season two.

We hope so.

Thanks so much.

You're welcome.

Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien is a co-production of Mobias Media and Arizona PBS.

You can watch the show at azpbs.org/resolvetosolve this podcast is a productio of Central Sound at Arizona PBS.

Our video editors are Matthew Anderson and Macie Logan.

We get audio support from Joe Miller and Daniel Bevc.

Our producer is Anna Williams.

Executive producers Alex Kosiorek, Carol Yancho, Scott Woelfel, and Miles O'Brien I'm your host Elise Hu.

Thanks for joining us.