Ground Truth

Building Fervo has been a roller coaster, with big highs, daunting lows, and a team doing things that should be impossible. Dawn Owens and David Ulrey share the ins and outs of the deals behind it all.

Dawn Owens wasn’t looking for a job, and Sarah Jewett had walked away from a sandwich with Tim Latimer without a second thought. Both ended up joining Fervo Energy, where the team took risks and bet on itself to get Project Red, its first commercial pilot, up and running in the Nevada desert.

Tim Latimer, a drilling engineer, came to Stanford to start a geothermal company using techniques from the shale boom. As the lone MBA in engineering classes, he won over a skeptical professor, who pointed him to Jack Norbeck, a PhD with expertise in the field and the co-founder Tim had been looking for. Just as the two got started, a stranger’s conference paper proposed bringing shale techniques to geothermal. “We’ve been scooped,” Tim told Jack. But the stranger, Christian Gradl, didn’t see a rival. He saw a team.

Tim Latimer grew up next to the last coal plant built in America. As a drilling engineer, a string of heat-damaged motors led him to geothermal energy and the realization that oil and gas technology could unlock it. Then a 2015 flood brought climate change into his own life. Episode one follows Tim from Riesel, Texas, to a Stanford application essay with a plan: no company, no investors, just an idea.

Fervo Energy delivers 24/7 carbon-free geothermal energy. But before there was a company, there was a flood, a broken motor, and a class project. Join Olivia, a Fervo newbie, as she asks the people who built it how it all happened.