Tim Latimer, the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, has raised over $400 million to pursue his dream of unlocking limitless zero-carbon thermal energy from the Earth’s crust. Latimer’s passion for digging and creating energy has led him to develop a plan to extract geothermal energy using the same “fracking” techniques used in the oil and gas industry.
Fervo Energy plans to use a 166-foot-tall drilling rig to punch a total of 80 boreholes in the Escalante Desert near Milford, Utah. Each of these holes goes down a mile and a half, then horizontally for nearly another mile, through solid granite rock that’s close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Once a hole is drilled, high-pressure water mixed with sand is blasted down it to open fractures in the rock. Fervo then uses sensors to pinpoint where those fractures have spread and drills the next well so that its expected fractures intersect with those created by the first. This creates a closed loop, where cold water is injected down one well, takes the heat out of the rock, and becomes steam that flows back up through the second well to the surface for use as thermal energy.
Fervo’s ambitious goal is to produce 2,000 megawatts (two gigawatts) of zero-carbon geothermal power at a cost of “several billion” by 2030, which would be enough for more than 2 million homes. The company has already presold 115 megawatts of its power under a long-term contract with Google’s data centers and another 320 megawatts to Southern California Edison. While the initial costs of this technology may be high, Latimer hopes to repeat the plummeting cost curve of solar power, which has become 80% cheaper over the last 15 years.
