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In Texas, ex-oil and gas workers champion geothermal energy as a replacement for fossil-fueled power plants

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. This is the second of a three-part series on emerging energy sources and Texas' role in developing them. Part one, on hydrogen fuel, published on Monday; part three, on small nuclear reactors, will publish on Wednesday. STARR COUNTY — In 2009, on a plot of shrub-covered cattle land about 45 miles northwest of McAllen, Shell buried and abandoned a well it drilled to look for gas. The well turned out to be a dry hole. Vegetation grew back over the site. In 2021, a Houston-based energy company run by former Shell employees came looking for it. This company wasn’t drilling for oil or gas, though. Its engineers were looking for a place to experiment with their technology for producing geothermal energy, created by Earth’s underground heat. A startup called Sage Geosystems leased the site. The company installed a wellhead and brought in a diesel-powered pump. They used fluid to create cracks in the rock deep below the surface, a technique similar to fracking for oil and gas. One day last March, the crew pumped 20,000 barrels of water into the 2-mile-deep well. Hours later, an operator opened the well from a control room. Pipes above ground shook as the pressurized water gushed back up. The water spun small turbines, generating electricity. The pressurized water, which was pumped underground and later released to the surface through the well on the right, at the Starr County demonstration on March 22, 2023. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune Left: Water spins a turbine at the Starr County demonstration site. Right: An operator controls the flow in and out of the well. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune Sage and other companies believe geothermal power is key to replacing polluting coal- and gas-fired power plants. Even though solar and wind are proven clean energy sources, they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows. Geothermal power could provide continuous, emissions-free energy. “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.” Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration. At least three companies are based in Houston, and scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge of geology, drilling and extraction to a new energy source. “We’ve punched over a million holes in the ground in Texas since Spindletop,” said former Texas oil and gas regulator Barry Smitherman, who has become a geothermal advocate. “So we have a lot of knowledge, and we have a lot of history and skill set.” Hveragerði, a city in Iceland, where 85% of the country's energy is sustainable, either hydroelectric or geothermal. Credit: Raul Moreno/SOPA Images/via REUTERS Heat constantly radiates out from the center of Earth as radioactive elements break down. That energy warms water that bubbles up to or escapes as steam at the surface. Humans have taken advantage of that phenomenon — an early form of geothermal power — for heating, bathing and cooking since ancient times. For more than 100 years, engineers have used that underground hot water or steam to generate electricity. Geothermal power in 2015 fueled 27% of the electricity in Iceland, which sits on one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. In 2022, it generated about 5% of the electricity in California. The United States is the top geothermal electricity producer in the world. Still, the total amount of geothermal electricity produced in America is tiny compared with other sources. It accounted for about 4 gigawatts last year, according to a federal analysis, or enough to power about 800,000 Texas homes. Businesses such as Sage and government researchers say there’s a lot more geothermal power to be had by pumping fluid through hot rock where there is no natural water. With technological advances, a government analysis predicts geothermal power in the U.S. could grow to 90 gigawatts by 2050. That would have been enough to power the entire Texas grid during last summer’s highest-demand day. Companies are racing to develop their technology and techniques to harness this energy source. They vary in how deep they want to drill (from around 7,000 feet, which oil and gas equipment can handle, to 66,000 feet, which it cannot), how they heat the water (in the well or in the rock) and how they bring the heated water back up (in the same well that sent it down or with a second one). Like oil wildcatters, the geothermal industry must figure out the best places to drill. They’ll face the same concerns about triggering earthquakes that have dogged oil and gas fracking operations and previous geothermal efforts. In 2006, a pilot geothermal plant in Switzerland caused a magnitude 3.4 earthquake that damaged buildings and led to the plant’s closure. In 2017, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake linked to a pilot geothermal project in South Korea injured dozens. Companies should follow existing best practices informed by research to monitor seismicity and adjust or pause operations as needed, said William Ellsworth, an emeritus professor at Stanford University. States could also mandate these protocols. “You have to pay attention to what you’re doing,” Ellsworth said. And perhaps most importantly, the geothermal businesses will have to show they can compete with the cost of other power sources, with help from the federal government in the form of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The more the technology is deployed, the more the costs might come down, Rice University Associate Professor Daniel Cohan said. Getting the price where the federal government hopes for it to be cost-competitive is “feasible,” Cohan said, “but there’s no guarantee that the industry will get there.” 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. “We’re all doing something a little bit different,” Sage CEO Cindy Taff said. “One of us is going to have a breakthrough that really commercializes this stuff.” The daughter of a geophysicist who worked for Mobil, Taff studied mechanical engineering and built a 36-year career at Shell. She worked her way up from production engineer to vice president, managing a team with an annual budget of around $1 billion. Taff explains how Sage Geosystems uses its Starr County well to store energy. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune With freckles and curly hair that falls past her shoulders, Taff said she knew the world wanted to pivot to new energy sources. Her daughter, concerned about climate change, urged her mother to get away from the “dark side” of oil and gas. When former colleagues from Shell told Taff they were co-founding Sage and invited her to join them, she got excited. Taff saw that Sage was a nimble company with people she considered some of the smartest in the industry. The geothermal business had a lot of growing to do, like the early days of wind or solar. Her work could have a large impact. “It was exciting to be working with people that I knew had a sense of urgency and made a difference,” Taff said. “And then, it was exciting to be working for yourself in a way that you can push the agenda.” So, in 2020, Taff took the leap. Her daughter joined the company too. Building interest in geothermal  In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska, killing some 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters and 300 harbor seals. In Augusta, Georgia, 10-year-old Jamie Beard was riveted by the news coverage. “I understood things enough to know that that was not something we wanted,” Beard said. That experience pushed Beard into environmental activism, starting the next day, when she took a Kleenex box decorated like the ocean to raise money for coral reefs. She painted murals about environmental rights. In college, at Appalachian State University, she organized an Earth Day festival and tied herself to trees on a West Virginia mountaintop to protest workers scraping them away to mine for coal. Years before Jamie Beard helped launch Sage Geosystems, she was a student at Appalachian State University teaching others how to use solar ovens. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard Beard went on to study environmental law at Boston University. She represented corporations, telling herself she could make change best from the inside. That proved incorrect. She joined a startup working on technology that could be applied to geothermal drilling. That’s when her life changed. Beard read an interview about the huge potential for geothermal power to provide electricity around the world. The interview was with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jefferson Tester, who led a team that published a 372-page assessment of the resource for the federal government in 2006. “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.” Beard read the report over and over. This is my career, Beard thought. The history of modern geothermal power went back a century: The world’s first full-scale geothermal power plant started operating in 1913 in Italy. In 1960, Pacific Gas and Electric built the first commercial geothermal power plant in the United States at a spot in Northern California known as “The Geysers.” In the 1970s, the federal Department of Energy started researching pulling power from what was referred to as hot, dry rock. The country that decade suffered through Arab countries’ embargo on exporting oil to America, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Still, the technology didn’t get far enough for the concept to take off. The Larderello geothermal power plant, which is the world's oldest, was built in Tuscany, Italy. Credit: Enel Green Power Engineers built geothermal power plants where they could find existing water resources relatively easily, maybe marked by hot springs or fumaroles, which are holes where hot gases and vapors escape from underground, said Lauren Boyd, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s geothermal technologies office. But building new plants got riskier as prime locations got harder to find. Beard saw opportunity. She knew the oil and gas industry could develop technology quickly. The U.S. ushered in the “shale revolution” as companies drilled horizontally and cracked open rock with hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, to extract giant amounts of oil and gas. That technology could be used for geothermal. Beard, 45, is the type of person who speaks with an energy that rubs off on you. Her hair is cut into an angular bob; she wears artsy glasses. She made giving a TED talk look easy. 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. Jamie Beard speaks at a SXSW panel titled "Geothermal and the Promise of Clean Energy Abundance" on March 9 in Austin. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard “Oil and gas people are a gigantic brain trust,” Beard said. “They are a huge asset.” Beard had a young son. She learned he inherited a rare genetic condition that gave him a life expectancy of 10 or so years. A journalist from Wired who profiled Beard described a woman facing an existential choice: She could let the doom of his fate swallow her, or focus on changing the world. Beard started by reaching out to industry veterans whom she suspected were retired, golfing and bored. Maybe their grandchildren were after them for being part of the fossil fuel industry that contributes to climate change. 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. Chris Anderson, the leader of TED, known for its conferences with TED talks by experts on various topics, invested $16 million through his climate investment fund. Drilling firm Nabors invested $9 million more. Early successes  Beard wasn’t the only person who saw the potential of leveraging expertise from the oil and gas industry to develop geothermal in Texas. Tim Latimer grew up in a city of about 1,000 residents in Central Texas, where he remembers being fascinated by the Discovery Channel show “Build It Bigger” about constructing large projects that impact many lives, such as bridges, tunnels and dams. Latimer studied mechanical engineering at the University of Tulsa. He wanted a job back in Texas to be near family and friends, so when he graduated in 2012 he went to work on drilling sites while the shale revolution was taking off. 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. Fervo CEO Tim Latimer at the Fervo Energy office in Houston on March 22. Credit: Mark Felix for the The Texas Tribune Then came the lightbulb moment. He found the same 2006 geothermal report that inspired Beard. He realized that what he was doing, which included drilling into high-temperature rock in South Texas, presented what he called a “huge opportunity for tech transfer” into geothermal. Latimer thought the idea was so obvious he could join a geothermal company already doing it. He found none. What if this could change how the world gets energy and no one tried it? he wondered. Like other startup founders, he’s articulate and dreams big. At a conference where some wore suits, he wore sneakers, a button-down and jeans. Latimer went to Stanford University Graduate School of Business and met a classmate getting a PhD in geothermal research. Together they started Fervo Energy. They headquartered the business in Houston. Their first Houston-based hire had 15 years of experience working for oil and gas companies Hess and BP. Fervo now employs 80 people, about 60% of whom came from oil and gas work. Fervo’s approach is basically to drill vertically, then use fracking technology to create horizontal cracks in the earth. That way, operators can send water down the well, where it can flow through the small cracks in the rock to heat before coming back up another nearby well. Two California energy providers have signed contracts to buy power from Fervo. Google also has a financial agreement with them. Oil and gas company Devon Energy Corporation invested $10 million. Last summer, Fervo ran a 30-day test in 375-degree rock in Nevada. They deemed it a success, and now the company is building a project nearby in Utah, next to where the Department of Energy has sponsored a geothermal field lab. They expect the project will put power mostly onto the California grid in 2026. Drilling deeper Back in Houston, in a beige set of warehouses on the south side of town, another company led by former oil and gas experts is taking a third approach. Henry Phan left a 19-year career in product development at Schlumberger, where his work included designing drilling equipment that could steer sideways, to join a former colleague who launched Quaise Energy. The company focuses on using millimeter waves — which are higher frequency microwaves like the ones used to heat food — to create wells by vaporizing rock. Henry Phan, vice president of engineering for Quaise Energy, stands with a wave guide that the company uses to direct waves from the surface into the hole they are creating, in Houston on Feb. 15, 2024. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune First: Employees of Quaise Energy stand next to a repurposed drilling rig that will hold a wave guide. Last: Vaporized basalt rock from testing at Quaise Energy in Houston. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune Oil and gas equipment begins to fail when temperatures below ground reach around 400 degrees. Drill bits wear down quickly against harder rock and electronics are pushed past their limits. Using millimeter waves would allow operators to “drill” deeper than oil and gas equipment can go — which means reaching hotter rock that could produce more power. The idea interested Phan, and he thought the physics made sense. Plus, he would work on cutting-edge technology that he thought could be a “big step change for humanity.” Quaise had a lot less bureaucracy than at the giant Schlumberger, where money going into product development seemed to be diminishing. In 2020, he signed on as Quaise’s vice president of engineering. He brought more former colleagues with him. Quaise aims to be able to drill into 300 to 500 degree rock by 2026, produce steam that can generate electricity by 2028 and go commercial after that. Their investors include Nabors, climate investors Prelude Ventures and billionaire Vinod Khosla. In early experiments with the technology, they used millimeter waves to “drill” through an eight-foot cylinder of basalt rock, plus samples of 1- to 2-inch-thick basalt. The examples sit on display in their office. “It’s cool to work on a new product,” Phan said, “but the fact that it can make an impact to … our life and our children’s life and their generation and their kids is monumental. So it’s rewarding from the point of view that we’re working on something that is so impactful if we can make this thing work.” Disclosure: Google, Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration as scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge to a new energy source.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.


