Is Geothermal The Future For Oil & Gas? Ep207: Jamie Beard

Jamie Beard  

I am incredibly excited about the opportunity for geothermal, particularly next generation geothermal, in the United States right now, and that is directly related to politics and the new administration. They've been really vocally supportive about geothermal, and that has not happened in the United States before.

Bryony Worthington  

Thinking then about geothermals potential. As you said, it's huge, right? It's a big part of the potential solution. But today it's not delivering very much at all, right? 

JB  

It is like less than 1%. It's so small it's not even showing up. 

BW  

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Jamie Beard, founder and executive director of Project InnerSpace, a not for profit organization promoting a massive increase in the deployment of geothermal energy worldwide. We met during San Francisco climate week where Democrat grandees Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi helped open the proceedings. There is no doubt that any political consensus on climate change there once was in the US is now completely broken down, and yet, there is one form of renewable energy that the current occupants of the White House actually support, and that's geothermal. Jamie is perhaps the most celebrated and well known advocate for geothermal in the world, and I wanted to ask her about her role in getting this often overlooked energy source onto the map, and about some of the challenges that need to be overcome. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the beautifully decorated geothermal house, now a firm fixture on the climate and energy circuit. Please join me in welcoming Jamie Beard to Cleaning Up. 

BW  

Well, thank you for doing this with me, Jamie. I'm very excited to be here today at Geothermal House in San Francisco climate week. I wanted to have a conversation a bit about you as a leader and a bit about the technology that we're here to promote. So could you just start by telling us who you are and what you do, in your own words?

JB  

Sure, hey everybody. So we're speaking to a live audience and also a podcast audience. So hello, hello. I'm a lawyer by training, an energy and regulatory lawyer. Prior to being a lawyer, I was an artist, a creative — studied science but a lot of passion for art — and turned into an entrepreneur post lawyering. I got a bit tired of the work from the inside — to not-a-lot of impact and effect — of the big law world. So I joined a startup, and then jumped into geothermal energy from there. So that's kind of my path to where I am now.

BW  

But when you went into law from art, what was it that motivated you to make that change?

JB  

So I was actually a muralist back in the day in high school and college, and I would paint murals that had environmental statements, that made environmental statements about conservation. And I just couldn't find a way to not only support myself doing that, but also feel that I was making enough of a dent in the world's problems, like enough impact, as a creative full time. Also, I was an activist back then, the kind that chains yourself to trees, kind of activist, environmental activist. And I learned slowly through that process that screaming at people from the outside is actually not a good way to get things done. And so I thought back then, well, maybe I should try to get into the inside. I should do that through law, I'll go to law school! And so that's what I did.

BW  

And so then spent a period of time in law school. Sounds as if that didn't actually meet your needs, then, you didn't feel that that was a route to direct impact?

JB  

Law school was one thing, it was the firm. It was the law firm environment that beat the hope out of me in terms of being able to make change. So I'm sure this is not lost on the audience here. But you know, companies don't hire big law firms to ask them for their advice on how to change the world for the better. They hire big law firms to defend themselves, typically, against things that they've done that they shouldn't have. So I found myself in an environment where I was on the wrong side of a lot of the arguments I was making. And it got uncomfortable to a point where— it was around the time of Macondo and the BP oil spill, where I was at a big law firm who was defending multiple clients in that controversy. And I just decided to jump.

BW  

Right, and you jumped from there into an energy startup, right? Tell us a little bit about that.

JB  

Yeah. So I was in Boston. I met through my network a kind of a mad scientist entrepreneur type out of MIT, who had invented a cool energy storage technology and was in the process of spinning out a company out of MIT. And I joined as the second or third employee, pre-funding. So it was a scary kind of high risk jump, but it felt really exciting. The energy storage device they were developing was for all kinds of applications. There was a lot of science and technology, it was really cool. So I decided to just jump in and go for it.

BW  

And this was a chemical battery? 

JB  

An advanced form of chemical storage, an ultracapacitor. 

BW  

So tell us how you go from there to geothermal.

