I’ve noticed a pattern lately, a happy pattern in some of the renewable energy news that I read. There are multiple examples of technologies and skills originally developed for the oil and gas industry that are becoming directly applicable in renewables.
Example 1.
Fervo is a energy company that drills not for oil but for heat. Geothermal energy is useful stuff when it’s conveniently located near the surface. Picture boiling hot springs next to Icelandic volcanoes. Heating water is easy when the hot water is already right there. But if you drill deep enough, you can make your own geothermal party just about anywhere. The trick is being able to drill deep and cheap and fast. It turns out this is not so easy. But as luck would have it, the fracking revolution of the last few decades has developed exactly the skills we need to go bobbing for hot rocks. Houston-based Fervo is now moving out of their initial proof-of-concept period with solid evidence that they’ll be able to sell geothermally-generated electricity at a reasonable rate. Even if the current batch of news coverage is optimistic, it’s still satisfying to see fracking tech put to low-carbon use. It’s like watching a con man raise money for the orphanage.
Example 2.
Solugen, also Houston-based company, makes chemical products, chemicals that would typically be created from petroleum feedstocks. One of its two founders had a background in the industrial chemicals industry. The other one brought the biological know-how. They’ve built something called a Bioforge that looks like a petrochemical refinery, but instead of starting with petrochemicals and warping them at high temperatures and pressures, they start with sugars and use specially engineered enzymes operating a low temperatures and pressures to create their end products. As they scale up their technology, they’re able to build on properties and skill sets originally developed for the chemicals industry, but creating much less waste and greenhouse gas emissions along the way.
Image by Midjourney
Example 3
Ørsted is a Danish company that makes sea-based wind turbines. To do this, you need fleets of ships specialize in towing, positioning, and securing enormous steel structures in the middle of the ocean. Once again, this is not easy. But Ørsted has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. Only, back in the day, they used to make oil rigs. But around 2008, Ørsted started building offshore wind farms. Since then, they have fully transitioned from being a fossil-fuel company to being a renewable energy company. Everything they learned sucking oil from the seafloor they can now apply to pulling electricity from a passing breeze.
There is an insane amount of money, talent, and expertise in the oil and gas industry. Rather than making enemies out of the people in that field, how can we give them a playbook that puts them, their skills, their capital, and their equipment to work in a newer, cleaner energy industry?
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 