What's going on with geothermal?

In this episode, Project InnerSpace founder and executive
director Jamie Beard, who has been instrumental in influencing
oil and gas personnel to move into the geothermal industry,
discusses exciting recent developments in geothermal and the
opportunities ahead.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Things are starting to come together for geothermal. Political
awareness has seen an uptick. Investment is flowing in. Startups,
many staffed by veterans of the oil and gas industry, are
swarming to take advantage of existing geothermal opportunities
and expand those opportunities. New technologies and techniques
are reaching the demonstration phase.


It’s an exciting time.


At the center of it all is Jamie Beard, who for more than a
decade now has served as a kind of pied piper luring people out
of oil and gas and into geothermal. (Here’s her 2021 TED Talk.) A
one-time energy and regulatory lawyer, Beard founded the
Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization, dedicated to educating
and training oil and gas personnel to move into geothermal. (GEO
recently helped launch the Texas Geothermal Institute to expand
that work.)


She is also the founder and executive director of Project
InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the geothermal
industry. It recently launched an initiative to build a Global
Heat Flow Database, which would help map subsurface resources
across the globe. It also plans to invest in new geothermal
technology companies that are ready to launch first-of-a-kind
demonstration projects.


Beard has been my go-to resource on geothermal for years, so I
was thrilled to bring her on the pod to discuss the current state
of the industry, the migration of personnel and expertise from
oil and gas to geothermal, and the path to global scale for the
industry.


All right then. Jamie Beard of Project InnerSpace. Welcome to
Volts. Thank you so much for coming.


Jamie Beard


Oh, my gosh. David Roberts. Hello. It's nice to see you again.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's been a while since we talked. You know, when I was
working on a piece on geothermal for Vox a few years ago, I don't
know how many years ago, my family makes fun of me because
everything pre pandemic is about five years ago. Yeah, I guess it
was 2020. And my sense then around geothermal was that there was
this sort of kind of a surge of interest, call it ten to 15 years
ago, and a surge of investment. And then that kind of tailed off,
kind of the air went out of that balloon a little bit lost steam.


There you go. That's the pun I was looking for. And then my sense
was that as we were talking back in 2020, a bunch of strands
trends were just starting to come together for a new big
resurgence, a renaissance of geothermal. I want to talk about the
future of geothermal, the immediate future, the near term future,
the midterm future. But first, I would like to just start with a
snapshot of, like, what is happening in the industry now? Is it
still the case that only conventional geothermal wells are
actually being dug and operating? What's the kind of snapshot of
the industry?


Jamie Beard


Well, no, it's no longer just the case that conventional is being
dug, which is really cool. And that's actually a difference
between now and 2020. So when we talked back in the day, you're
right to use renaissance, we were just about at the beginning of
one, right? So it was like there's all this stuff that was very
buzzy, but there wasn't really a whole lot in the ground. There
were some teams that were kind of thinking about it, but nobody
was really doing it yet. So there are some teams that have gotten
out and done stuff in the last couple of years, and that means
demonstrations, and that means that wells have been drilled, and
that means that demonstrations and pilots have been done.


And that's also meant that the oil and gas industry has gotten
increasingly excited and started investing. So the landscape has
changed quite a bit in the last three years in terms of momentum
and also investment dollars, which is really cool, I guess, to
start with.


David Roberts


I should have done this at the very beginning, but I shouldn't
assume that listeners read that piece on geothermal.


Jamie Beard


Well, everybody in the world has.


David Roberts


I would like to think so, but just in case there's a few out
there who have it, I just want to make a very basic distinction.
Geothermal to date, mostly, almost exclusively has been what's
called hydrothermal, which is you go find places where there are
natural riffs and reservoirs of thermal activity, and then you go
down there and exploit that heat. So that's what geothermal has
been from like the dawn of time up until about five minutes ago.
You go find these areas where the heat already exists, that's
conventional geothermal, and you stick a straw down and get the
steam up and make electricity.


Then there is coming what's called advanced geothermal, whereas
you go make your own reservoir, you dig down and you crack the
rock to create basically an artificial or a human made fracture,
which then the hot water comes, fills the cracks, then you stick
a straw down, et cetera. You make your own reservoir. And then
there are sort of beyond that, kind of like what you might call
cutting edge. I don't know what the exact term is. Cutting edge
technology research where people are trying to do things like
closed loop geothermal, where instead of just having the heat be
dispersed in this natural reservoir, you're just tubing water
down, letting it heat up and tubing it back up.


Jamie Beard


These are very accurate terms.


David Roberts


I hope everybody's keeping up. And then there's wacky cutting
edge drilling technology, like using lasers and plasma sound
waves, plasma millimeter waves, god knows what else. That's the
cutting edge. That's just like the landscape, just in case people
don't know. So most of what's happened to date in the history of
geothermal has been conventional geothermal. And as far as I
know, in terms of commercial operating geothermal plants, they're
still almost all conventional hydrothermal, are they not?


Jamie Beard


Yeah, that's right. There are a few commercial egs plants in the
world, but they are very few. And the rest is the Iceland kind of
geothermal, the geothermal that we see on the surface. So it's
the traditional stuff, but even that there's not much of it in
the world. Right?


David Roberts


Right.


Jamie Beard


It's still quite small, but anyway, yeah, so you caught everybody
up to 2020 with your article. So everybody that's listening, go
read David's article from 2020. It'll catch you up to then, and
then we'll cover the last three years.


David Roberts


Now, right now what I want to know is, is there still interest in
conventional hydrothermal? Are people still trying to dig those
wells? Is that still like a going concern? Or is everyone turning
their attention now to egs, which is enhanced geothermal systems,
which is this make your own reservoir thing, scalable geothermal?
Is everybody going in that direction now?


Jamie Beard


No, not everybody, and I don't think everybody should. When it
comes down to it, there's a whole lot of conventional geothermal
in the world that has not been developed. There a lot. Even
though conventional geothermal, or hydrothermal as it's called,
is geographically limited, there's still a whole lot of it out
there that we could be leveraging. Right.


So if you look at the oil and gas industry and how they're
engaging in geothermal, about half of the entities are going to
dip their toe in to geothermal by pursuing conventional
hydrothermal projects first and then the other. Half is looking
and thinking, well, we'll just skip over that and go for the
gold. Go for the stuff that we can scale and do anywhere. Right.
And so there definitely a split in the community on that. But I
think when it comes down to it, we're going to, over the next ten
years or so, develop a whole lot of hydrothermal before we end up
in scalable stuff.