This is the second of a three-part series on emerging energy sources and Texas' role in developing them. Part one, on hydrogen fuel, published on Monday; part three, on small nuclear reactors, will publish on Wednesday.

STARR COUNTY — In 2009, on a plot of shrub-covered cattle land about 45 miles northwest of McAllen, Shell buried and abandoned a well it drilled to look for gas. The well turned out to be a dry hole. Vegetation grew back over the site.

In 2021, a Houston-based energy company run by former Shell employees came looking for it.

This company wasn’t drilling for oil or gas, though. Its engineers were looking for a place to experiment with their technology for producing geothermal energy, created by Earth’s underground heat.

A startup called Sage Geosystems leased the site. The company installed a wellhead and brought in a diesel-powered pump. They used fluid to create cracks in the rock deep below the surface, a technique similar to fracking for oil and gas.

One day last March, the crew pumped 20,000 barrels of water into the 2-mile-deep well. Hours later, an operator opened the well from a control room. Pipes above ground shook as the pressurized water gushed back up. The water spun small turbines, generating electricity.

The pressurized water, which was pumped underground and later released to the surface through the well on the right, at the Starr County demonstration on March 22, 2023. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
Left: Water spins a turbine at the Starr County demonstration site. Right: An operator controls the flow in and out of the well. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune

Sage and other companies believe geothermal power is key to replacing polluting coal- and gas-fired power plants. Even though solar and wind are proven clean energy sources, they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows. Geothermal power could provide continuous, emissions-free energy.

“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.”

Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration. At least three companies are based in Houston, and scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge of geology, drilling and extraction to a new energy source.

“We’ve punched over a million holes in the ground in Texas since Spindletop,” said former Texas oil and gas regulator Barry Smitherman, who has become a geothermal advocate. “So we have a lot of knowledge, and we have a lot of history and skill set.”

Hveragerði, a city in Iceland, where 85% of the country's energy is sustainable, either hydroelectric or geothermal. Credit: Raul Moreno/SOPA Images/via REUTERS

Heat constantly radiates out from the center of Earth as radioactive elements break down. That energy warms water that bubbles up to or escapes as steam at the surface. Humans have taken advantage of that phenomenon — an early form of geothermal power — for heating, bathing and cooking since ancient times.

For more than 100 years, engineers have used that underground hot water or steam to generate electricity. Geothermal power in 2015 fueled 27% of the electricity in Iceland, which sits on one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. In 2022, it generated about 5% of the electricity in California. The United States is the top geothermal electricity producer in the world.

Still, the total amount of geothermal electricity produced in America is tiny compared with other sources. It accounted for about 4 gigawatts last year, according to a federal analysis, or enough to power about 800,000 Texas homes.

Businesses such as Sage and government researchers say there’s a lot more geothermal power to be had by pumping fluid through hot rock where there is no natural water. With technological advances, a government analysis predicts geothermal power in the U.S. could grow to 90 gigawatts by 2050. That would have been enough to power the entire Texas grid during last summer’s highest-demand day.

Companies are racing to develop their technology and techniques to harness this energy source. They vary in how deep they want to drill (from around 7,000 feet, which oil and gas equipment can handle, to 66,000 feet, which it cannot), how they heat the water (in the well or in the rock) and how they bring the heated water back up (in the same well that sent it down or with a second one).

Like oil wildcatters, the geothermal industry must figure out the best places to drill. They’ll face the same concerns about triggering earthquakes that have dogged oil and gas fracking operations and previous geothermal efforts. In 2006, a pilot geothermal plant in Switzerland caused a magnitude 3.4 earthquake that damaged buildings and led to the plant’s closure. In 2017, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake linked to a pilot geothermal project in South Korea injured dozens.

