How This Houston Clean Energy Entrepreneur Navigates the Geothermal Hype to 100x His Business Growth

Geothermal energy is increasingly recognized as a major player in the clean energy mix, and while many might think of it as a new climate technology solution, Tim Latimer, co-founder and CEO of Fervo Energy, knows better.

“Every overnight success takes a decade to happen, and I think Fervo, fortunately – and geothermal as a whole – has become much more publicized recently as people realize it can be a tremendous solution to the challenges that our energy sector and climate that we’re facing,” he says on the Houston Innovators podcast.

In fact, Latimer has been optimistic about geothermal as a clean energy source since leaving his job as an oil and gas drilling engineer to pursue a dual degree program – MBA and MSc. of the earth – at Stanford University. He had decided that, faced with the reluctance of incumbent energy companies to try new technologies, he was going to find a way to start his own company. That’s exactly what Latimer did through the Stanford program and Activate, a nonprofit hardware technology program that funded two years of Fervo’s research and development.

And the gamble was more than rewarded. Since its official launch in 2017, Fervo Energy has raised more than $430 million – most recently raising a $244 million Series D round. What’s even more impressive to Latimer is that his idea of ​​drilling horizontal wells is working. The company celebrated the success of a pilot program last summer by achieving ongoing production of carbon-free geothermal energy with Project Red, a northern Nevada site made possible through a 2021 partnership with Google.

The next step for Fervo is to grow and scale at a rate of approximately 100x. While the Red Project included three wells, the Cape Project, a site in southwest Utah, will include approximately 100 wells with significantly reduced drilling costs and an estimated delivery in 2026. Latimer says there is a dozen other projects like Project Cape that are in the works.

“This is a huge acceleration of our drilling, construction and power plant programs since our pilot project, but we’ve already had tremendous success there,” Latimer said of the Cape project. “We believe our technology has a very promising future.”

Even as Latimer envisions Fervo Energy’s rapid growth, he says it’s all due to the foundation he’s put in place for the company, whose culture is based on the motto “Building Things That Last.”

“You won’t achieve something that truly changes the world by taking shortcuts and taking baby steps. And if you want to advance something as complicated as the global energy system that was built over hundreds of years with billions of dollars of capital invested, you’re not going to do it overnight,” says -he. on the show. “We’re all in this together for the long haul.”