Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in resistance camps means resources are pooled and shared. That’s because climate work, at least at the individual level, doesn’t pay much.
“You’re not really using money inside a camp, even though it’s helping get resources to function,” said Big Wind. “There’s so much possibility, because nobody had to worry about their basic necessities,” they said.
Outside of the camps is where people like Big Wind have to worry.
A member of the 30×30 White House Advisory Committee, and a long-time climate activist, Big Wind spoke in Dubai at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and, from a young age, has crowdfunded conservation initiatives on the Wind River Reservation.
“I’m not getting paid to go to these things,” said Big Wind, “by these institutions, by the feds, or by the international community.” Big Wind’s day job with the Wyoming Outdoor Council helps pay for some of these trips, and they continue to rely on crowdfunding to support travel.
The unpaid labor that Big Wind provides to fight climate change is at the heart of a new paper published in Cambridge University Press called “Wages for Earthwork” — “earthwork” being the term to describe labor that takes care of the planet and provides benefits to all. That work should be compensated, argues essay author David Temin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
“If we’re going to think about a just transition to a world without fossil fuels, we need to put a lot of this invisible labor at the center,” Temin said. “A lot of this is obvious to Indigenous communities. Everyone is implicitly benefiting from this.”
The argument may seem quite basic, but the exploitation of unpaid earthwork has far reaching economic dimensions. Take unpaid housework or childcare: labor that maintains society and allows for the economy to continue operating but that is invisible in everything from labor markets to gross domestic products. Because productivity in most economies is a matter of goods and services, unpaid labor — like eldercare or earthwork — lies outside the market.
“The parallel is absolutely apt,” said Erin Hatton, a professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in gender and labor markets. “Because of our capitalist system, labor outside the home has a measure of respect.”
Earthwork, Hatton says, broadens that definition of home by taking care of the Earth as one would tend to a household where everyone lives. “It’s a home more broadly constructed,” she said.
Whereas unpaid housework and childcare have historically fallen to women, unpaid earthwork typically falls to Indigenous peoples, who are expected to steward land and share traditional ecological knowledge for free, says Micheal Mikulewicz, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The argument is they should be grateful that we are actually asking and trying to help, which doesn’t help them put food on the table,” Mikulewicz said.
The federal government does provide applications to grants pointed at tribal nations and organizations. This year, the Biden administration awarded $120 million dollars to 146 Indigenous-led projects for everything from climate-adaptation planning to community-led relocation and habitat restoration. But that doesn’t account for all the labor that has been done without federal funding. Also, grant-funding tends to privilege organizations with the means to pay grant writers, which can leave smaller organizations at a disadvantage.
“We don’t really talk about the amount of work and labor that will be necessary to adapt to climate change,” said Mikulewicz. “Actually making changes in our economy, in our society, in the way our economic system works, or even the way we grow food for that matter. The phases of adaptation are really, really diverse.”
Mikulewicz adds that there are no easy answers to solving these imbalances, but that compensating Indigenous climate labor is a step in the right direction and could open the possibility of broader, more fruitful alliances between environmentalists and labor.
According to Temin, the paper’s author, solutions could range from hourly wages to pressuring non-Indigenous conservation organizations to pick up the tab, but he recognizes that answers are typically dependent on situations with no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation. The funds to help from large conservation organizations are not making it into the hands of local Indigenous communities.
However, Temin said the best way for Indigenous peoples to start seeing real forms of compensation is for governments to strengthen tribal sovereignty and return traditional lands to Indigenous stewardship.
“The most important component is securing land tenure rights and supporting local communities’ efforts to protect themselves and their territories against environmentally damaging extractive development projects and conservation projects that kick them off their own land,” he said.
Big Wind, on the Wind River Reservation, agrees. “I don’t think money is going to solve it. But I also feel like we do have a responsibility to ensure that we are taking care of the people who are working for all of us.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is launching an emergency response in Lower Florida Keys waters after reports emerged of smalltooth sawfish displaying abnormal behaviors such as spinning and whirling.
In addition to the abnormal behavior reported by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), as of March 24 there were more than 28 deaths of smalltooth sawfish, a press release from NOAA said.
An investigation effort led by the commission — including the collection and analysis of samples — was underway.
“If the opportunity presents itself, this would be the first attempt ever to rescue and rehabilitate smalltooth sawfish from the wild,” said Adam Brame, coordinator of NOAA Fisheries sawfish recovery, as The Guardian reported. “We’re hopeful for positive outcomes from these rescue attempts, and grateful to our partners for their support as we work to protect this endangered species. It’s important to note that active rescue and rehabilitation are not always effective in saving stranded animals. However, it can still give us critical information to learn about the nature of the distress.”