JB  

Okay, so, yeah, lots of twists and turns. But it just so happens that we noticed, as we were developing this novel product, that it was performing really well in really high temperature environments. So it was a really high temperature energy storage device. So we started thinking, where could we apply this technology? Defense and space and oil and gas. And it was around this period of time that MIT published a report called The Future of Geothermal Energy. It's kind of become the Bible of the next generation geothermal movement, the original statement of how massive the potential is for next generation geothermal. And it was just kind of two and two together, where the gist of that report — which is incredibly long and heavy technical — but the gist of it is there's many thousands of times more energy underneath us than the world could ever use. It's a set of engineering challenges and problems that we need to solve to tap into it. Effectively, a lot of that could come from the oil and gas industry and others who know how to drill, but that we can't get to it right now. There's just too many technological challenges. For me, hearing that and seeing what we were seeing in the lab, which was, "wow, technology can actually start solving these problems, we're having high temperature results that are amazing, that could apply." It was just a matter of time after putting those two things together that I jumped into geothermal. So we got a grant from the Department of Energy in that startup to do geothermal technology development. I got really involved and then decided to go all in on geothermal myself.

BW  

And so when is this? Around what time?

JB  

Yeah, mid to early 2000s. So, yeah, it's quite a long time, we've got a journey. So we're talking 15 years ago or more now.

BW  

But here we are today, we're in Geothermal House. I think this is the fifth or the sixth such house that you've hosted. And I mean, people are talking about geothermal in a way that it seems to have a new energy behind it. Tell us a little bit how that's come about, or what have been the successful things you've done to get it on the map.

JB  

So I jumped out of the startup and into Texas with the goal of engaging the oil and gas industry in the conversation. And around this time, the pandemic happened. So there was a dramatic downturn in the oil and gas industry, and then that was exacerbated horribly by the pandemic. So there was a slight period of time where there was a massive downturn in oil and gas. And at the same time, myself and my team were out agitating in Texas about geothermal and also trying to spin off some startups from oil and gas to pursue new technology. Some of them are actually at Geothermal House. And you know, one thing that we found, in terms of engagement in the space at that time was, because there was a downturn in oil and gas, there was more bandwidth for their teams to think about something new. Whereas if it had been a boom time in oil and gas, they would have just told us to pound sand, like 'we don't have time for this.' But there was actually early traction and getting conversations off the ground. And I don't mean in the executive level. I mean like the soldiers, the scientists, the geophysicists, people that are mid-level management or lower in the organization. So it became this grassroots thing that kind of organically grew, and then it spread through other entities, all through the oil and gas industry. Then you had startups spinning off, and they were creating their own buzz, and it became this growing, flourishing thing that's turned into us sitting here today,over a period of years. So it's been actually kind of fun to see. 

BW  

Let's just sort of think about that. These people were, because we've done an episode with Cindy Taff, who had spent a long time at Shell, you know, managing a massive team, and here she is now running a geothermal company and an advanced geothermal company, which is really interesting. And so some of our audience will be familiar with this, but what's the difference? What makes it advanced? Can you just quickly give us an explainer on the different types of geothermal that your organization thinks about. 

JB  

We are a not for profit  that tries to represent an entire, very complex ecosystem. And there are a lot of types of geothermal out there, but in a nutshell, you have the type that is in Iceland — hydrothermal. That's the type that's been around forever, and that is relatively geographically limited in terms of size and how much we can develop. And then there's next generation geothermal, which, in that bucket, has a whole lot of concepts. Yes, Cindy and Sage, there's a significant background with that team. That was actually one of the startup teams that we recruited in Texas to start a company. And they have gone on to be incredibly successful. They are but one of many next generation concepts, and you'll see on the walls of Geothermal House around us, you see some of them actively being drilled in the digital art here. So you have some concepts like engineered geothermal systems that use fractures. You have others like advanced geothermal thermal systems or closed loop that don't and then you have a lot of concepts that kind of blend these two into hybrid systems. And you're talking about a wide range of applications too. So heating and cooling, shallow versus deep versus super hot. There's so much out there right now. And I think that is really reflective of the renaissance that geothermal is in now, there are so many things. There's a lot of flowers blooming right now, almost so many flowers that it's hard to summarize what's out there right now, because there's a lot. But you know, in a very basic sense, you have next generation, that's a huge bucket, and you have hydrothermal or traditional geothermal systems that we see developed in a lot of places in the world now.