David Roberts


My impression of hydrothermal was always that there are a couple
of places where the sort of activity is intense enough to give
you the heat you need to really make electricity efficiently, but
there wasn't a ton of it because it couldn't compete kind of with
wind and solar. Have there been developments in conventional
hydrothermal geothermal that make it more attractive for
investment? Like have costs come down, has permitting or siting
gotten easier? What's the kind of state of play?


Jamie Beard


Sadly, that's not the case with we're going to get into that.
Yeah. No, there's not been much by the way, of regulatory,
unfortunately. But I think your question about costs coming down
yes, a lot of that has happened because of technology transfer
from the oil and gas industry over the past years that have
helped revitalize, for instance, underperforming wells for
hydrothermal. The heat is not usually the problem. The problem is
having sufficient water naturally occurring underground in your
reservoir to sustain your output. So you need to have enough
water coming up out of the ground to run your power plant.


And if you don't have enough, or if your well declines, over
time, which does happen with hydrothermal. Eventually you start
running out of water and wells decline. There are ways to
revitalize old wells, and that's being tried. There are ways to
enhance the fracture network in hydrothermal systems and that's
being tried, right? Yes. And quite frankly, hydrothermal is a
really nice 24/7 baseload source of clean energy. And so what
we're finding in terms of cost is that there are markets that
will sustain a premium for baseload simply because there's so
much solar and wind. Right?


David Roberts


Yeah, that's what I've been thinking about, is just that the
value of dispatchability in and of itself is rising. So I thought
that might be sort of affecting the economics of geothermal.


Jamie Beard


That's right.


David Roberts


Actually, let's pause here to talk about permitting and siting.
You hear a lot of complaints, really from everyone about this
subject, from every industry. But the geothermal people complain
that it's very difficult to get a well started, even relative to
oil and gas wells.


Jamie Beard


Yes.


David Roberts


So maybe just tell us quickly. These permitting and siting
problems, I assume, face all kinds of geothermal, the
hydrothermal and the advanced stuff. So what's the problem now?
And is there any solution on the horizon?


Jamie Beard


All right, so in a nutshell, so we don't put everybody to sleep.
In the United States, most of the really low hanging fruit for
geothermal development exists on Bureau of Land Management land,
federal land that is subject to the National Environmental Policy
Act, or NEPA. And it's an extensive set of environmental
regulations that require a lot of review before doing a project
on federal land. And geothermal projects are subject to NEPA.
What that means, essentially, is that for the multiple phases of
a project, in order to get a project developed on federal land,
you're looking at a permitting timeline of six or eight or even
ten years to get a project off the ground, which is completely
ridiculous.


You can't get projects funded under that scenario.


David Roberts


Is that also true for oil and gas well? Is that true for
everything, or is there unique barriers?


Jamie Beard


So here's the thing. This is what I was just about to point that
out, which is oil and gas drilling on federal land has been
excluded from this process through a categorical exemption.


David Roberts


What? Isn't that nice for them?


Jamie Beard


Well, that's whether they lobbied for it. And here's the problem.
Geothermal doesn't have a lobby. And so what we end up with here
is a scenario where you can get an oil and gas well drilled on
federal land in no time, very quick, in a geothermal well, which
is clean energy. And the same process as drilling the oil and gas
well is going to take you a decade. It kills projects. This kills
projects, right? When you ask what's the solution, I am loathed
to say politics, because who knows, right? And are we going to
wait around for that?


My personal opinion is no. Let's go around it so that's why I've
been focusing all my efforts on state and private land, because
we're just not going to do the federal you're.


David Roberts


Just going to throw your hands up about federal land and go to
other.


Jamie Beard


And that's how we go fast. And that's why most of these
demonstrations are in Texas.


David Roberts


Interesting. That's hilarious. And are there state permitting and
siting issues or are things generally better at the state level?


Jamie Beard


Well, look, if you focus on oil and gas states that have
streamlined permitting for oil and gas and that have friendly
regulatory environments to oil and gas, no, you got no problems.
Right. I think the trend is going to be and quite frankly, this
is the way it should happen if we're not going to sit around and
wait for politics, we need to be focused on deploying pilot
geothermal projects in states that are used to oil and gas
permitting. Right. Those are going to be the oil and gas states.
And they just so happen, many of them, to have excellent
geothermal resources so we can get projects permitted in twelve
months or less instead of a decade.


And we've seen that happen with one of the projects in Texas.
They were off to the races in a matter of months to do their
pilot. Yeah,


David Roberts


Texas.


Jamie Beard


Go go drill, baby drill.


David Roberts


Does have its merits.


Jamie Beard


Right.


David Roberts


Since you sort of brought up oil and gas, let's talk about a
little bit about how in the last ten years, techniques developed
and perfected by the oil and gas industry are coming to
geothermal. I think people know, once again, assuming they read
my article.


Jamie Beard


Read the article.


David Roberts


They know that fracking is part of that, but it's bigger than
just that. So what is the sort of knowledge transfer that's been
happening?


Jamie Beard


Yeah. So it's all of the learnings of the shale boom. Let's back
up on the shale boom. So all of a sudden, 20 or so years ago,
global geopolitics got rearranged by natural gas. And I think a
lot of folks kind of skip over why that happened. Right, it
happened, and we all realize it happened. But why? Why is the
reason geothermal is now a thing? Because it was this gigantic
flourish of technological development that came out of the oil
and gas industry and 10 or 15 years of massive leapfrogs in what
we can do when we're drilling and engineering the subsurface.


And that includes fracking, but it also includes a lot of other
cool things.


David Roberts


When we say fracking, we mean fracturing rock to create natural
gaps that are then filled, in natural gas's case by natural gas,
in this case by ...


Fluid.


Hot water. But that's what we are referring to, by fracking. I
just didn't want to assume people knew.


Jamie Beard


Yeah, right. So hydraulic fracturing, so the process of applying
pressure to a well bore in order to enhance or create new
fractures or pore space in rock. And that process can be used for
more than one thing. Like right now, we use it to produce more
gas than we normally could from a reservoir. But it just so
happens that that technique in creating or enhancing fractures
and rock is really helpful if we want to engineer the subsurface
to create a geothermal reservoir. Right. So it's a really good
example of kind of a bad word that comes out of the oil and gas.
Really polarizing word, right?


David Roberts


Yeah.


Jamie Beard


That can kind of be repurposed into a really interesting and big
opportunity for the future of clean energy.