According to FWC, the ongoing compilation of fish necropsy data so far showed no signs of bacterial infection or communicable pathogens. Salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature were also ruled out as the cause of fish deaths or abnormal behavior.
Smalltooth sawfish live primarily in shallow coastal waters, with one in five species living in tropical estuaries or seas, NOAA Fisheries said.
Once found in waters off the coasts of North Carolina and Texas, smalltooth sawfish are now mostly limited to Florida. In 2003, they became the first ever marine fish to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“Given the limited population size of smalltooth sawfish, the mortality of at least two dozen sawfish could have an impact on the recovery of this species,” Brame said in the NOAA press release.
Brame stated that a higher number of total mortalities was suspected, however. As of March 24, more than 100 sawfish — large juveniles and adults from seven to 14 feet long — had been impacted by the event.
NOAA planned to rescue the endangered sawfish and bring them to quarantine facilities for observation, with the goal of rehabilitating and releasing them. Agencies offering to house and rehabilitate the fish included Mote Marine Laboratory, Dynastic Marine Associates, Inc. and Ripley’s Aquariums.
“Our goal is to release all rescued sawfish back to the wild once rehabilitated,” Brame said in the press release.
NOAA said it would work with animal care teams, including scientists and veterinarians who would develop specified care guidelines.
A historic new law in Phoenix, Arizona, will provide thousands of outdoor workers in the hottest city in the country with protections from extreme heat.
In a unanimous vote, the Phoenix City Council passed an ordinance requiring that workers have easy access to rest, potable water and shade, as well as training to recognize signs of heat stress, a press release from the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) said. Vehicles with enclosed cabs must also have access to air conditioning.
“People who work outside and in hot indoor environments in Phoenix suffer unacceptably during our deadly summers, with too few protections,” said Katelyn Parady, a Phoenix-based expert on worker health and safety with National COSH, who assisted unions and local workers in advocating for the new extreme heat protection measures, in a press release from National COSH. “This ordinance is a critical first step toward getting workers lifesaving protections and holding employers accountable for safety during heat season. It’s also a model for how local governments can leverage their contracts to protect the workers who keep their communities running from climate change dangers.”
In 2023, there were a record 31 consecutive days of 110-plus degree heat in Phoenix. The city had 340 deaths related to the extreme heat, with 645 in Maricopa County, according to the county health department. Three-quarters of the heat-related fatalities happened outdoors.
In the United States, more than 40 percent of outdoor workers are Hispanic or Black, while making up approximately 32 percent of the population, reported The Guardian.
People of color and low-income workers are the most impacted by the hazards of extreme heat. According to Public Citizen, the risk of Latinx workers dying from heat stress is more than three times higher than that of their peers.
“This heat safety ordinance will change my life,” said Filiberto Lares, who has been delivering food to airplanes for Sky Chefs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport for 11 years, as The Guardian reported.
The new ordinance will apply to outdoor laborers who work for city contractors and subcontractors of engineering, construction and airport projects, as well as other city services, the press release said.
“The heat at Sky Harbor Airport is dangerous and all of us who work there know it,” said passenger service agent Cecilia Ortiz, who filed a complaint against her employer last summer over the sweltering conditions, in the press release. “We’re glad the city of Phoenix is stepping up to require that airlines and their contractors give us basic heat protections outdoors and in the jet bridges. Now we need to keep pushing to make sure cabin cleaners, who work inside planes but often with the A/C off, are also protected. And we are going to hold our employers accountable. They must take this ordinance seriously, so we can stay safe at work.”
In addition to the safety requirements required of contractors, they will also have to create and keep a heat safety plan.
“In the summers, when the temperatures reach extremes, the asphalt on the tarmac is even hotter,” said Lares, who is a UNITE HERE Local 11 member in Phoenix, in the press release. “It has felt as though people forget that many of us work in vehicles. Having air conditioning in work trucks, buses, and delivery vans matters just as much as in a building because those vehicles are our workplaces.”
Lori Bays, Phoenix’s deputy manager, said the new rule would apply to roughly 10,000 city contract workers, reported The Guardian.
“Phoenix is recognizing the need to take action to protect the most vulnerable,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a climate vulnerability researcher with the Union of Concerned Scientists, as The Guardian reported. “With an intense heat island effect, there’s very little vegetation and an unequal distribution of shading and trees that can help lower exposure to temperatures.”