BW  

And just to go back to that story of the pivoting out of oil and gas, it was really the teams that were familiar with fracturing rock, right, that they could then see: oh, hi, this geothermal it's not reliant on me finding these rare occurrences where we get wet, hot rock close to the surface. Now that we can drill at really great distances and fracture rocks, we've got this whole new way of doing geothermal.

JB  

Yeah. I mean, that would be the entire Sage team's journey, right? Cindy, who you talked to, actually was VP of unconventionals at Shell. Unconventionals is essentially fracking. I mean, that's the natural gas boom. And so for those types of concepts, you do see a lot of oil and gas brains entering the space, applying directly their knowledge that they gained in the shale boom toward geothermal problems. I'll say, though, it's not just fracking. So there's a lot of talent coming out of oil and gas in geophysics and geology subsurface characterization. So I see geologists in the audience now who are pioneering new types of geothermal systems, same goes for drilling. So drilling and fracking are different. I think the general public doesn't necessarily separate those two things from a technological perspective. But some geothermal concepts are not utilizing fracking but are utilizing really advanced drilling technologies, like directional drilling. That's being transferred directly from oil and gas.

BW  

So thinking then about geothermal potential, as you said, it's huge, right? It's a big part of a potential solution. But today it's not delivering very much at all.  

JB  

Like, less than 1%, it's so small, it's not even showing up. 

BW  

We've just reached the milestone globally that 40% of electricity now is clean, but it's largely made up of hydro, nuclear, wind and solar, with a bit of biomass. So why is this an under invested, an under capitalized solution. 

JB  

Oh my gosh. How long do we have?  

BW  

Not that long. Top three. 

JB  

All right. So that's an interesting and complicated question, but it's also really exciting to talk about the prospect when you compare geothermal where it is now. So, yes, it has huge potential. How much potential? Well, it's 1% or less now, the world doesn't even know about it. It doesn't even show up in most models. That is slowly changing. The IEA did a report, Rhodium Group did a report. So we have some really good data coming out about potential, and the potential is just massive, 140 times global energy demand, etcetera. What gets me really excited, though, is when you talk about oil and gas technology and applications of the oil and gas industry and its implications for scale. And when you start looking at that, how fast can we go? How fast can we scale, leveraging oil and gas, that's where I get really jazzed. And I think that if we started talking about that narrative more, we would attract more brains and capital and people and funds. Which gets to the crux of your question, which is, why is this the red headed stepchild of renewables? Why is this an opportunity that nobody has paid attention to? The answer to that question, I think, is because the opportunity has seemed so small to most people. When you hear geothermal, most people think about Iceland and hot springs, and they just assume that is not relevant. That was fun on vacation, but that is not relevant when it comes to energy and climate and everything else. I think that is a massive misperception that we have to fix. Because next generation geothermal is such a huge opportunity, and it's newly enabled, right? So we have a bias we have to work against. But just as an example in terms of statistics, we're trying to talk about this narrative of scale and how big could we get. You know, what I think fails is saying, 'Wow, we could do 20 times the amount of geothermal we do today.' Okay, 20 times zero is still zero, right? 20 times isn't going to cut it. But if we were saying things like we're going to do 100,000 times what we do today, that's getting somewhere right. And that's the oil and gas industry. So the oil and gas industry drills about 70,000 wells for us a year for oil and gas. And if we, just as a hypothetical, if we were to drill that many wells for geothermal between 2030 and 2050, that powers the world. Like we're talking 77% of all the electricity in 2050 demand. And all of the heat would be provided by geothermal. So all of a sudden you're just in massive exponential growth. And the key there is the oil and gas industry, right? That's where you can get people excited.

BW  

But let's dig into that oil and gas. Because, you've said that you shouldn't treat the sector as a monolithic entity, right? There's lots of different shades within that oil and gas bucket of companies. And I suppose a challenging question is: is it actually likely that the oil and gas sector will do this? Because in many ways, this is not what they do. They drill, sure, but they then pull out a commodity which is barreled up and traded and moves around the world, and is a very, very different business model. So actually, they're not in this business. They're in the business of trading a commodity. That's where they make their revenues and their profits. This is heat — this is generating heat, and it's quite local. 