David Roberts


Kind of a side thing. But I wanted to ask in the industry, what
is the sort of state of thinking on how to tiptoe around that?


Jamie Beard


Oh my gosh.


David Roberts


Do they want to just address it full on and say it's fracking but
it's different? Or do they want to just come up with a different
word for it? What's the kind of state of play?


Jamie Beard


What a good question. David, I love talking to you. This is an
excellent question. So it's super controversial what you just
asked and nobody really wants to talk about it. Right?


So this is the way I see it going. You've got geothermal entities
and the government tiptoeing around it, so they're trying to call
it something else because they don't want to get mixed up with
oil and gas and all that. Right.


So let's keep it nice and simple and let's call it other stuff.
So they've called it things like hydro-shearing and
hydro-fracking just to try to avoid the word fracking.


David Roberts


Come up with a boring enough term and everybody will just slide
right past it.


Jamie Beard


Right, right. Like nobody's going to notice kind of thing. Right.
The oil and gas industry, by and large, adopts the opinion,
"well, that hell, we just spent the last 20 years perfecting this
amazing technique that rearranged geopolitics and can
revolutionize the future of geothermal. We're going to call it
what it's called, damn it." Right. Then you have some entities
saying, yeah, but it might be easier from a community relations
standpoint to not dive right in there. So you do have some
controversy in oil and gas. My personal opinion is we need to
call a spade a spade. Right.


And I think there's going to be some intellectual work that we
need to do as human beings to get over polarized and loaded
terms. But we need to be honest with one another about what we're
doing. And if we rename something that is what we are doing a
technique for geothermal. It's not producing oil and gas, it's
producing clean energy. That's awesome. But we are doing a
technique that's called a thing.


David Roberts


Yeah, it looks a little shady when you ...


Jamie Beard


Well, it doesn't build trust. Right. If we start trying to call
it something else, that's not a trust building exercise. And I
think that's a lot of what we need to be doing for geothermal is
trust building.


David Roberts


Well, let's briefly address here then, the kinds of concerns
people might have when they hear the word "fracking". So I think
people have a lot of muddled ideas in their head about what the
dangers of natural gas fracking are. But tell us why this is
different and why people shouldn't worry, or if they should worry
a little bit, how much should they worry?


Jamie Beard


Well, okay, you're going to get the direct story from me, David.
This is the no b******t answer here, which is the way hydraulic
fracturing has been utilized by the geothermal industry so far
has been a very simple version. It's been very low tech. So
they're just trying to apply pressure and enhance existing
fractures. But it's a very basic method of hydraulic fracturing
that's been used. And I think when it comes down to it, when
you're fracturing to enhance a reservoir to circulate water or
another fluid, like, we can get to this later, but like,
supercritical CO2 is the new cool trend to use as your working
fluid for geothermal systems.


And it's a really cool idea, but if you are enhancing the
subsurface to make that clean energy system work better, why not?
As long as you're doing it safely and responsibly and leveraging
the learnings of the last 20 years about how we do that safely
and responsibly. I think when you start thinking about hydraulic
fracturing in the oil and gas context, the types of images that
come to mind are lighting your faucet on fire kind of these very
polarizing and upsetting images. Right?


And I do think that that is a result of ten or 15 years of bad
blood. Mistrust and bad blood between oil and gas and
environmental and climate activists. And I'll just go ahead and
say, just for full disclosure, I am an environmentalist and a
climate activist. I am not in or from the oil and gas industry.
In fact, quite the opposite. So I understand all of those
sentiments. I grew up wanting to oil and gas be damned. I mean, I
was going to bring them down kind of thing. So I get all that.
The differences, though, between the way geothermal wells are
fractured and oil and gas wells are fractured.


There are some in oil and gas. They're using a variety of
chemicals to enable that process.


David Roberts


Yeah, this is what I emphasize to people, is most of what you
associate with the damages of natural gas fracking have to do
with the fluids being injected and leaking into the groundwater
and etcetera. And geothermal just doesn't use those same fluids.


Jamie Beard


That's right. Well, right now, let's pause for a second and say,
yes, there are a lot of differences in techniques and fluids used
and also where natural gas is located, you oftentimes have to
drill through water tables to produce and get to natural gas
reservoirs. And when you have those sorts of close in
geographical distance between water tables and oil and gas
resources, you have the potential to have problems, particularly
if you're fracturing the subsurface. Geothermal is different.
Right. So because in the case of hydrothermal, you're in a
hydrothermal reservoir, you're in the water table, it's a
reservoir that's full of water, and your intent is producing that
water to the surface.


Right. So it's a different kind of game in geothermal. Just off
the bat, but I'll say part of the excitement, this is where we
need to do some intellectual work, in bringing people together
and not fighting about this. But but we're going to have to think
about this. A lot of the benefit that we will see over the coming
years, coming out of the oil and gas industry into geothermal, is
actually adapting some of those more complex techniques that they
use in hydraulic fracturing and oil and gas and adopting them
into geothermal, applying them to make the geothermal reservoirs
function properly.


Does that mean we need to transfer the chemicals and these ...
no, not necessarily. But what we do want to do is transfer the
really cool, cutting edge stuff like multistage fracturing, where
you're actually engineering the reservoir in really specific ways
to where they're parallel structures that you're fracking to
connect with one another, and therefore you can predict how the
fluids will flow amongst them. They're more complicated
engineered subsurface reservoirs. And if we can do that like
we're doing it for natural gas. Now in the geothermal context,
EGS in particular, what we're saying is engineered or enhanced
geothermal systems, they will work better.


And what that means is they will have better output. What that
means is they will be cheaper to build. Right. So some of that
transfer we do want and we should support, but I think we need to
figure out how to separate the good from the bad when we think
about fracking or the "f" word. So we call it.


David Roberts


And also the other question that I get constantly, I'm sure you
get it several times a day, is about earthquakes. People have
this real fixation on the idea that geothermal digging is going
to cause earthquakes. Was there ever anything to that? Is there
currently anything to that? Is that a real worry or is that kind
of a myth?


Jamie Beard


No, it's a real worry. Absolutely. It's something that we should
absolutely be focused on and considering. Here's the thing. The
cases in the world where seismicity, or I'll back up induced
seismicity, so geothermal systems have natural seismicity
associated with them all the time. It just happens. What we don't
want is to be causing that seismicity by our actions. So we are
interfering with the subsurface in a way that causes seismicity,
particularly seismicity that is detectable by humans. Right. So
seismicity that is above a level that becomes noticeable. And
there have been cases where geothermal systems, particularly EGS
projects, where they're going in and fracking these reservoirs,
have caused induced seismicity and some of them have been
significant.