As climate change continues to bring increasingly hotter summers to Phoenix, advocates of the ordinance say broader protections are necessary for all workers, not only those employed by the city’s contractors and subcontractors, the press release said.
“It’s good news that our city council is listening to workers who are in grave danger due to climate change,” Parady said in the press release. “But your body’s ability to cope with extreme heat does not depend on whether you work for a city contractor, directly for the city or for a private employer. We’re going to keep organizing until all workers have strong protection from heat – because everyone works under the same blazing sun.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. on March 21 overturned previous orders by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that banned the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in product packaging by a plastics treatment company, Inhance Technologies.
In December 2023, the EPA issued two orders for Houston-based Inhance Technologies to stop manufacturing PFAS, including PFOA, in its plastics treatment processes. Exposure to PFOA may be linked to higher risks of certain types of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
The PFAS are a byproduct from the company’s flourination process, which is used to make plastics more durable and prevent degradation of the products inside the treated containers. The company treats containers designed for products like cleaners and pesticides.
Inhance Technologies sued the EPA one week after receiving the orders, and it stated that if it had to follow the orders and shut down its fluorination process, it would go bankrupt.
The federal appeals court overturned the orders, saying the EPA exceeded its authority by issuing the orders under Section 5 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The judges said that Section 5 of the TSCA allowed the EPA to regulate the use of “new” chemicals or chemicals used in “new” ways, and they said they agreed with the argument that EPA overstepped by issuing the orders under Section 5 instead of Section 6, which applies to regulation on all chemicals.
The judges said that Section 5 did not apply to Inhance Technologies’ fluorination process, which has been used for 40 years, Reuters reported.
“The court did not dispute EPA’s underlying decision that this is a danger to human health, what they did was say it’s not a new use, which I think is wrong… but this case isn’t over by any stretch,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), as reported by The Guardian.
The EPA told The Guardian it will review the decision from the federal appeals court.
PEER and the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) shared in a press release that they will “pursue that case in addition to any other remedies that are available to abate this significant and unreasonable danger to public health, and will urge the government to do so as well.”
In the 20 months since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered billions in subsidies for clean energy projects and electric vehicles, President Joe Biden has sought to supplement those climate carrots with a few key sticks. The Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months raced to roll them out, in the form of key regulations that penalize carbon emissions from power plants, oil wells, and passenger cars, under an effort to finalize new rules before the election.
The administration on Friday finalized the last of those rules, a set of strict standards for carbon emissions from big rigs and other heavy-duty vehicles. This regulation has been among the most controversial Biden climate rules, in large part because it pushes up against the limits of available technology: Freight companies and trucking industry advocates have argued that the rule could force them to abandon diesel engines before electric drivetrains are ready to replace them in long-haul tractor-trailers. The EPA weakened the rule from an earlier version in response to those concerns, delaying the mandate for the largest trucks by a few years.
But the rule goes beyond long-haul trucking. It also applies to a wide range of other heavy-duty vehicles, including garbage trucks, box trucks, cement mixers, and school buses. These vehicles spew toxic air pollution just like 18-wheelers, but they travel far fewer miles and carry lighter loads, making them easier to replace with electric models.
“When you look at the share of vehicles, even in the tractor-trailer space, a huge chunk of those don’t travel more than 250 miles per day,” said Dave Cooke, a vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a climate advocacy organization. “There is a significant chunk of the sector that could be electrified now, because a large portion of it has these really distinct routes.” The rule will apply to about 11 million heavy-duty vehicles in the United States.
The trucking industry’s opposition to the rule has centered on what EV drivers often call range anxiety: Tractor-trailers have to haul heavy loads down interstate highways for hours at a time, and many existing batteries aren’t quite up to the task of replacing diesel engines over such long ranges. Furthermore, the few electric tractor-trailers on the market right now are several times more expensive than conventional models, and there are few places to charge them. The Biden administration has sought to remedy this infrastructure gap with a “zero-emission freight corridors strategy” that will channel chargers and grid investments toward interstates that carry an outsize share of long-haul freight.
But a large percentage of trucks and heavy-duty vehicles don’t make long trips and so don’t need to worry so much about range. Garbage trucks, city buses, and delivery vehicles, for example, travel just a few hundred miles each day at most, within the range of current battery technology, and they return to a depot or warehouse where they can charge overnight.
Even the Clean Freight Coalition, which represents freight companies and truck dealers, has found that most of these vehicles could go electric using available technology. A recent report from the group found that electric models on the market right now could handle 93 percent of medium-duty trucking routes, with only the longest 7 percent requiring more juice than current batteries can offer. That’s compared to just half of all tractor-trailer routes, according to the report.