JB  

Or electrons. 

BW  

Yeah, electrons. But again, they've all struggled to get into the electron business. Again, not something they really understand. They like to be able to store things and trade things. And electrons don't really lend themselves to that. Kodak could have invented the digital camera. In fact, I think one of their lab technicians did. They just ignored it because their business model was, 'we want to sell things a lot of times to a lot of people and keep people hooked.' This is breaking the model.

JB  

Yeah, all right. So this is the hope I have there. You know, energy transition, that term, when you look at oil and gas entities in their current business model, their commodity-based business model, and you start talking about energy transition and looking at concepts like solar and wind, I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense for oil and gas. I mean, it just doesn't leverage core competencies, it doesn't leverage assets, it doesn't leverage 200 years of knowledge and learning. It doesn't leverage their workforce or anything they do. And so I just don't see that working in terms of the industry. But you know, a transition is a pretty big deal. A pivot is a lot easier. And a pivot can happen where you have a whole lot of core competency overlap. Things make sense. You're leveraging everything you do to a certain extent, but you have one or two things you need to solve for. And that's what I think the oil and gas industry prospect is for. Not just geothermal, but also CCUS and critical minerals, and other types of subsurface expertise. And so if oil and gas is going to lead on the front foot, they need to lead on the foot where they're in their core competencies, and geothermal is amazing that way. Now, geothermal is not a commodity that you can stick in a barrel. How to deal with that, right? I would say that the oil and gas industry is working really hard right now to try to build a business model for geothermal that will work for them, and the type of factors that they're looking at in that business model is, well, okay, so it's not a commodity. It's also, though, not a boom and bust cycle. If we jumped into geothermal, we are dealing instead with stable, 30 to 50 year lifetimes in a PPA, for an electron or heat as a service model, which are very stable income, right? And so there are trade offs that you can make there in the business model, where you're looking at massive scale. It's assured income for a period of time, and it requires very old dinosaur-like finance departments at oil and gas to think a little bit outside the box. Is that happening as fast as I would hope? No, but it's also a massive and very slow industry and a big ship to turn. It's happening faster than I thought it would. And evidence of that Bryony would be we have more than 150 oil and gas entities in a consortium working on geothermal, and all of them are participating, right? So they are trying, but we're not there. We're not there yet.

BW  

And I imagine in that consortium, you've got companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger who are actually the people who provide those drilling and surveying and project delivery for the oil and gas sector. Because, again, it's not a monolithic entity, and many of the big OEMs producing oil and gas are relying on third parties to actually do the physical infrastructure. So the pivot might happen in the supply chain and the suppliers to the oil and gas, even if the oil and gas industry itself proves to be a little slower. 

JB  

Exxon Mobil is also in the consortium, right? So I mean yes, but — or yes, and — they're all participating, but for different reasons and in different ways. And I think there's a role for every single part of the oil and gas industry in massive global scaled-up geothermal development. And I think they're all trying to find their way now. What is their role in this energy future?

BW  

And I guess ultimately, it comes down to long-term security, right? The thing about geothermal is that they ain't going to run out in our human experience, whereas oil and gas is finite, right? It's going to not be here forever. I come from the UK, we've seen our North Sea gas and oil boom and bust. We're in the dog days now of that reserve, and it was what two to three decades, and it's done. So that's not really long term sustainable.

JB  

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure that the oil and gas industry, or many folks in the oil and gas industry, actually view the opportunity that way, though. I think it's mostly additive. So the argument is more: we will do that, and we will do oil and gas. And geothermal with a really longer term view of scaling out oil and gas. But I think the opportunity there is it doesn't really matter what you believe. If you think that we need to scale oil and gas down right this second, tomorrow or a week ago. Or whether it's going to be this longer tail, because no matter what, we should have a lot more geothermal energy. So let's just go, yeah.