Companies should follow existing best practices informed by research to monitor seismicity and adjust or pause operations as needed, said William Ellsworth, an emeritus professor at Stanford University. States could also mandate these protocols. “You have to pay attention to what you’re doing,” Ellsworth said.

And perhaps most importantly, the geothermal businesses will have to show they can compete with the cost of other power sources, with help from the federal government in the form of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.

The more the technology is deployed, the more the costs might come down, Rice University Associate Professor Daniel Cohan said. Getting the price where the federal government hopes for it to be cost-competitive is “feasible,” Cohan said, “but there’s no guarantee that the industry will get there.”

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.

“We’re all doing something a little bit different,” Sage CEO Cindy Taff said. “One of us is going to have a breakthrough that really commercializes this stuff.”

The daughter of a geophysicist who worked for Mobil, Taff studied mechanical engineering and built a 36-year career at Shell. She worked her way up from production engineer to vice president, managing a team with an annual budget of around $1 billion.

Taff explains how Sage Geosystems uses its Starr County well to store energy. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune

With freckles and curly hair that falls past her shoulders, Taff said she knew the world wanted to pivot to new energy sources. Her daughter, concerned about climate change, urged her mother to get away from the “dark side” of oil and gas.

When former colleagues from Shell told Taff they were co-founding Sage and invited her to join them, she got excited.

Taff saw that Sage was a nimble company with people she considered some of the smartest in the industry. The geothermal business had a lot of growing to do, like the early days of wind or solar. Her work could have a large impact.

“It was exciting to be working with people that I knew had a sense of urgency and made a difference,” Taff said. “And then, it was exciting to be working for yourself in a way that you can push the agenda.”

So, in 2020, Taff took the leap. Her daughter joined the company too.

Building interest in geothermal 

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska, killing some 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters and 300 harbor seals. In Augusta, Georgia, 10-year-old Jamie Beard was riveted by the news coverage.

“I understood things enough to know that that was not something we wanted,” Beard said.

That experience pushed Beard into environmental activism, starting the next day, when she took a Kleenex box decorated like the ocean to raise money for coral reefs. She painted murals about environmental rights. In college, at Appalachian State University, she organized an Earth Day festival and tied herself to trees on a West Virginia mountaintop to protest workers scraping them away to mine for coal.

Years before Jamie Beard helped launch Sage Geosystems, she was a student at Appalachian State University teaching others how to use solar ovens. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard

Beard went on to study environmental law at Boston University. She represented corporations, telling herself she could make change best from the inside. That proved incorrect. She joined a startup working on technology that could be applied to geothermal drilling.

That’s when her life changed.

Beard read an interview about the huge potential for geothermal power to provide electricity around the world. The interview was with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jefferson Tester, who led a team that published a 372-page assessment of the resource for the federal government in 2006.

“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.”

Beard read the report over and over.

This is my career, Beard thought.

The history of modern geothermal power went back a century: The world’s first full-scale geothermal power plant started operating in 1913 in Italy. In 1960, Pacific Gas and Electric built the first commercial geothermal power plant in the United States at a spot in Northern California known as “The Geysers.”

In the 1970s, the federal Department of Energy started researching pulling power from what was referred to as hot, dry rock. The country that decade suffered through Arab countries’ embargo on exporting oil to America, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Still, the technology didn’t get far enough for the concept to take off.

The Larderello geothermal power plant, which is the world's oldest, was built in Tuscany, Italy. Credit: Enel Green Power

Engineers built geothermal power plants where they could find existing water resources relatively easily, maybe marked by hot springs or fumaroles, which are holes where hot gases and vapors escape from underground, said Lauren Boyd, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s geothermal technologies office. But building new plants got riskier as prime locations got harder to find.

Beard saw opportunity. She knew the oil and gas industry could develop technology quickly. The U.S. ushered in the “shale revolution” as companies drilled horizontally and cracked open rock with hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, to extract giant amounts of oil and gas. That technology could be used for geothermal.

Beard, 45, is the type of person who speaks with an energy that rubs off on you. Her hair is cut into an angular bob; she wears artsy glasses. She made giving a TED talk look easy.

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.

Jamie Beard speaks at a SXSW panel titled "Geothermal and the Promise of Clean Energy Abundance" on March 9 in Austin. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard

“Oil and gas people are a gigantic brain trust,” Beard said. “They are a huge asset.”

Beard had a young son. She learned he inherited a rare genetic condition that gave him a life expectancy of 10 or so years. A journalist from Wired who profiled Beard described a woman facing an existential choice: She could let the doom of his fate swallow her, or focus on changing the world.

Beard started by reaching out to industry veterans whom she suspected were retired, golfing and bored. Maybe their grandchildren were after them for being part of the fossil fuel industry that contributes to climate change.

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.

Chris Anderson, the leader of TED, known for its conferences with TED talks by experts on various topics, invested $16 million through his climate investment fund. Drilling firm Nabors invested $9 million more.

Early successes 

Beard wasn’t the only person who saw the potential of leveraging expertise from the oil and gas industry to develop geothermal in Texas.

Tim Latimer grew up in a city of about 1,000 residents in Central Texas, where he remembers being fascinated by the Discovery Channel show “Build It Bigger” about constructing large projects that impact many lives, such as bridges, tunnels and dams.

Latimer studied mechanical engineering at the University of Tulsa. He wanted a job back in Texas to be near family and friends, so when he graduated in 2012 he went to work on drilling sites while the shale revolution was taking off.

