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An exploratory well at Zanskar’s Big Blind site in Nevada.
Zanskar
Interest in geothermal power lately has centered on companies that use new techniques to artificially coax 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 water it pumps in to make steam to power a turbine.
Zanskar Geothermal, a Utah-based startup, thinks using AI-powered analysis to find naturally occurring geothermal wells is a cheaper option.
“Geothermal is this incredible energy source–carbon-free, baseload power, small footprint, domestic–all the things you want,” Zanskar founder and CEO Carl Hoiland told Forbes. “But maybe 40 or 50 years ago, we came to believe it was actually just too hard to find; too rare. So the industry really stopped growing.”
Fervo, which is preparing to publicly list its shares, has a workable approach.
“But what if we could just get better at discovery and exploration?” Hoiland said. To do that, his company, which operates one geothermal well in New Mexico and is exploring new sites in Nevada and other parts of the U.S. Southwest, is using AI to do detailed assessments to find geothermal wells no one knew existed.
“We’re really wildcatters out drilling for new geothermal resources all over the western U.S.,” he said. “We take dozens of different data types, each of which doesn’t really tell you anything directly, but altogether can start to paint a picture for AI models that are good at these sorts of hyperdimensional problems.”
Using that, the company kept finding “anomalous locations nobody had known about,” Hoiland said. So many that “it became clear the opportunity was enormous, much bigger than anybody had thought.”
This month, it lined up a $40 million credit line that could expand to $100 million to begin drilling and operating wells at the most promising sites. It’s the first of its kind funding deal for early-stage geothermal projects, according to the company. Though Zanskar’s New Mexico site is generating revenue from power sales, the plan is to spend heavily for now to activate more new wells, said Hoiland.
He’s convinced that natural geothermal can play as big a role as solar or wind within the next several years, especially if it gets more industry support.
“If you took every drilling rig that’s operating today in the U.S., 500 or so, and switched them to geothermal tomorrow, we’d be adding 50 to 100 gigawatts of new well fields of geothermal,” Hoiland said. And unlike oil and gas wells, their output won’t decline 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 competitors, slowing demand for its EVs or the still-theoretical payoff from robotaxis and humanoid robots.
It might be SpaceX.
If Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite-internet company goes public at anything close to the rumored $1.75 trillion valuation, it will not 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 myth. Certainly, SpaceX, with its reliable and steady leadership under long-time president Gwynne Shotwell, is shaping up to be a shinier proxy — with fewer close competitors or awkward quarterly questions about exactly when Tesla can take on Waymo in self-driving tech or actually deliver its C-3PO-style robot.
“There are many Tesla investors who perceive SpaceX to be a better investment for many reasons,” Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor and CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Gerber Kawasaki, which manages over $4 billion, told Forbes. “If I sell my Tesla shares, 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 this is going to be easy money.”
That’s largely because, despite Tesla’s continued profitability, it’s undergoing a fundamental shift from the business that built the brand–electric vehicle sales–which have plateaued as it waits for new AI-oriented ones to kick in.
Hot Topic
Jack Hurd, World Economic Forum’s Earth Systems Agenda head, on the need for better forest management in a warming world
Forest fires are a growing problem, particularly in places where they didn’t occur in the past, such as those burning in Georgia. What is the broader impact of this climate-related change?
First of all, forest and land use change contribute about 15% of all global CO2 emissions. This means that the act of deforestation, the act of converting natural ecosystems, contributes about 15% of global CO2 emissions. That’s really 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 that because what that does is it changes the dynamics in the atmosphere, which sort of exacerbates fire risk.
When we think about forests in general, not all forests, fire is a natural element of many forest systems. In California, the forests are prone to fire and they’re exposed to fire, 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 susceptible to the risk of fire. And when you do have a change in climate, and you have forests that aren’t managed well, you have a lot of undergrowth that is susceptible to fire.
When we don’t clear forests or have fire naturally run through a forest, which we’re generally loath to do, they become overstocked and overdense. And then when fire does come into the system, which it eventually will do, you end up with catastrophic fires. That’s what we’ve seen in California, in the Intermountain West, but in places like Georgia or Southern Europe or Western Australia, you also now see this. It all points to the fact that we’re not actually managing our forests well, and that, combined with climate change and rising temperatures, it does cause a fundamental problem where we end up with forest loss in a lot of places around the world.
So every region of the world now has to have much more active forest management?
Absolutely. I think there’s two things going on here. One is that we have to recognize that fire is going to be in different systems than it traditionally has been. Number two is we have to manage the forests and manage the fire, if you will, in ways that we’re probably not used to doing so. And number three is in order to reduce the loss of life and property, we have to manage the built environment in a way that is also different from maybe what 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 preservation?
We’re not doing very well. It’s possible to say we’re doing a little bit better than we were. In the 1990s, we were losing about 16 million hectares of forests per year globally. A lot of that was in the tropics. More recently, in the 2010 to 2020 range, it was down to about 10 million hectares per year. There’s a large portion of that in the tropics or in countries where the rule of law is not well established. It’s hard to differentiate how much of that loss is due to fire versus other associated activities.
The Trump administration has scaled back support for the Forest Service and prioritized energy production and mining on federal lands. Is the U.S. now something of an outlier when it comes to forest preservation?
Traditionally, previous Republican and Democratic administrations have always thought that forests and nature, forests in particular, were generally a bipartisan issue. That’s largely because a lot of the key forested states are in the Intermountain West and controlled by Republican legislatures and governors. So forest management has generally been a more bipartisan issue than other aspects of the environmental situation.
The Trump administration has not really upheld the traditional practices of most Republican administrations, and are clearly not funding that at the level that has been done in the past.
What Else We’re Reading
Georgia blaze shows how climate change has led to more wildfires in the East (Associated Press)
‘The damage is done’: Global oil crisis has changed the fossil fuel industry forever, IEA chief says (The Guardian)
A new idea to save the climate: Dam the Bering Strait (New York Times)
44% of Americans breathe dangerously polluted air. In California, it’s 82% (Los Angeles Times)
Florida’s DeSantis signs bill on Earth Day reversing local climate change action (Miami Herald)