The electric transition among short-haul vehicles is already happening in many parts of the country. The Biden administration has doled out billions of dollars to cities like Baltimore to roll out electric school buses, and companies like Amazon have deployed a growing number of electric Rivian delivery trucks on package routes.
The nation’s most ambitious effort is afoot in California, which has been seeking federal permission to impose even stricter truck emissions standards than the EPA. It has been making an aggressive push to decarbonize short-haul trucking, otherwise known as drayage. Trucks unloading freight from the nation’s two biggest ports, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, make thousands of trips through residential neighborhoods, and the state is pushing companies to go electric and improve air quality in those areas.
The Biden administration’s new rule sets a faster timeline for things like delivery vans and utility trucks than it does for tractor-trailers. The standards for those smaller vehicles start in the 2027 model year, but standards for “sleeper cab” long-haul rigs don’t take effect until 2030, a change that represents a big concession to concerns from the trucking industry.
“We thank [EPA] for addressing industry concern about the challenges of the early years of the rule, and we remain committed to upholding the spirit of this regulation,” Sean Waters, an executive at the major trucking company Daimler, said in a statement following the rule’s announcement.
Like the EPA’s previous rule on passenger cars, the truck rule is “technology neutral,” meaning it doesn’t mandate an electric transition. Instead it sets goals for the carbon emissions of a truck manufacturer’s entire fleet, giving them the option to increase the fuel efficiency of their diesel engines or offer hybrid or electric models. The agency laid out a hypothetical scenario showing how a company could reach compliance in model year 2032 by rolling out a line of hybrid delivery vans and school buses. Two-thirds of its tractor-trailers would still run on diesel, with a smaller number of hydrogen fuel cell trucks thrown into the mix as well.
Cooke says the agency could have pushed companies harder to switch to zero-emission vehicles given that the technology for electrified short-haul trucks already exists.
“This rule doesn’t put that guarantee in place, that we’re going to see zero-emission trucks in communities on the ground that are dealing with the trucking sector,” he said, adding that he had hoped for a “stronger signal” to companies and utilities to invest in electric trucks and transmission infrastructure to charge them.
Even so, the rule will still lead to significant air quality improvements, says Laura Kate Bender, who leads healthy air advocacy at the American Lung Association. That will be true even for cities without major trucking routes or large ports, she said: Large local vehicles like buses and garbage trucks are some of the most polluting on the average city street, and a strong push to replace them with electric models will ease the burden on frontline communities.
“There’s a lot of different types of trucks, beyond the big long-haul trucks that we think of on the highway, that are actually in folks’ neighborhoods,” said Bender. “We’re excited to see the cleanup that this leads to.”
AnnDionne Selestin normally finished work as a housekeeper at The Westin in West Maui after 5 p.m., but August 8 was different. With a hurricane passing south of the island and the power out, most guests were riding things out in their rooms and didn’t want to be bothered. So Selestin, her husband, and three aunts who also worked at the hotel headed home early, driving through Lāhainā in the mid-afternoon as an inferno approached.
They spent two hours stuck in gridlocked traffic, watching branches fly through the sky and the orange glow of flames on the hillside inch closer and closer. As a black cloud descended on their line of cars and more people hurried out of their driveways into the caravan, fear evident in their faces, Selestin and her aunties prayed silently, in English and Pohnpeian, the native language of their home island in Micronesia, Pohnpei.
Their prayers were answered that day: They survived the Lāhainā wildfire that killed more than 100 people in the coastal historic town, the deadliest blaze in modern U.S. history.
Tourism skidded to a halt. Six months later, Selestin started working with wildfire survivors who were Indigenous Pacific migrants like herself: Families who migrated from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. That’s when she learned that despite treaties between their countries and the United States that allow her community to live and work here legally and indefinitely, a mistake in the drafting of a law 28 years ago prevented them — some of them homeless — from getting access to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Now, Congress has passed a law restoring access to FEMA and other key federal programs to citizens of these countries living in the U.S. It ends nearly three decades during which people such as Selestin, an estimated tens of thousands, had been cut off from governmental safety-net programs.
The community of legal migrants from Pacific island nations is known as the Compact of Free Association, or COFA, citizens. That COFA citizens weren’t eligible for any aid is attributed to an inadvertent mistake in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The new law that corrects this error was included in the federal spending bill approved last month.
Members of this community who were denied crucial support in the wake of Lāhainā’s destruction are expected to be the first to benefit.