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.

Fervo CEO Tim Latimer at the Fervo Energy office in Houston on March 22. Credit: Mark Felix for the The Texas Tribune

Then came the lightbulb moment. He found the same 2006 geothermal report that inspired Beard. He realized that what he was doing, which included drilling into high-temperature rock in South Texas, presented what he called a “huge opportunity for tech transfer” into geothermal.

Latimer thought the idea was so obvious he could join a geothermal company already doing it. He found none. What if this could change how the world gets energy and no one tried it? he wondered. Like other startup founders, he’s articulate and dreams big. At a conference where some wore suits, he wore sneakers, a button-down and jeans.

Latimer went to Stanford University Graduate School of Business and met a classmate getting a PhD in geothermal research. Together they started Fervo Energy. They headquartered the business in Houston. Their first Houston-based hire had 15 years of experience working for oil and gas companies Hess and BP. Fervo now employs 80 people, about 60% of whom came from oil and gas work.

Fervo’s approach is basically to drill vertically, then use fracking technology to create horizontal cracks in the earth. That way, operators can send water down the well, where it can flow through the small cracks in the rock to heat before coming back up another nearby well.

Two California energy providers have signed contracts to buy power from Fervo. Google also has a financial agreement with them. Oil and gas company Devon Energy Corporation invested $10 million.

Last summer, Fervo ran a 30-day test in 375-degree rock in Nevada. They deemed it a success, and now the company is building a project nearby in Utah, next to where the Department of Energy has sponsored a geothermal field lab. They expect the project will put power mostly onto the California grid in 2026.

Drilling deeper

Back in Houston, in a beige set of warehouses on the south side of town, another company led by former oil and gas experts is taking a third approach.

Henry Phan left a 19-year career in product development at Schlumberger, where his work included designing drilling equipment that could steer sideways, to join a former colleague who launched Quaise Energy. The company focuses on using millimeter waves — which are higher frequency microwaves like the ones used to heat food — to create wells by vaporizing rock.

Henry Phan, vice president of engineering for Quaise Energy, stands with a wave guide that the company uses to direct waves from the surface into the hole they are creating, in Houston on Feb. 15, 2024. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
First: Employees of Quaise Energy stand next to a repurposed drilling rig that will hold a wave guide. Last: Vaporized basalt rock from testing at Quaise Energy in Houston. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune

Oil and gas equipment begins to fail when temperatures below ground reach around 400 degrees. Drill bits wear down quickly against harder rock and electronics are pushed past their limits. Using millimeter waves would allow operators to “drill” deeper than oil and gas equipment can go — which means reaching hotter rock that could produce more power.

The idea interested Phan, and he thought the physics made sense. Plus, he would work on cutting-edge technology that he thought could be a “big step change for humanity.” Quaise had a lot less bureaucracy than at the giant Schlumberger, where money going into product development seemed to be diminishing. In 2020, he signed on as Quaise’s vice president of engineering. He brought more former colleagues with him.

Quaise aims to be able to drill into 300 to 500 degree rock by 2026, produce steam that can generate electricity by 2028 and go commercial after that. Their investors include Nabors, climate investors Prelude Ventures and billionaire Vinod Khosla.

In early experiments with the technology, they used millimeter waves to “drill” through an eight-foot cylinder of basalt rock, plus samples of 1- to 2-inch-thick basalt. The examples sit on display in their office.

“It’s cool to work on a new product,” Phan said, “but the fact that it can make an impact to … our life and our children’s life and their generation and their kids is monumental. So it’s rewarding from the point of view that we’re working on something that is so impactful if we can make this thing work.”

Disclosure: Google, Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.


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How Mississippians Can Intervene in Natural Gas Pipeline Proposal

Mississippi residents can comment on a proposal for a natural gas pipeline that would span nearly the full width of the state

Mississippians have until Tuesday to intervene in a proposal for a natural gas pipeline that would span nearly the full width of the state.The pipeline, called the “Mississippi Crossing Project,” would start in Greenville, cross through Humphreys, Holmes, Attala, Leake, Neshoba, Newton, Lauderdale and Clarke counties and end near Butler, Alabama, stretching nearly 208 miles.Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan, sent an application for the project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on June 30. The company hopes the pipeline, which would transfer up to 12 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, will address a rising energy demand by increasing its transportation capacity.Kinder Morgan says on its website that, should it receive approval, construction would begin at the end of 2027 and the pipeline would begin service in November 2028. The company says the project would cost $1.7 billion and create 750 temporary jobs as well as 15 permanent positions.The project would also include new compressor stations in Humphreys, Attala and Lauderdale counties, although exact locations haven’t been set.Singleton Schreiber, a national law firm that focuses on environmental justice, is looking to spread awareness of the public’s ability to participate in the approval process, whether or not they support the proposal.“We’re just trying to raise awareness to make sure that people know this is happening,” said Laura Singleton, an attorney with the firm. “They’re going to have to dig and construct new pipelines, so it’s going to pass through sensitive ecosystems like wetlands, private property, farmland, things like that. So you can have issues that come up like soil degradation, water contamination, and then after the pipeline is built you could potentially have leaks, spills.”Singleton added while such issues with pipelines are rare, when “things go bad, they go pretty bad.”To comment, protest, or file a motion to intervene, the public can go to FERC’s website (new users have to create an account, and then use the docket number “CP25-514-000”). The exact deadline is 4 p.m. on Aug. 5. More instructions can also be found here.In addition to FERC, the proposal will also face review from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and the state environmental agencies in Mississippi and Alabama.Mississippians have seen multiple incidents related to gas leaks in recent years. In March, three workers were injured after accidentally rupturing an Atmos Energy pipeline doing routine maintenance in Lee County, leaving thousands without service. Then last year, the National Transportation Safety Board found that Atmos discovered gas leaks over a month prior to two explosions in Jackson, one of which claimed the life of an 82-year-old woman.This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - June 2025

BPA faces suit over energy market decision that opponents say would raise rates

The lawsuit comes after governors, lawmakers, utility regulators and renewable energy proponents in the region unsuccessfully pressed the BPA to reconsider its plans.