They not only detectable, but damage causing induced seismicity.
And I will say there is kind of an obsession in media, right,
about geothermal. It's like, oh, there's all this awesome stuff
happening, but earthquakes, it's always this thing. It's kind of
the boogeyman. And I would say in those situations where there
has been induced seismicity related to an EGS project, in 100% of
the cases, that was because the system lubricated an existing
fault that was underneath the system. Therefore, that system
should have never been located or sited where it was being
developed. And there's a reason this is happening, which is the
geothermal industry is so fractured and regional.


It's kind of a mom and pop shop kind of industry. You've got
entities out there just kind of developing projects, but not
really sharing best practices and standardization, developing
protocols that everyone is following, et cetera. And in those
types of situations, you'll have mistakes and some of the
mistakes end up on international news, right? And that's what you
have for geothermal. And that's also David, kind of, and I think
this is going to be ironic to probably some of your listeners
that I'll say this, but standardization and establishment of
protocols and data sharing and getting things like this under
control at scale, the oil and gas industry is really great at
that.


David Roberts


Well, we're going to get back to that, but that's a great segue
to my next question, which is tell us about what Project
InnerSpace is. Project InnerSpace is nonprofit. You have to
advance geothermal. The plans have two phases, which I would like
to talk about in turn. The first phase, what you're trying to do
now, what just got launched and is underway, is basically, as far
as I can tell, an attempt to map and better understand what's
beneath the surface. So just tell us a little bit about
InnerSpace and what this phase one looks like.


Jamie Beard


Awesome. Thank you for asking this. We kind of forgot about that
part right at the beginning. Hello, I'm Jamie Beard. I run
Project InnerSpace. Project InnerSpace is a nonprofit that I
founded this last May. So it's a newly launched entity. The
purpose of InnerSpace is to address two major barriers that are
standing in the way currently of geothermal reaching exponential
scale in growth. And essentially what we're trying to do at
InnerSpace is put ourselves out of business by 2030. So we're
trying to run a sprint and make ourselves completely irrelevant
by the end of this decade.


First is phase one, which you mentioned, which is building a
global, high resolution, global map of where the geothermal
resources are and how deep they are so we can understand the low
hanging fruit.


David Roberts


And this doesn't exist. Imagination, like in some library
somewhere that seems like that should be happening already.


Jamie Beard


You'd think, amazingly, it doesn't exist. Some places in the
world have done a better job than others at estimating we have
some maps of the United States that were done by Southern
Methodist University in the early 2000s. We did a little poking
around on that, actually, with SMU a couple of years ago to see
how accurate those maps were. And it turned out the maps are a
little bit inaccurate on the wrong side for geothermal. So it's
actually a rosier picture for geothermal than those maps show,
which could interfere. And frankly, since so many projects are on
the margin economically, having maps that are even 10% off
matters.


It matters, right. So we need to get this stuff right. We need to
know where the resources are, how deep the resources are, and
what temperature they are before we start siting projects.


David Roberts


So right now a geothermal company just wanders out into the
landscape and starts digging.


Jamie Beard


That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, they do the best they can,
but there's a lot of money that goes into subsurface exploration.
Oil and gas spends billions of dollars doing subsurface
exploration for oil and gas.


David Roberts


I'm surprised some of that isn't transferable, they would know
enough.


Jamie Beard


That's what InnerSpace phase one is. Right?


So it's like, all right, oil and gas industry, y'all have a lot
of data and we would like to use that to build a really high
resolution, detailed global map that's interactive and free for
the world so that everybody can use it, including governments,
but also startups and everybody in between.


David Roberts


So this will just save a lot of exploration costs. It will help
startups skip some of that exploration stage and just know where
to go.


Jamie Beard


That pre-project risk. Yeah.


David Roberts


And it will give us a better global sense of what the resource
is.


Jamie Beard


That's right. So it's not going to be high resolution enough to
say this is the exact spot we want to put our plant. We can't do
all that. That's a little bit too much for a map of this size.
But what we can say is these are the regions in the developing
world where there's a lot of low hanging fruit for geothermal and
there are huge population centers here and wow, this country is
poised to be adding a lot of coal capacity over the coming
decades. So, wow, let's just slip geothermal in here instead.


David Roberts


Is this about sort of like rationalizing and checking and
ordering existing data? Or does this involve people going out
into the field and I don't know what it would look like digging
holes ...


Jamie Beard


Drilling a hole.


David Roberts


Drilling holes and testing.


Jamie Beard


We will not be drilling any holes in phase one. Thankfully. Phase
one is a fast sprint too. So we're going to publish in 24 months.
What we're doing is we're grabbing all the data that's out there
that's imperfect. And most heat flow data in the world that's out
there is imperfect, meaning it's not cleaned, it's not organized.
It needs to be QC'd before it can be utilized and relied on. So.
We're going to take all the data that's out there, clean it and
get it in really good shape. Then we're going to collect as much
oil and gas data as we can.


So this is data that the oil and gas industry has from the
millions and millions of wells they've drilled globally. So they
know ...


David Roberts


It's not proprietary, they're willing to share it?


Jamie Beard


Some of it is, but they're willing to share the pieces that we
are able to clean to keep proprietary. So we can do that. So
we'll have a subset of data that's never been used for the
purpose of geothermal exploration before, which is going to be
really helpful because it turns out when they drill for oil and
gas wells, they take the temperature of the well as they drill
all the way down to the bottom. And that's really helpful in
predicting how hot it will be deeper and also in like formations
in other places in the world. So what we'll do after we get all
this data is add in some AI.


So we're going to do some predictive analytics on it, right? So
we'll be able to predict more accurately than we do currently
places in the world where we don't have a lot of existing data,
what to expect in those formations in terms of depth and quality
of the geothermal resources.


David Roberts


Interesting. And then phase two will be investing in sort of
demonstration projects, first of a kind projects helping a lot of
these new technologies, these new startups, establish the fact
that they are possible ...


Jamie Beard


Game changers.


David Roberts


This is what I want to talk about is we discussed earlier there's
Egs, which is just sort of fracking making your own reservoir,
but then there's deeper and deeper and deeper stuff people are
pushing towards. And that super deep stuff is where you get into
really mind blowing, game changing type of stuff. We're basically
like super-efficient, super-hot, always on available anywhere,
this kind of stuff.