“Just knowing that there’s people that actually care about the COFA citizens, it’s amazing,” said Selestin, the surprise evident in her voice. “We’re very grateful.”
That fact people care surprises Selestin because for most of her life, she’s heard that people like her are not welcome in Hawaiʻi. Her parents moved to Maui from Pohnpei when she was 6, seeking a better life for her and her siblings. At first, that meant splitting up the family by leaving her older brothers with relatives on their home island more than 3,000 miles away. Her father got a job on a pineapple plantation, an experience that reflects the immigrant story so often celebrated in Hawaiʻi.
But there was one key difference. Selestin is a citizen of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, one of three Pacific island nations that gained independence and a seat at the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s following a century of colonial rule.
The United States gained control over the islands from Japan during World War II and supported their independence with the understanding that the U.S. military would still retain strategic power over their lands, airspace, and surrounding waters, a portion of the western Pacific region that rivals the size of the continental U.S. The international agreements securing these military rights — the Compacts of Free Association — have been increasingly recognized as critical to U.S. national security amid growing concerns about China.
As part of the compacts, the U.S. to a large extent maintains an open border policy with the three nations: Their citizens can live and work in the U.S. and vice versa with no need for a visa. When the treaty with the Federated States of Micronesia was signed in 1986, people who moved to the U.S. were eligible for the same federal programs, such as federal disaster aid, that long-term permanent residents can access.
But just 10 years later, COFA citizens’ eligibility was stripped in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It wasn’t just FEMA: The community lost access to Medicaid and food stamps. They could work in the U.S. legally for decades, but if they suddenly became disabled they could no longer collect Social Security disability insurance.
Many COFA migrants who moved to the U.S. for work and education never needed to rely on these safety nets. But others who were too sick to work, or struggling to raise families on low salaries and high rents, quickly realized that they had been paying taxes into a system that excluded them when they needed help most.
The Lāhainā wildfire gave momentum to longstanding community advocacy to reverse this systematic exclusion and to ongoing efforts by Hawaiʻi congressional leaders, Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ed Case, to restore their eligibility.
The bill was included in a broader measure to renew the treaties with the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands. The law provides funding to the countries and also extends veterans’ health benefits to COFA citizens, who serve in the U.S. military at high rates and previously were denied care.
After the bill became law this month, FEMA announced it will reopen its cash assistance application window for COFA citizens affected by the Maui wildfires. Agency spokesman Todd Hoose said he’s not sure yet how many people it’ll help — he’s heard estimates as low as a few dozen people or as high as 200. The COFA community in Lāhainā was small, but growing; much bigger was the Filipino community, which included immigrants of mixed legal status. Undocumented people remain excluded from federal disaster cash assistance.
“We do not yet have the process, but we are encouraging folks to help us identify those who are potentially eligible,” Hoose said.
Even though there’s still so much unknown, Selestin is excited. In the months since the wildfire, FEMA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help affected families stay housed. She knows people who have been sleeping in their cars and struggling to feed their kids. As a middle schooler on Maui, she felt ashamed to be Micronesian, but now at age 24, she’s proud of it, and wants to continue to help her people get back on their feet.
Rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate change-related effects are expected to increase outmigration from the island nations, especially the low-lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, to more mountainous islands like Guam and Oʻahu and other parts of the U.S. The Maui wildfire will not be the last time that members of the Micronesian diaspora will be in need of federal disaster assistance. And next time, they’ll have the right to receive it right away.
“That’s huge for us,” Selestin said.
Correction: This story originally misspelled AnnDionne Selestin’s name.
This story was originally published by the Texas Tribune and is the second of a three-part series on emerging energy sources and Texas’ role in developing them.
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.
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.
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.
Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
“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.”
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 percent of the electricity in Iceland, which sits on one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. In 2022, it generated about 5 percent of the electricity in California. The United States is the top geothermal electricity producer in the world.
An operator controls the flow in and out of the well.
Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
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.
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.
Taff explains how Sage Geosystems uses its Starr County well to store energy.
Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
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.
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.”
The Larderello geothermal power plant, which is the world’s oldest, was built in Tuscany, Italy.
Enel Green Power
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.
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.
“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.
Jamie Beard speaks at a SXSW panel titled “Geothermal and the Promise of Clean Energy Abundance” on March 9 in Austin.
Courtesy of Jamie Beard
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.
Fervo CEO Tim Latimer at the Fervo Energy office in Houston on March 22.
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune
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.
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 percent of whom came from oil and gas work.
Fervo’s approach is basically to drill vertically and horizontally, 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.
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.
Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
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 and later invested millions more.
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.
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.
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.
Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
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.