Five energy and conservation nonprofits are suing the Bonneville Power Administration over its decision to join a new energy trading market, claiming it will raise electricity and transmission costs in Oregon and across the region. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, alleges that BPA’s move violates the Northwest Power Act and the National Environmental Policy Act and will also weaken energy grid reliability and reduce access to clean energy. BPA, the Northwest’s largest transmission grid operator, in May announced it would join the Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool day-ahead market known as “Markets Plus” instead of joining California’s day-ahead market. The Southwest market is smaller with fewer electrical generation resources, experts say. Prior to that decision, Pacific Northwest governors, lawmakers, utility regulators and renewable energy proponents had pressed the BPA for months to reconsider its plans, which the agency initially announced in March.The nonprofits involved in the legal challenge are the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a watchdog organization that advocates for utility customers; national environmental group the Sierra Club; the Montana Environmental Information Center, which promotes clean energy; the Idaho Conservation League, a natural landscape conservation group; and the NW Energy Coalition, which promotes affordable energy policies. The groups, represented by San Francisco-based environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, want the court to vacate BPA’s decision, require the agency to prepare an environmental impact statement and rescind the financial commitments already made to the Southwest energy market.The BPA’s spokesperson Nick Quinata declined to comment on the pending litigation. Previously, the agency said the Southwest day-ahead market is superior to the California one because it would allow BPA to remain more independent due to its market design and governance structure. BPA, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, markets hydropower from 31 federal dams in the Columbia River Basin and supplies a third of the Northwest’s electricity, most of it to publicly owned rural utilities and electric cooperatives. It also owns and operates 15,000 miles – 75% – of the Northwest’s high-voltage transmission lines. Nearly every electric utility in Oregon benefits from either the clean hydroelectricity or the transmission lines controlled by BPA. BPA’s decision sets the stage for having two energy markets across the West.The lawsuit says that will likely lead to rising prices and blackouts during periods of high electricity demand because of the complexity of transmitting power across boundaries between different utilities and the agreements required for such transfers. Oregon’s two largest utilities, investor-owned Portland General Electric and Pacific Power, have both signed agreements to join California’s day-ahead market instead. They, too, have argued that once BPA leaves the Western market, the available energy they can purchase would diminish and become more expensive, leading to higher prices for customers across the region.Regional electricity providers also may have to construct additional power generation facilities, increase operation of existing facilities or both, to make up for BPA’s participation in a smaller and less efficient energy market, the suit contends. It could also increase reliance on generation resources powered by fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas plants because clean energy isn’t as widely available in the smaller Southwest market, the suit says. The Northwest Power Act, passed by Congress in the 1980s, requires BPA to provide low-cost power to the region while encouraging renewable energy, conservation and protection of fish and wildlife.BPA violated those duties when it chose the Southwest market option, according to the lawsuit. The groups also allege BPA’s market choice could harm fish and wildlife in the Columbia basin because it could alter the operation of the federal hydroelectric dams from which Bonneville markets power. The lawsuit claims BPA failed to comply with federal environmental law by not conducting any environmental impact analysis on impacts to fish and wildlife before making its decision. The Citizens’ Utility Board, a party to the lawsuit, said it hoped the BPA reverses course – otherwise its decision will splinter the West’s electricity markets, costing utility customers billions of dollars at a time when many are already dealing with skyrocketing bills.The board, as well as other critics of BPA’s decision, have pointed to an initiative developing an independent governance structure for California’s day-ahead market.“Oregon is facing overlapping energy challenges: rising utility bills, rising electricity demand from data centers, and stalling progress on meeting clean energy requirements. The last thing we need is for one of our region’s largest clean energy suppliers to reduce ties with the Pacific Northwest,” said the group’s spokesperson Charlotte Shuff. — Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

States, enviro groups fight Trump plan to keep dirty power plants going

In late spring, the Department of Energy ordered two aging and costly fossil-fueled power plants that were on the verge of shutting down to stay open. The agency claimed that the moves were necessary to prevent the power grid from collapsing — and that it has the power to force the plants to stay open even if the…