So the second phase for Project InnerSpace is investing in some
of these first of a kinds. And what I am curious about is sort of
of all those technologies that I wrote about and that people are
passing back and forth and some of them sound quite Sci-Fi. Who
is ready to go start digging. Like what are the advanced
geothermal technologies that are to the point that they're ready
to start producing. When you start investing in these first of a
kinds, what are they going to look like? Like first of a kind,
what?


Jamie Beard


So phase two is a fund. It's a billion dollar fund and it will
invest in up to 20 1st-of-a-kind pilot projects in different
places in the world. And phase one will help inform where we put
them right. So we're going to use that data to help inform that
process. But the portfolio will be broad. So geothermal is vastly
underfunded in every possible way across every single concept to
be honest. And so we're going to cast as broad a net as we can to
have as high an impact as we can in terms of proving out scalable
geothermal concepts.


And so geothermal, I don't think that we should look at
geothermal as a one size fits all type of thing, where if we can
just make this one kind of system work, it could be applicable
anywhere in the world. That's probably not going to be the case
because the subsurface in different places in the world looks
really different. There's different types of rock, there's
different types of heat flow, right? So different types of
geothermal systems will excel in different types of subsurface
reservoirs. And so I think we need to cast a really wide net on
the types of concepts that we'll fund with phase two.


And so that will include EGS, but it will also include
closed-loop. It will include EGS and closed-loop hybrids. So
systems that mix both so they'll go down and they will
directionally drill this radiator style, radiator style system
into the rock, but they will also fracture around that to enhance
heat flow going to that well bore, right? So that's pretty cool
because what you do in a hybrid kind of system is you eliminate
the risk of fracture evolution over time. You're not pressurizing
the fractures and trying to circulate fluid through them and then
making them change over time.


They're static, right? They're just sitting there.


David Roberts


You fracture the one time and then it does the rest of the work
for you. And closed-loop is so, I mean, I'm the farthest thing
from a technical person in the world, but it's intuitively
appealing because it's just so much more contained. Like your
fluid is exactly you know, exactly what the fluid is, exactly how
much it is, how fast it's moving.


Jamie Beard


And you get out what you put in. Right? And also closed loops are
really cool because you can use non-water working fluids that
work better than water in closed loop. And that's where
supercritical CO2 comes in. It heats up faster than water. We
have a lot of CO2 laying around. Let's use it, right? It's cool.
And the turbines on the surface can be redesigned to actually run
directly off of supercritical CO2. So direct drive by CO2, which
is very promising and very cool. So the fund is going to cast a
wide net on these things, right?


We're looking at power production projects with Cogeneration of
industrial heat. So looking at industrial heat decarbonization
with some of the concepts, a coal plant conversion might be
possible.


David Roberts


What about the lasers? What are ...


Jamie Beard


The drilling concepts? Yeah.


David Roberts


Are those real enough that they're ready to start digging?


Jamie Beard


Well, I don't imagine that we will be deploying one of these next
gen drilling concepts in phase two, because we are deploying
phase two starting in a year and a half or two years. So those
concepts are not quite ready for commercial deployment, and these
are commercial pilots. So we're going out and building power
plants with this money. And we'll have 20 power plants when we're
done. They're not quite ready, but that's not to say they won't
be. Right.


So these cool, we're going to vaporize rock kind of concepts,
they're sexy enough for venture capital and they're well funded.
Right. So they're running a sprint. And we may see some of these
concepts deployed in the near term, but probably not near enough
term for phase two. Let's see, definitely by the end of the
decade, we'll see one in the field, my guess.


David Roberts


And this is all basically different ways of bringing up heat that
you use to boil water and create steam and run a turbine. Right.
I mean, this is all ...


Jamie Beard


Very simply yes.


David Roberts


Just about getting heat.


Jamie Beard


That's right. We're just trying to harvest heat so we can harvest
heat for heat, so we can harvest it to use in an industrial
process so we don't have to burn fossil fuels to produce that
heat, which I think is a no brainer for geothermal, but we can
also use the heat to produce electricity. And we're focused on
that as well.


David Roberts


Since you mentioned it. I wanted to ask about this, too. A lot of
this is another thing that I feel like has sort of captured
public interest, maybe slightly out of scale with its reality.
But how big of a piece of the geothermal pie is going to be
repowering fossil fuel facilities? Because people really love
that idea.


Jamie Beard


You mean converting existing plants to geothermal?


David Roberts


Yes, like a coal plant. Instead of getting the heat to run the
turbine from coal, you just get it from underground. But the
turbine already exists. The power plant already exists. The ...


Jamie Beard


Transmission structure.


David Roberts


Transmission to and from already exists. So it's a great idea. I
just wonder great idea. How big of a deal is that going to be?


Jamie Beard


Well, so there are a couple of things about geothermal right now
that are really good at catching headlines because they sound so
cute. Right? And that's one of them. And another one is oil and
gas well reuse. You hear that one all the time, right? Yeah. Oh,
let's just reuse. All right. Okay.


David Roberts


Both those I wanted to ask about. The second one I'm super
skeptical about, just for obvious ...


Jamie Beard


Which one the coal plant?


David Roberts


Reusing wells.


Jamie Beard


Yeah.


David Roberts


You're drilling in different places, looking for different.


Jamie Beard


Yes, Right. And you're not looking for heat when you're drilling
for oil and gas. You're looking for oil and gas. You're avoiding
oftentimes. Yes, that's true. All right, so let's look at coal
first. I really like the idea. In fact, InnerSpace has just
funded a coal plant conversion study. Right.


So we are studying the top 20 candidates for coal plant
conversion in the United States to geothermal. We're going to
prioritize them by economics and subsurface characterization and
we'll get a good picture of that. I like the idea. Could we go
and do a megawatt to megawatt coal plant conversion today on the
existing footprint of the plant with geothermal? Maybe ... Maybe
in a really hot place, a hot subsurface. Hot in the subsurface,
right. So say we go to Nevada, where you've got really attractive
geothermal gradients and you try your very best. So we get the
best in oil and gas to drill this well as cheaply as they can.


And by the way, it's not one well, it's many wells to do it.
Megawatt for megawatt. We could probably technologically do it.
It's feasible to do it. The problem becomes this, though. It's
not economically feasible to do it. Not right now.


David Roberts


It all just comes down to how deep you can get. Right? I mean,
ultimately it all just comes down to getting deeper. Getting
deeper, cheaper.


