My colleague Guy Oliver has written a piece for Energy Tech Review that puts the subsurface back at the center of the geothermal conversation, where it belongs. Three things in it worth reading twice.
– Technically viable is not the same as commercially viable. A project crosses the bankability threshold when the reservoir is understood well enough to underwrite, not when the concept is elegant.
– Geothermal’s output is not only electrons. Augustine Island shows how a large, long-life resource becomes the foundation for low-carbon fuels, hydrogen, direct lithium extraction and data center infrastructure. The resource sets the ceiling on all of it.
– Data science does not remove subsurface uncertainty. It translates that uncertainty into risk metrics a financier can actually evaluate. That is a narrower claim than most AI pitches in this sector, and a more useful one.
And the line I keep coming back to:
“๐๐๐ค๐๐๐๐ง๐๐๐’๐ ๐๐ค๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ฃ๐๐ง๐๐ฎ ๐ฉ๐๐๐๐จ๐๐ฉ๐๐ค๐ ๐๐จ ๐ฃ๐๐ฉ ๐๐๐ค๐๐ฉ ๐ซ๐๐ก๐๐ข๐. ๐๐ ๐๐จ ๐๐๐ค๐๐ฉ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ฉ๐๐ค๐.”
Thirty-five years of subsurface evaluation sit behind that sentence. Worth ten minutes of your time.