In late spring, the Department of Energy ordered two aging and costly fossil-fueled power plants that were on the verge of shutting down to stay open. The agency claimed that the moves were necessary to prevent the power grid from collapsing — and that it has the power to force the plants to stay open even if the utilities, state regulators, and grid operators managing them say that no such emergency exists. But state regulators, regional grid operators, environmental groups, and consumer groups are pushing back on the notion that the grids in question even need these interventions — and are challenging the legality of the DOE’s stay-open orders. The DOE claimed that the threat of large-scale grid blackouts forced its hand. But state utility regulators, environmental groups, consumer advocates, and energy experts say that careful analysis from the plant’s owners, state regulators, regional grid operators, and grid reliability experts had determined both plants could be safely closed. These groups argue that clean energy, not fossil fuels, are the true solution to the country’s grid challenges — even if the ​“big, beautiful” bill signed by Trump last week will make those resources more expensive to build. Some of the environmental organizations challenging DOE’s orders have pledged to take their case to federal court if necessary. “We need to get more electrons on the grid. We need those to be clean, reliable, and affordable,” said Robert Routh, Pennsylvania climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups demanding that DOE reconsider its orders. Keeping J.H. Campbell and Eddystone open ​“results in the exact opposite. It’s costly, harmful, unnecessary, and unlawful.” Taking on the DOE’s grid emergency claims The groups challenging the DOE’s J.H. Campbell and Eddystone stay-open orders point out that the agency is using a power originally designed to protect the grid against unanticipated emergencies, including during wartime, but without proving that such an emergency is underway. “This authority that the Department of Energy is acting under — Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act — is a very tailored emergency authority,” said Caroline Reiser, NRDC senior attorney for climate and energy. ​“Congress intentionally wrote it only to be usable in specific, narrow, short-term emergencies. This is not that.” For decades, the DOE has used its Section 202(c) power sparingly, and only in response to requests from utilities or grid operators to waive federal air pollution regulations or other requirements in moments when the grid faces imminent threats like widespread power outages, Reiser said. But DOE’s orders for Eddystone and J.H. Campbell were not spurred by requests from state regulators or regional grid operators. In fact, the orders caught those parties by surprise. They also came mere days before the plants were set to close down and after years of effort to ensure their closure wouldn’t threaten grid reliability. J.H. Campbell was scheduled to close in May under a plan that has been in the works since 2021 as part of a broader agreement between utility Consumers Energy and state regulators, and which was approved by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages grid reliability across Michigan and 14 other states. “The plant is really old, unreliable, extremely polluting, and extremely expensive,” Reiser said. ​“Nobody is saying that this plant is needed or is going to be beneficial for any reliability purposes.” To justify its stay-open order, DOE cited reports from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), a nonprofit regulatory authority that includes utilities and grid operators in the U.S. and Canada. NERC found MISO is at higher risk of summertime reliability problems than other U.S. grid regions, but environmental groups argue in their rehearing request that DOE has ​“misrepresented the reports on which it relies,” and that Consumers Energy, Michigan regulators, and MISO have collectively shown closing the plant won’t endanger grid reliability. Eddystone, which had operated only infrequently over the past few years, also went through a rigorous process with mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection to ensure its closure wouldn’t harm grid reliability. The DOE’s reason for keeping that plant open is based on a report from PJM that states the grid operator might need to ask utility customers to use less power if it faces extreme conditions this summer — an even scantier justification than what the agency cited in its J.H. Campbell order, Reiser said. As long as the DOE continues to take the position that it can issue emergency stay-open orders to any power plant it decides to, these established methods for managing plant closures and fairly allocating costs will be thrown into disarray, she said. “We have a system of competitive energy markets in the United States that is successful in keeping the lights on and maintaining reliability the vast, vast majority of the time,” Reiser said. ​“The Department of Energy stepping in and using a command-and-control system interferes with those markets.”

Designing a new way to optimize complex coordinated systems

Using diagrams to represent interactions in multipart systems can provide a faster way to design software improvements.