Jamie Beard


Well, yes. So it depends. This is all about energy density,
essentially. So if you want to look at it like energy density,
the deeper you go, the more energy dense your output for
geothermal. Right?


So if you're drilling to 600 degrees Celsius and you're producing
at the surface 600 degrees Celsius fluids, that's awesome. I
mean, that is natural gas power plant style enthalpy. And that's
pretty awesome. And then you can start talking about plants that
are gigawatts, right? Big plants, like coal plants. But right
now, what we're calling that in geothermal land is super-hot. So
super-hot rock or SHR, my favorite.


David Roberts


Finally the energy world comes up with a cool term, finally,
right?


Jamie Beard


Exactly. Just add super to it and that makes it cool. Right. So
those systems are theoretical right now, not super well
understood. How we would fracture in, for instance, you've gone
so hot that the rock is now plastic. It's not hard anymore. It's
soft. So how do you fracture that and have the fractures not
close


David Roberts


And have your drilling equipment not melt?


Jamie Beard


It'll melt. But that's the thing. That's why all these kind of
cool new drilling methods are being researched and produced,
because they are relying on materials that actually just melt and
vaporize the rock instead of drilling them. There may be a
situation where we can actually drill into 600 degrees Celsius
semiplastic rock in the future. I think what this comes down to,
though, is economic feasibility. We can probably do it now, like
I was mentioning with the coal plant conversion, right? We could
get the best in class to go drill those wells, and they've done
it.


Like oil and gas has drilled 300 Celsius offshore, no problem. We
could do it. But do we have the $500 million to do it? No, we
don't. No, we don't, actually. Right. And that makes it
economically infeasible right now. So the question really will
become for these kind of cool, sexy, super deep systems, is can
we get the cost down? Or is something so dramatic going to happen
over the next decades in terms of our energy markets, that we're
going to be able to afford to develop these systems. And I'm
hoping yes. Right. That's my hope.


David Roberts


What you want to do just in terms of broad, big picture for the
industry is get the low hanging fruit first. Build a bunch of
plants, get the learning, bring the cost down.


Jamie Beard


Learning curve.


David Roberts


And it's not necessarily the case that the places the coal plants
are, are where the low hanging fruit is.


Jamie Beard


Right, exactly. Though some of them are.


David Roberts


No reason to start there.


Jamie Beard


Yes. And we're going to find the ones that are, because some of
them are, but not all of them are. And you are exactly right.
That where we start is baby steps. And that is exactly, David,
how shale happened. Right. We ended up with a little bit, a
little bit, a little bit more, uhoh, this is a lot, a lot, a lot,
bam. Change the world. Right. And it was just like this was about
taking baby steps. And so for geothermal, it'll be the same.
Right? Let's go and find the easiest stuff to do first. That's
probably going to be in sedimentary basins, because they're soft,
the rock is soft, and oil and gas, for instance, understands how
to do it because they've been doing it for shale.


David Roberts


Well, let me ask this, because I had a pod recently on learning
curves and on what kinds of technologies do and don't get on
them. And a big piece of what gets on a learning curve is
technologies that are more modular, more factory produced, and
not so kind of bespoke to each individual location. So I'm
curious sort of in the current state of play for geothermal, how
bespoke is it in an individual location? How modularized is it?
And what room is there to sort of modularize it in a way that
will accelerate that learning?


Jamie Beard


It is the perfect example of getting on a learning curve and
particularly transferrin from oil and gas to geothermal. I think,
David, you saw it recently we published a report called The
Future of Geothermal in Texas. And there was a chapter in that
report that dealt with transferable learnings from oil and gas
and learning curves. And the outcome of that report was
essentially, well, hell, if we just transferred what we've
already got, let's not even talk about what we need to develop or
what we could. Let's just talk about what we've already got in
oil and gas and let's transfer that into geothermal.


How much do we reduce cost off the top? Just transfer what they
already do in oil and gas into geothermal. And yeah, modular, the
way they do oil and gas, David, is called pad drilling. It's
manufacturing. It is ultra-modular. I mean, they literally stamp
out oil and gas wells, 200ft from one another in a line. Right.
It's manufactured. Right. It's the definition of modular. But if
we grabbed all of that technology and just transferred it in
wholesale to geothermal. No innovations required. We've got 43%
cost reduction off the top for geothermal. That's huge, right? I
mean, that is not considering new stuff.


That is what we've already got. That is a huge opportunity. Huge
opportunity.


David Roberts


This is another good segue then, because I want to talk about
this larger sort of relationship between oil and gas and
geothermal. This is of course your bailiwick, your sweet spot.
This is your bag. So this is another one of these sort of like
folktales about geothermal going around. Oil and gas, You can
just transfer to geothermal. Same skills. It's great. It's going
to cause this flow.


Jamie Beard


It's becoming a headline too. Yeah, it's another cute headline.


David Roberts


Yeah. I'm just curious, to what extent is that a reality? Number
one, to what extent are the skills really transferable? And
number two, to what extent is it happening? The geothermal
industry is so tiny compared to oil and gas, so it's not like
leakage to geothermal is going to show up in the statistics of
oil and gas employment, I think, anytime soon. In a major way. I
mean, tell me if I'm wrong.


Jamie Beard


But no, you're not wrong.


David Roberts


What is the nature of that? How much of that is reality and how
much of that is acute headline?


Jamie Beard


So I think the headlines get it a little bit wrong, but I think
we need to look at it differently. So we need to adjust what
we're thinking here. So skills transfer and all that? Yes, I
mean, almost 100%. It is so synergistic in terms of skill set,
transferring from oil and gas to geothermal that we're talking
about minimal training certificate level, let's just get you up
to speed kind of thing, but otherwise go.


David Roberts


Interesting, so drilling really is just drilling then.


Jamie Beard


It is drilling. Drilling is drilling. You're either drilling for
oil, you're drilling for heat, you're drilling for water. It
doesn't matter, you're drilling.


David Roberts


Right.


Jamie Beard


So when it comes down to it, awesome. So you've got this highly
skilled workforce of millions globally. Let's go, right? We don't
have to build that for geothermal. It's there. So how do we
transfer it? Right, well, this is my opinion. We transfer it not
by taking people out of oil and gas and putting them in this
nascent and tiny industry we call geothermal. We do that by
turning the geothermal industry into oil and gas or vice versa.
Right, so we get the oil and gas industry to look at geothermal
as a viable and exciting future business model where they
themselves, the oil and gas entities, then become massive
geothermal developers and producers using their own workforce.