BW  

And I guess the other motivation might well be that okay, the world does seem to be wanting to move towards these more distributed, perhaps more secure models of energy generation — solar, perhaps being the poster child for that very fast delivery, distributed everywhere, manufactured so the costs come down really fast. And if oil and  gas isn't careful, batteries and solar just eat everybody's lunch, right? And it can't do everything, they can't do heat as well. So perhaps there is this sense that even if you don't care about climate change, and you can argue that — from a security perspective — fossils are the best, you've still got this possibility that your segment is shrinking because the world's moving fast into clean.

JB  

And one of the refrains we hear often from folks who are either still in this industry or have left industry, is brain drain in the industry. So the industry is actually losing young, bright minds to other really sexy careers. Because right now it's not necessarily bragging rights to graduate from college and join an oil and gas major, right? There's the stigma attached to that. And in a lot of places, the Sage team has talked a lot about how their kids, you may have talked with Cindy about this, how their kids actually played a huge role in them jumping into geothermal because their children disapproved of their work in the oil and gas industry. But when they transitioned those skills, they were automatically cool. And so cool that they were going to school and college bragging about what their parents were doing for their careers now. And I think that's kind of the model that I think is gonna drain the industry over time, unless there's a more exciting and kind of big, hopeful, scalable concept that will drive new brains and energy into the industry.

BW  

And that's one thing that actually geothermal has: it is quite big engineering. It's visible, I've heard you talk about that. People, in this world of talking about the climate crisis and trying to find solutions, there's a kind of purity dilemma that everyone gets into where they'll only accept a very narrow range of solutions. And I love the fact that there are people out there now advocating for a whole wide range of solutions, and that we're embracing engineering, we're embracing big projects. We're embracing the idea that this isn't about going backwards into something where there isn't the harnessing of the talents and the engineering and the technologies that we all have. We're actually just using that, basically applying them to the solutions that have perhaps not been able to be done today, right? That's the very progressive pro-abundant message, right? 

JB  

Well, and they're hard problems. I mean, they're hard problems to solve, and that makes them really, really sexy and appealing, I think.

ML  

Cleaning Up is brought to you by members of our new Leadership Circle: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP Portugal, Eurelectic, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live, that’s cleaningup.live.   

ML  

For an unwell or premature newborn, a power cut can be the difference between life and death. For the past eight years, I've been working with the medical team at the Government Hospital in the city of Bo, in Sierra Leone, to support their neonatal special care unit with a solar and battery mini-grid. Now with reliable electricity, the unit is able to save literally hundreds more lives every year. In February, producer Oscar Boyd and I went out to visit the unit, see how the system is working and assess what could be done to maintain and expand it. The resulting documentary episode of Cleaning Up is very moving. Please watch it. You'll find a link in the show notes for this episode.

BW  

Talking of hard problems. We are in the US. We're in California, which is its own place, but obviously there has been a period of instability, I'd say. Over the last few months, there's been a lot of commentary about, can the US actually build big again? Can it get back into the habit? I mean, it did it for fracking, for sure, but it's this ability to get on the forefront, and be at the beginning of a new energy revolution that's not oil and gas. Can it do that? And let's not spend too much time thinking about the day to day politics. But where is your vision? If you think about project InnerSpace, how much of your effort is in the US, how much of it is just, 'Okay, it's a big world. Where else could we be doing work?'

JB  

All of those things. So I am incredibly excited about the opportunity for geothermal, particularly next generation geothermal, in the United States right now. And that is directly related to politics and the new administration. They've been really vocally supportive about geothermal, and that has not happened in the United States before. So I think that it does offer a rare opportunity for bipartisanship and unpolarized agreement on a path, amongst incredibly polarized entities right now. So in the United States, there are huge opportunities. But if you look at the global energy pie and 2050 energy demand, and where that demand is going to come from in the world... it is not the United States. The United States is not going to have the population to even hit one of the top 100 population centers in 2050. And so we, at Project InnerSpace, have started looking around the world for the opportunities that if we were to build now towards scale by 2050 how could we serve the most humans and the most demand in the world? And those places are India, Asia, South America, Africa. Not necessarily the United States. So we have work ongoing.

BW  

In that list, though, you specifically didn't mention China, but I think I've heard you say that China's drilled the deepest geothermal well ever made.

