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An exploration well at Zanskar’s Big Blind site in Nevada.
Zanskar
Iinterest in geothermal energy recently it has focused on companies using new techniques to artificially cheat this carbon-free source of electricity out of the ground. Fervo Energy, for example, drills horizontal wells to access hot rocks thousands of feet underground, which can heat the water it pumps to generate steam to power a turbine.
Zanskar Geothermal, a Utah-based startup, believes that using AI-based analysis to find geothermal wells in the wild is a cheaper option.
“Geothermal is this incredible energy source – carbon-free, baseload power, small footprint, domestic – all the things you want,” said Zanskar founder and CEO Carl Hoiland. Forbes. “But maybe 40 or 50 years ago, we came to believe that it was really, really hard to find, really rare. So the industry really stopped growing.”
Fervo, which is preparing to go public, has a workable approach.
“But what if we could get better at discovery and exploration?” Hoyland said. To do that, his company, which operates a geothermal well in New Mexico and is exploring new sites in Nevada and other parts of the US Southwest, uses artificial intelligence to make detailed assessments to find geothermal wells no one knew existed.
“We’re really wild drilling for new geothermal resources all over the western US,” he said. “We’re getting dozens of different types of data, each of which doesn’t tell you anything directly, but collectively they can start to paint a picture of AI models that are good at these kinds of high-dimensional problems.”
Using this, the company continued to find “anomalous sites that no one knew about,” Hoiland said. So much so that “it became clear that the opportunity was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought.”
This month, it established a $40 million line of credit that could be expanded to $100 million to begin drilling and operating wells in the most promising locations. It is a first-of-its-kind financing deal for early-stage geothermal projects, according to the company. Although Zanskar’s New Mexico site generates revenue from electricity sales, the plan is to spend a lot for now on activating more new wells, Hoiland said.
He is convinced that natural geothermal can play as big a role as solar or wind power in the coming years, especially if it gets more support from industry.
“If you took every rig operating in the U.S. today, 500 or so, and converted them to geothermal tomorrow, we would add 50 to 100 gigawatts of new geothermal well fields,” Hoiland said. And unlike oil and gas wells, their production will not decrease over time. “We think they will last decades, if not centuries.”
The big read
SpaceX’s IPO could leave Tesla eating rocket dust
Tesla’s biggest problem may no longer be Chinese rivals, slowing demand for its electric vehicles, or the still-theoretical payoff from robotics and humanoid robots.
It could be SpaceX.
If Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite internet company goes public at anything close to its rumored $1.75 trillion valuation, it won’t just be one of the biggest IPOs in history. It will give Tesla investors tired of waiting for the CEO’s promises to materialize something they haven’t had in a while: a potentially bigger, more exciting way to invest in the Musk legend. To be sure, SpaceX, with its reliable and steady leadership under longtime president Gwynne Shotwell, is shaping up to be a shinier proxy — with fewer close competitors or awkward quarterly questions about when exactly Tesla might take on Waymo in self-driving technology or actually deliver its C-3PO-style robot.
“There are a lot of Tesla investors who see SpaceX as a better investment for a lot of reasons,” Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor and CEO of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Gerber Kawasaki, which manages more than $4 billion, told Forbes. “If I sell my shares in Tesla, nobody’s going to argue that it’s not overvalued. And if I want to buy the sizzle, I’m going to buy SpaceX. And that’s what people want to do. A lot of people think that’s going to be easy money.”
That’s largely because, despite Tesla’s continued profitability, it’s undergoing a fundamental shift from the business that created the brand — electric vehicle sales — which have hit highs as it waits for AI-oriented new ones to take off.
Read more here
Hot topic
Jack Hurd, head of the World Economic Forum’s Earth Systems agenda, on the need for better forest management in a warming world
Wildfires are a growing problem, especially in places where they haven’t occurred in the past, like those burning in Georgia. What is the broader impact of this climate-related change?
First of all, forests and land use change contribute to about 15% of all global CO2 emissions. This means that the act of deforestation, the act of converting natural ecosystems, contributes to about 15% of global CO2 emissions. This is very important because forests absorb about 30% of the existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So by continuing to destroy forests, we further damage their ability to absorb CO2. I mention this because what it does is it changes the dynamics in the atmosphere, which makes the fire hazard worse.
When we think of forests in general, not all forests, fire is a natural element of many forest systems. In California, forests are fire-prone and fire-exposed, and there are forests that require fire for their health and growth. In other parts of the world, fire is not a natural part of the system. And as we continue to have a slightly warming climate, it has an impact on forests that makes them more vulnerable to fire risk. And when you have a change in climate and you have forests that are not managed properly, you have a lot of undergrowth that is prone to fire.
When we don’t clear forests or when fire runs naturally through a forest, which we generally hate to do, overstocking and density become. And then when the system catches fire, which it eventually will, you end up with catastrophic fires. We’ve seen that in California, in the Intermountain West, but in places like Georgia or Southern Europe or Western Australia, you’re also seeing it now. It all points to the fact that we are actually not managing our forests well and that, combined with climate change and warming, is causing a fundamental problem where we end up losing forests in many places around the world.
So every region of the world must now have much more active forest management?
Absolutely. I think two things are going on here. One is that we have to recognize that fire will be in different systems than it has traditionally been. The second is that we have to manage forests and manage fire, if you will, in ways that we’re probably not used to doing. And number three is to reduce loss of life and property, we need to manage the built environment in a way that’s also different than maybe we’ve done in the past.
Globally, are we continuing to lose forests at a rapid clip? How are we doing in terms of forest conservation?
We’re not doing very well. It is possible to say that we are doing a little better than we were. In the 1990s, we were losing about 16 million hectares of forest annually worldwide. Many of these were in the tropics. More recently, in the 2010-2020 period, it has decreased to about 10 million hectares per year. There is a large part of this in the tropics or in countries where the rule of law is not well established. It is difficult to differentiate how much of this loss is due to fire versus other related activities.
The Trump administration has cut support for the Forest Service and prioritized energy production and mining on federal lands. Is the US now something of an outlier when it comes to forest conservation?
Traditionally, past Republican and Democratic administrations have always believed that forests and nature, forests in particular, were generally a bipartisan issue. That’s largely because many of the key forest states are in the Intermountain West and controlled by Republican legislatures and governors. Therefore, forest management has generally been a more bipartisan issue than other aspects of the environmental situation.
The Trump administration hasn’t really supported the traditional practices of most Republican administrations and clearly isn’t funding it at the level it has in the past.
What else are we reading?
Georgia flame shows how climate change has led to more wildfires in the East (Associated Press)
“The damage is done”: The global oil crisis has changed the fossil fuel industry forever, says the head of the IEA (The Guardian)
A new idea to save the climate: Bering Strait Dam (New York Times)
44% of Americans breathe dangerously polluted air. In California, it is 82% (Los Angeles Times)
Florida’s DeSantis signs bill on Earth Day reversing local action on climate change (Miami Herald)