Coordinating complicated interactive systems, whether it’s the different modes of transportation in a city or the various components that must work together to make an effective and efficient robot, is an increasingly important subject for software designers to tackle. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an entirely new way of approaching these complex problems, using simple diagrams as a tool to reveal better approaches to software optimization in deep-learning models.They say the new method makes addressing these complex tasks so simple that it can be reduced to a drawing that would fit on the back of a napkin.The new approach is described in the journal Transactions of Machine Learning Research, in a paper by incoming doctoral student Vincent Abbott and Professor Gioele Zardini of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).“We designed a new language to talk about these new systems,” Zardini says. This new diagram-based “language” is heavily based on something called category theory, he explains.It all has to do with designing the underlying architecture of computer algorithms — the programs that will actually end up sensing and controlling the various different parts of the system that’s being optimized. “The components are different pieces of an algorithm, and they have to talk to each other, exchange information, but also account for energy usage, memory consumption, and so on.” Such optimizations are notoriously difficult because each change in one part of the system can in turn cause changes in other parts, which can further affect other parts, and so on.The researchers decided to focus on the particular class of deep-learning algorithms, which are currently a hot topic of research. Deep learning is the basis of the large artificial intelligence models, including large language models such as ChatGPT and image-generation models such as Midjourney. These models manipulate data by a “deep” series of matrix multiplications interspersed with other operations. The numbers within matrices are parameters, and are updated during long training runs, allowing for complex patterns to be found. Models consist of billions of parameters, making computation expensive, and hence improved resource usage and optimization invaluable.Diagrams can represent details of the parallelized operations that deep-learning models consist of, revealing the relationships between algorithms and the parallelized graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware they run on, supplied by companies such as NVIDIA. “I’m very excited about this,” says Zardini, because “we seem to have found a language that very nicely describes deep learning algorithms, explicitly representing all the important things, which is the operators you use,” for example the energy consumption, the memory allocation, and any other parameter that you’re trying to optimize for.Much of the progress within deep learning has stemmed from resource efficiency optimizations. The latest DeepSeek model showed that a small team can compete with top models from OpenAI and other major labs by focusing on resource efficiency and the relationship between software and hardware. Typically, in deriving these optimizations, he says, “people need a lot of trial and error to discover new architectures.” For example, a widely used optimization program called FlashAttention took more than four years to develop, he says. But with the new framework they developed, “we can really approach this problem in a more formal way.” And all of this is represented visually in a precisely defined graphical language.But the methods that have been used to find these improvements “are very limited,” he says. “I think this shows that there’s a major gap, in that we don’t have a formal systematic method of relating an algorithm to either its optimal execution, or even really understanding how many resources it will take to run.” But now, with the new diagram-based method they devised, such a system exists.Category theory, which underlies this approach, is a way of mathematically describing the different components of a system and how they interact in a generalized, abstract manner. Different perspectives can be related. For example, mathematical formulas can be related to algorithms that implement them and use resources, or descriptions of systems can be related to robust “monoidal string diagrams.” These visualizations allow you to directly play around and experiment with how the different parts connect and interact. What they developed, he says, amounts to “string diagrams on steroids,” which incorporates many more graphical conventions and many more properties.“Category theory can be thought of as the mathematics of abstraction and composition,” Abbott says. “Any compositional system can be described using category theory, and the relationship between compositional systems can then also be studied.” Algebraic rules that are typically associated with functions can also be represented as diagrams, he says. “Then, a lot of the visual tricks we can do with diagrams, we can relate to algebraic tricks and functions. So, it creates this correspondence between these different systems.”As a result, he says, “this solves a very important problem, which is that we have these deep-learning algorithms, but they’re not clearly understood as mathematical models.” But by representing them as diagrams, it becomes possible to approach them formally and systematically, he says.One thing this enables is a clear visual understanding of the way parallel real-world processes can be represented by parallel processing in multicore computer GPUs. “In this way,” Abbott says, “diagrams can both represent a function, and then reveal how to optimally execute it on a GPU.”The “attention” algorithm is used by deep-learning algorithms that require general, contextual information, and is a key phase of the serialized blocks that constitute large language models such as ChatGPT. FlashAttention is an optimization that took years to develop, but resulted in a sixfold improvement in the speed of attention algorithms.Applying their method to the well-established FlashAttention algorithm, Zardini says that “here we are able to derive it, literally, on a napkin.” He then adds, “OK, maybe it’s a large napkin.” But to drive home the point about how much their new approach can simplify dealing with these complex algorithms, they titled their formal research paper on the work “FlashAttention on a Napkin.”This method, Abbott says, “allows for optimization to be really quickly derived, in contrast to prevailing methods.” While they initially applied this approach to the already existing FlashAttention algorithm, thus verifying its effectiveness, “we hope to now use this language to automate the detection of improvements,” says Zardini, who in addition to being a principal investigator in LIDS, is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.The plan is that ultimately, he says, they will develop the software to the point that “the researcher uploads their code, and with the new algorithm you automatically detect what can be improved, what can be optimized, and you return an optimized version of the algorithm to the user.”In addition to automating algorithm optimization, Zardini notes that a robust analysis of how deep-learning algorithms relate to hardware resource usage allows for systematic co-design of hardware and software. This line of work integrates with Zardini’s focus on categorical co-design, which uses the tools of category theory to simultaneously optimize various components of engineered systems.Abbott says that “this whole field of optimized deep learning models, I believe, is quite critically unaddressed, and that’s why these diagrams are so exciting. They open the doors to a systematic approach to this problem.”“I’m very impressed by the quality of this research. ... The new approach to diagramming deep-learning algorithms used by this paper could be a very significant step,” says Jeremy Howard, founder and CEO of Answers.ai, who was not associated with this work. “This paper is the first time I’ve seen such a notation used to deeply analyze the performance of a deep-learning algorithm on real-world hardware. ... The next step will be to see whether real-world performance gains can be achieved.”“This is a beautifully executed piece of theoretical research, which also aims for high accessibility to uninitiated readers — a trait rarely seen in papers of this kind,” says Petar Velickovic, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and a lecturer at Cambridge University, who was not associated with this work. These researchers, he says, “are clearly excellent communicators, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next!”The new diagram-based language, having been posted online, has already attracted great attention and interest from software developers. A reviewer from Abbott’s prior paper introducing the diagrams noted that “The proposed neural circuit diagrams look great from an artistic standpoint (as far as I am able to judge this).” “It’s technical research, but it’s also flashy!” Zardini says.

The UK Says at an Energy Summit That Green Power Will Boost Security, as the US Differs

Britain has announced a major investment in wind power as it hosts an international summit on energy security

LONDON (AP) — Britain announced a major investment in wind power Thursday as it hosted an international summit on energy security — with Europe and the United States at odds over whether to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government will invest 300 million pounds ($400 million) in boosting Britain’s capacity to manufacture components for the offshore wind industry, a move it hopes will encourage private investment in the U.K.’s renewable energy sector.“As long as energy can be weaponized against us, our countries and our citizens are vulnerable and exposed,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told delegates.He said “low-carbon power” was a route to energy security as well as a way to slow climate change.Britain now gets more than half its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and the rest from natural gas and nuclear energy. It aims to generate all the U.K.’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.Tommy Joyce, U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, told participants they should be “honest about the world’s growing energy needs, not focused on net-zero politics.”He called policies that push for clean power over fossil fuels "harmful and dangerous," and claimed building wind turbines requires "concessions to or coercion from China" because it supplies necessary rare minerals.Hosted by the British government and the International Energy Agency, the two-day summit brings together government ministers from 60 countries, senior European Union officials, energy sector CEOs, heads of international organizations and nonprofits to assess risks to the global energy system and figure out solutions. Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this story. ___The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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