JB  

China has had an enormous amount of investment in this space as well. I mean, we're talking to the tune of multiple billions of dollars to do really bold, big scale things for geothermal, both in the research and development stages — so the deepest well — but also heating and cooling networks. I mean, the easier stuff that is really technologically enabled, China is way ahead of the United States in that regard.

BW  

And is that not, at least in part, because they lack an oil and gas industry? They have some gas. They do drill, and they have some reserves, but they do not have the geological deposits that the US and other parts of the world have. So they're forced to look for other alternatives, right? And I do worry that... I like your analogy that, 'if you want to turn the ship, you've got to recruit the sailors.' I worry, though, that even if the sailors are on board, the captain of the ship, and, more importantly, the person who owns the ship, they're not going to come on board, because it's just inimical to their business model, whereas China lacks that.

JB  

You know, I've actually not thought of it that way before. That's an interesting perspective. And it may be right. The way I've looked at China's moves in this way: the way China does things, is generally heavily influenced by engineering and common sense and very big, bold moves that are for the better of society as a whole. And so I think this is just one example out of a lot of examples where China has really moved and dominated a space because they just decided that was in the best interest of the country. And here we are there on geothermal. You know, China has Sinopec, China has some oil and gas entities. Those entities are involved in their geothermal projects. But that is an interesting perspective. And one that I think is worth some thought. So what does that mean for the rest of the world's oil and gas industry in terms of engagement in this space? I don't know, let's see.

BW  

Yeah, let's see. And actually, I come more from a utilities and electricity sector background. And I do think that utilities now know how to do projects that are vocationally producing electrons and heat, right? Often it's CHP units which are providing heat and power together, that's the utility model. And there I see much more interest in firm electricity that's always on, and storage. And I think, as you said, geothermal is incredibly flexible, can do all of those things, and it also has this lovely inter-seasonal element. Do you want to talk to me about that? Because I only recently learned this, and it's obvious when you think about it. Talk to us about the inter-seasonality of it.

JB  

Yeah, so the massive overlooked opportunity in geothermal, in the view of Project InnerSpace, really is that geothermal shines in terms of heating and cooling and ability to store these forms of energy underground. And so, if you look at world energy demand and how we use energy, about 50% of the world's energy usage actually goes to heat and cool things. So we're talking about buildings, but also industrial process heat. So flipping that over and looking at it a different way, if we were to solve for heat and cooling, then the world would use 50% less electricity. That's in itself, gigantic, right? And I think that when you see geothermal in the news these days, it's almost always about power and about producing electricity for data centers and other things. The conversation is really not focused on this low hanging fruit, which is the subsurface and the shallow subsurface. It's a consistent temperature underground year round. That's shallow geothermal. You can use that for heating and cooling. If you go deeper, same thing. You can pair it with industrial heat pumps. You can store waste heat underground and use it later. I mean, there's this whole flourishing of concepts, but they are just really obvious ways to solve hard problems. Like, what are we going to do about heat? And it drives me absolutely crazy to hear about how we're going to heat people's homes with hydrogen, when we have geothermal that's already technologically enabled and cheaper than hydrogen. It drives me absolutely crazy that geothermal isn't absolutely at the forefront of these conversations.

BW  

Well, again, it comes back to the fact that, who are the people promoting hydrogen? They're the commodity boys, right? Because it's a drop in their mind, and a substitute for what they currently do, which is, 'we have a chemical form of energy, and we sell it and we trade it and we move it around.' And the sort of hope has been from that perspective that hydrogen will be the replacement. It clearly isn't the same, it can never meet the same efficiencies. It's never going to be cost effective, but it's convenient. 

JB  

It was more  comfortable. 

BW  

And it's probably set back more obvious solutions that were, as you say, just harnessing the fact that the temperature beneath our feet stays constant. And let's face it, we're moving into a world where we're going to be more hot and more cold. The extremes are going to be there. So dumping heat into the ground and recovering it when we need it, that seems to be a way, way more efficient way of doing this. 

JB  

And in particular in places in the world that don't have enough electricity to keep people cool. In dangerous heat events, geothermal can really shine in places like, I mean, just this last week Southern India hit almost unsurvivable temperatures already. In that type of scenario, when there's generally energy poverty in a region, there are massive swings in temperature, they're threatening human survival, geothermal is a really low hanging fruit in terms of keeping people alive in terms of building heating and cooling scenarios. And we are not talking about complicated technologies that are not enabled. We are talking about things that we already know how to do.