David Roberts


Right?


Jamie Beard


And we've started to see that already. We're starting to see the
very beginning of that trend where you've got Chevron that's
about to develop a geothermal project in California.


David Roberts


Is there a big major, is there an oil major with like a full
fledged geothermal ...


Jamie Beard


Team!


David Roberts


Department, team, whatever.


Jamie Beard


They all have them now, all of them. And David, in 2020, when you
did your article, none of them had them.


David Roberts


Interesting.


Jamie Beard


That's how fast this is happening. Every single oil major has a
dedicated geothermal person. Some of them have like VP of
geothermal. We've got executives in geothermal now with whole
funded teams. Some of them have a portfolio of geothermal
companies that they've invested in. I mean, this has all happened
in the last three years. So we're talking about traction. Like,
read David's article first to get a 2020, but then between 2000
and 2023, there has been so much that's happened within the oil
and gas industry for geothermal.


David Roberts


And in terms of their motivations, the oil and gas majors
motivations, how much of this is hedging against us being in what
is possibly a dying industry and we need something else to do
versus geothermal actually being like remunerative to the point
that it would actually attract their attention regardless.


Jamie Beard


All right, both I think if you're an oilfield service company or
a drilling contractor, so you're the one with the skilled labor
and the rigs. You're looking at geothermal and thinking, okay,
there's our future business, right? They need rigs, they need
drillers. That's what we should do. Right? So you have some very
fast movers in that space and they are leading the pack in oil
and gas. So you have like Baker Hughes is out there kicking butt.
They're one of the ones that has a geothermal team and they're
out there really pushing another one Neighbors Drilling
contractor, just really pushing hard and getting out there and
making investments.


That's awesome. But you have the operators, the majors, like the
Chevron, Shells, BPs of the world who are also looking at
geothermal and thinking, where in the world is this most relevant
for us in terms of where we own assets, where we operate assets?
How can we pull geothermal in as a value add into a portfolio and
eventually, maybe, build it into a massive, globally scalable
opportunity where we're drilling millions of projects, right? And
so you look at geothermal in terms of scale. If we were drilling
at the scale of oil and gas, if we're drilling geothermal at the
scale of oil and gas, we solve energy.


That's it. We solve energy by 2050. Right? And that's the
opportunity for oil and gas.


David Roberts


So you genuinely think it's not a PR play for the big oil and
gas?


Jamie Beard


No, I mean, you can't greenwash with geothermal, right? It's core
competency. I'll be the first one to say it. You go on any majors
website and they've got wind turbines splashed all over the
place.


David Roberts


Algae. They used to have algae.


Jamie Beard


Yeah, algae, whatever. Solar panels. I mean, you'd think you were
at a solar manufacturer or whatever. You're on oil majors
website, it's all crap, right? I mean, that is greenwashing.
Absolutely. If you look at the scale of their renewables
investments versus the scale of their investment and their core
competencies. Note, core competencies meaning subsurface. So what
do we do with that? Well, we grab that core competency and we
turn it to something that is future facing, right? Which is like,
fine, stay subsurface experts. Awesome. Do CCUS, geothermal, and
mining because we need lithium and we need clean, baseload power,
right?


And we need to store a whole lot of carbon. So you all are the
subsurface experts. Go. And that is really working. And I don't
think you can really shake a stick at that in terms of
greenwashing because it's core competency. They're doing what
they know how to do.


David Roberts


And I have to believe that there are as a card carrying greeny, I
have a deep and abiding hostility toward oil and gas companies.
But I have to believe there are people in there who are good
people and want to do good things. And this is an actual I know
you share this sentiment. This whole notion that they were ever
going to get into renewable energy in a big way I thought was
always kind of silly. It's just a different just a completely
different business.


Jamie Beard


Not the same business model.


But this, I have to believe that psychologically, there are a lot
of people, oil and gas, who are gratified by this and excited by
this because it's a real exit. It's a real exit out of the past
into the future, not just BS hand waving.


Yeah, you are absolutely right. Over the past three years in some
of the majors. The way this has happened and built into what it
is is through grassroots movements in the employees. They start
beating down the doors of executives and having roundtables about
geothermal and all of a sudden it builds into this thing. And all
of a sudden they're presenting it to the board and the C suite
and then they've got a program. I mean, that's awesome. And I can
absolutely attest to oil and gas as a villain industry. It's not
so easy to look at an individual across the table that works in
the oil and gas industry and be like, you villain.


That's not the case. Right. It's just not. I mean, these are
people that love the environment and have families and are really
freaking skilled at what they do. And they're humans, right? And
you sit across the table from these guys and they know how to
drill. Good Lord. Y'all go drill. Let's just change what you're
drilling for.


David Roberts


You made a point. I heard in another interview, which I found
really interesting and you sort of implied it or talked around it
a little bit so far. But I want to get straight at it, which is
the question of how to scale geothermal up so that it's more than
a niche, kind of extra. I was looking at the new electricity
capacity installed sort of graph that the EIA just came out with
and I was sort of gratified that you can actually see geothermal
with the naked eye now.


Jamie Beard


Oh, yeah, really? So it's like 1%.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's like a tiny little stripe at the top. You can see it,
but so we all want the idea is to scale it up so that it's a big
player to rival wind and solar. Your sort of argument is that the
way wind and solar got to where they are was by all kinds of
policy help and subsidies over the course of decades, basically.
And so if we want geothermal to follow that route, it will also
take decades. And we don't have decades. So your theory, how do
we scale it up quickly? And you have an answer to that, so that's
what I like to hear.


Jamie Beard


Yeah, I mean the answer to that is the oil and gas industry,
right? So we can sit here and wait 20 years and fund startups to
grow into giants and fund RnD and hope for the best. Or we can
convince an incredibly capable and skilled industry that there's
a market based approach here and that they can do what they know
how to do and also solve energy and climate. And we're talking
about the type of scale here that we start drilling for
geothermal like we drill for oil and gas between 2030 and 2050.
That exceeds world energy demand, I mean future world energy
demand.


David Roberts


Do you mean if the scale of geothermal drilling were equal to the
scale of oil and gas drilling?


Jamie Beard


Correct. In number of wells per year, yes. So we're talking about
if we did that, I'm talking about with conservative estimates
too. So 70,000 wells a year globally, 10 megawatts a pop, which
is pretty damn low for a geothermal project. We end up at 146% of
future global energy demand by 2050, and that's for heat and for
electricity, 77%. Bam.


