Cindy Taff, chief executive officer of Sage Geosystems, at a testing site in Starr County on March 22, 2023. The startup is testing storing energy in the ground. Theres some people that believe that theres a climate crisis, and some people dont believe it," Taff said."We want this to be the energy of choice whether you believe in it or not because its cost-effective as well.
“Geothermal heat doesn’t have those variable conditions,” University of Texas at Austin clean energy expert Michael Webber said. “If you hit a hot spot below ground — might be thousands of feet down — the heat won’t matter based on whether it’s cloudy or whether it’s summer.” Companies are racing to develop their technology and techniques to harness this energy source. They vary in how deep they want to drill , how they heat the water and how they bring the heated water back up .
The federal Department of Energy said this month that $20 billion to $25 billion needed to be invested by 2030 to move toward widespread use. When former colleagues from Shell told Taff they were co-founding Sage and invited her to join them, she got excited. “The technology needed to advance … but it wasn’t like it had to invent a whole new area because it’s so compatible with what we do with hydrocarbon extraction,” Tester said in an interview with the Texas Tribune. “They drill holes in the ground and they pull fluids out of the ground, whether they’re gas or liquids, and they sell it. Well, that’s what you do for geothermal too.
Armed with a $1 million Department of Energy grant, Beard moved to the University of Texas at Austin around 2019 to convince people that now was the time to start a geothermal company. She argued that oil and gas experts did not have to be only the villains in the climate change story; they could also be the people who help alleviate it.
Beard said she spent months talking with people like Lance Cook, who retired from Shell as a vice president. Beard said the reaction she usually got was “it’ll never work,” followed by a phone call a few weeks later that the person was still thinking about it. But Cook decided to jump in, and he became the chief technology officer for a new company named for Beard’s son, Sage.
Latimer considered whether he should be working in fossil fuels in a world confronting climate change. But working on rapidly developing technology alongside smart people excited him. Moving into wind or solar didn’t feel right after years studying drilling.Credit: Mark Felix for the The Texas Tribune