BW  

Well, listen, I'm really grateful for the time that you've spent with me today, and for welcoming me to Geothermal House. My first visit, I hope not the last. I just wanted to ask, if you look at your to-do list in the coming weeks and months. What is front of mind for you? What are the things that you're going to be leaving here today to go and work on with your team?

JB  

Yeah, so over the next year, we're going to finish publishing our Google Earth for geothermal tool: Geomaps. So this is a global geothermal prospecting tool, where you can just press on a map and it'll tell you how much geothermal potential is underneath you and what the applications are. So we'll be finishing that project and starting to build new partnerships to push it into the future, leveraging AI, etc. So that's kind of a fun one. We're also focusing increasingly on other places in the world. So you're familiar with our work in the UK that we recently launched, we also launched some work in Indonesia. So these are typically when we step into an ecosystem, it's a financial support, organizing the various stakeholders, publishing a scientific report, which then the ecosystem can use to pursue policies, etc, that are supportive, and then getting pilots off the ground. And that's something that I'm really excited about as well. We've been building some novel financial instruments that we'll be able to use in different places in the world to build highly catalytic, highly scalable, but low hanging fruit, first of a kind projects that are having a hard time finding traditional project finance but that would be massively impactful. So as an example of this: there's a project in India which is a conversion of a chemical industrial facility from burning coal to geothermal process heat. And that is the first of a kind in the world, for sure, and if we were to pull off that project, it's massively scalable to just about every industrial facility in the region, right? So that's a really fun one that we're working on this year.

BW  

I'm delighted that you're doing this, Jamie, I'm glad that you obviously also have kept your artistic life active, because I have to say, this is a very beautiful space you created. Your marketing, your use of language, it all helps elevate this topic. So I think your talents are fantastically harnessed. And I hope we can continue the conversation. Because from the utility perspective, I would love to see thermal energy operators — oil and gas aside, there are people who are burning that gas and burning coal to generate heat and power. If they get on board this, I think they are very technology agnostic, and hopefully we'll see this replacement of burning stuff with just harnessing what's beneath our feet.

JB  

Massive heat networks, absolutely. Let's do it. 

BW  

Great, thank you. 

JB  

Thank you for having me.

BW  

So that was Jamie Beard. It was a real pleasure to learn more about Jamie's background and to learn about her motivations in taking on this mantle of global champion for geothermal energy. The energy, creativity and knowledge she brings to the topic is definitely having an impact, and there are a number of countries that have the space and access to the drilling infrastructure that can tap into this always on and available anywhere form of clean energy. I hope the US will be among them. I remain somewhat skeptical that the oil and grass industry will make the pivot but, as Jamie says, the industry is not a monolith, and some firms may well take it seriously. More likely, as first of a kind projects are built, and if costs come down, I can see utilities adding this technology to their menu of options, and the companies that are selling drilling services to oil and gas, happily working with a new set of customers to make geothermal projects happen at scale. Less a case of the sailors turning the existing ship around, and more sailors abandoning ship to apply a different, more sustainable route. Thank you to Project InnerSpace for hosting us and to you for listening, we hope you enjoyed the conversation. My thanks as ever go to Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our editor, and the rest of the Cleaning Up team and the Leadership Circle who make this podcast possible. Please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

ML  

Cleaning Up is brought to you by members of our new Leadership Circle: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP Portugal, Eurelectic, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live, that’s cleaningup.live.   

ML  

For an unwell or premature newborn, a power cut can be the difference between life and death. For the past eight years, I've been working with the medical team at the Government Hospital in the city of Bo, in Sierra Leone, to support their neonatal special care unit with a solar and battery mini-grid. Now with reliable electricity, the unit is able to save literally hundreds more lives every year. In February, producer Oscar Boyd and I went out to visit the unit, see how the system is working and assess what could be done to maintain and expand it. The resulting documentary episode of Cleaning Up is very moving. Please watch it. You'll find a link in the show notes for this episode.