David Roberts


Interesting. I mean, that's not going to happen, is it? That's
like a theoretical boundary. But how realistic do you think it is
to get to that scale that quickly? Like it would be? Not many
industries have ever done that.


Jamie Beard


Well, oil and gas did it with shale, let's just do it again.


David Roberts


Just do it again. Is there as much money in geothermal as there
was in shale, though?


Jamie Beard


Well, so, look, I think you have to ... you can't compare
geothermal to oil and gas in that way, right? Because geothermal
is never going to make for oil and gas companies what oil and gas
makes for oil and gas companies. But you also have these
companies trying to build offshore wind farms and struggling with
single digit returns. Geothermal is going to be higher than that,
right? So there's going to have to be a little bit of a shift
where you look at geothermal as an oil and gas entity and you
say, "Ha, we're probably going to max out at about 15% return,
but hell, we can drill a million of them. That sounds pretty
good. Let's go." Right, so there's going to be a little shift.
It's going to be a lot of wells for less returns than oil and
gas. And I think if you compare geothermal with wind and solar,
it looks pretty darn good to an oil and gas company.


David Roberts


Yeah. And of course, what the rate of return is, is somewhat
affected by policy. So policy could get in there and at least
tweak the incentives.


Jamie Beard


You can keep having hope for this, David, you keep hoping for the
politics and whatever. We'll just go drill in Texas or what ...
you know.


David Roberts


IRA happened. Well, let's conclude here then, and let's just talk
because I'm a policy guy. And I have to ...


Jamie Beard


I know you do that. You keep doing that, David. I love it.
Somebody's got to work on it.


David Roberts


So, two questions by way of wrapping up. One is, was there
anything in IRA in the Inflation Reduction Act or the
Infrastructure Act or CHIPS, now that I think about it, in the
legislation that Democrats just passed, was there anything for
geothermal? And did you feel like in all the frenzy of activity
leading to that stuff, that geothermal had a voice up there in
those circles? Like, does it yet have a voice? That's my first
question. The second question is just what policy, if you were
less cynical about policy and still had policy hopes, what would
those hopes be for?


Jamie Beard


Oh, good, these are great questions. Okay, so, yes, there was lip
service to geothermal in the IRA, unfortunately not well fitted.
So it's ITC and PTC, they're meant to apply now across all types
of renewables with a longer time frame to benefit from them. The
problem, though, with geothermal, particularly on federal land,
is the development and the permitting. Time frame is so darn long
that you almost can't even make it even with the extended window
under the IRA. Your second question was, well, did geothermal
have a voice? Clearly no, because we ended up in the same spot.


Right. Where it's like, well, we're trying to fit geothermal,
which is pretty darn unique, under a one size fits all policy to
fit and solar and wind that are very streamlined in terms of
permitting and much more predictable with very little ... no
subsurface risk. Right, so it's like no, essentially no. Is it
better than it was? Yes. But is it going to fix anything? No,
probably not. So that's my answer there. I have hope for the
future, though. I think when it comes down to geothermal, we're
probably going to need to build a lot of individual state
alliances that then go and build a coalition that go after
federal.


Right. So it's like when we get a bunch of states and governors
and state legislatures involved and motivated and feeling like
that geothermal could be a really viable future economy in those
states. And this is what. We're doing right now in Texas, if we
can build that across other states that would really benefit from
geothermal in the future, we may have a shot at getting
geothermal a more impactful voice on the federal level.


David Roberts


But if that coalition came together, pressured the feds, and the
feds did something, would that just be under the general heading
of permitting reform, the kind of permitting reform that
everybody is clamoring for now, or is there something more
unique?


Jamie Beard


No that's so boring. Yeah, you told me I could pick just
whatever, right? In terms of what the federal government could
do, that would be really cool and impactful. And if you're going
to let me have that leash, I will just take it and say, yeah,
sure, fix permitting. Yes, please. But that's easy. If we want to
really accelerate geothermal in a way that it catches geothermal
up with other renewables, that geothermal has been substantially
underfunded comparatively. Right. If we really want to catch
geothermal up, then we need to say make an office of subsurface
energy, put geothermal CCUS and lithium in it, and build it
ARPA-E style.


Interesting, right? So we've got high risk, high reward type, big
investments going toward trying to figure out how to do all these
three things really well.


David Roberts


DOE has got the Earthshot, right? I mean, it's putting some money
toward that kind of stuff.


Jamie Beard


Yeah, but David, we're talking about like $200 million here, $100
million there, and we're comparing that for geothermal with a
billion here and a billion, right? And so it's like, what are we
doing? You all right? What are we doing here? So I would put the
billions in the office of subsurface energy, put an industry
advisory board, engage with that, and go, that would be ARPA-E
style, high risk, high reward. How do we build this fast? Go, if
I was in charge, that's what I would do.


David Roberts


So the game plan then the strategy here is get oil and gas
interested, get them moving, get them funding startups, get them
interested, get states interested and on board via oil and gas
being interested. And then take your coalition of states and oil
and gas industry to the federal level and move the Feds on
permitting and just general more attention and money to
Geothermal. That's the game plan.


Jamie Beard


That's the game plan. InnerSpace is launching ten more. So we did
the future of geothermal in Texas. We just published that a
couple of months ago. We're launching ten more states this year.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting.


Jamie Beard


We're building the coalition.


David Roberts


Is Washington just at a ...


Jamie Beard


No sorry


David Roberts


No geothermal activity in Washington?


Jamie Beard


No, it's not that. Washington is great. You've got awesome
geothermal resources. We're focused though, on oil and gas state,
traditional energy states, oil and gas states, right. So we're
really focused on states that have a real interest in their
current oil and gas economies and focused on getting them excited
about building that into a geothermal economy.


David Roberts


I got to say, if you manage to navigate the red-blue divide with
an energy source without getting Hoovered into culture war on
either side, that's going to be a real historical accomplishment.


Jamie Beard


Yeah, that's something to keep eyes on. More on that later. We'll
talk about that one. We'll come back in a couple of years, David.
We'll see. How that's going.


David Roberts


Awesome. Well, the pace things are going, I'd love to have you
back in three years. I'm sure it'll be transformed. Exactly.
We'll be on to some other use for lasers. All right, Jamie Beard
of InnerSpace, thank you so much. I've been meaning to have you
on forever. This is beautiful. This is exactly what I wanted.
Thank you so much for coming on.


Jamie Beard


Awesome, David. Thanks so much. This is fun.


David Roberts


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