Episode 122: Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy
Today's guest is Tim Latimer, Co-Founder and CEO of Fervo Energy.
Fervo Energy is a geothermal energy developer, that has developed technology that is more cost-effective than traditional methods. The company is commercializing technology to develop, own, and operate geothermal assets as a dispatchable foundation to a 100% clean energy future. Its technology incorporates proven cost-effective methods such as horizontal drilling and advanced fiber optic sensing to lower the cost and increase the productivity of geothermal development.
This is the first episode that I've done putting geothermal front and center, and Tim does a great job in this discussion of providing an overview of geothermal technology. I learn why it matters, where it is in its evolution, where it needs to get to and the barriers holding it back. We also talk a bunch about Tim's journey from starting as a drilling engineer, working in the Permian and Eagle Four Basins, to now being laser-focused on thermal technology and the clean energy transition. I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do as well.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
In today's episode, we cover:
What is Fervo and what was its genesis?
The origins of Tim’s interest in climate change.
Tim’s early work experience in the fossil fuel industry as an oil-drilling engineer.
How the vision of energy independence and coal-alternatives enticed him to enter the oil industry.
The epiphany that prompted him to leave the fossil fuel industry and explore geothermal energy.
Tim’s realization that the bottleneck for geothermal development is financing not research.
Tim’s experience at Stanford Graduate School of Business and his decision to go all in on Fervo Energy.
How geothermal systems work and what has historically hampered development outside of select countries.
Fervo’s new horizontal-drilling approach and heat-flow distribution technique.
Fervo Energy’s business model and its services.
How geothermal offers a carbon-free renewable energy without the challenges of intermittency.
Goal of developing first operational facility by 2021.
How lands rights are treated.
How geothermal can compensate for the night-time intermittency issue that has come with the growth of solar energy.
The role of storage as it relates to geothermal energy.
How Tim sees areas of risk for Fervo.
What success looks like for Fervo.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
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Hello, everyone, this is Jason Jacobs and welcome to my climate journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Today's guest is Tim [Latimer 00:01:20] co-founder and CEO of Fervo Energy. Fervo Energy is commercializing technology to develop, own, and operate geothermal assets as a dispatchable foundation to 100% clean energy future. Their technology incorporates proven cost-effective technology such as horizontal drilling and advanced fiber optic sensing to lower the cost and increase the productivity of geothermal development. What's all that mean?
Well, that's what we find out in this episode. This is the first one that I've done putting geothermal front and center and Tim does a great job in this discussion of providing an overview of geothermal technology, why it matters, where it is in its evolution, where it needs to get to, some of the barriers holding it back, and we also talk a bunch about Tim's journey from starting as a drilling engineer working in the Permian and Eagle Four Basins to now being laser focused onto thermal technology and the clean energy transition. I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do as well. Tim Latimer, welcome to the show.
Tim Latimer: Thanks, Jason, great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: This does not actually feel like a show because you're one of those people, I think I met you one time at a conference back when we were allowed to travel or even leave the house, but since then we've probably engaged back and forth on email, on direct message, on Twitter, 300 times so, I mean, it's good to see that you actually exist in real life but I feel like I already know you.
Tim Latimer: That's true. I think I hadn't heard of what you were after when we met. It was about a year ago at this time at The Fastest Path to Zero Conference in Michigan-
Jason Jacobs: That's right, in Michigan.
Tim Latimer: ... occurred. Yeah, a tremendous conference that just kinda tackled decarbonization from all kinds of fronts. I love forums like that because you can get so side loaded in your segments so it's good to see what everybody else is working on and understand that there are smart people attacking every part of this problem. And, yeah, it's been fun to follow your own journey from that point on, you know, through the pod and other forums, so excited to sit down and be recording with you [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, and it's exciting for me too because when I first entered the space I was actually pretty freaked out because I navigated my way over to this more kind of like deep tech world that you come from and... because I thought that that was the biggest lever for tackling climate change and I was like, man, this is where I wanna be because I wanna tackle climate change, uh, with the highest leverage things but, gosh, is this a foreign language to me.
And since then I believe very much that this world matters but now at least I have come to understand that it's not the only thing that matters, which means that I have a lot more flexibility in terms of where I anchor as evidenced by like how I've been spending the last year and a half. But it's good to kinda come back around, it's like full circle in a way because this is a critically important area and it's one that even today I don't have a great handle on candidly, so I'm excited to take an hour with you here or however long we take and dig in and talk about it.
Tim Latimer: Yeah, that sounds great. I wholeheartedly endorse that statement. I think that I've ended up in kinda the hard tech, new science, new innovation world and that's, of course, a big part of the puzzle, but if you think about how many sectors need to be changed and across how many dimensions, I mean, it's just one part of many. So, I think, just like your own example, everyone needs to kinda find a home for where they can make an impact on climate change. And hard tech is a really fun place to do it and presents its own thrills and challenges, but there's also a really wide spectrum of ways for people to make a difference.
Jason Jacobs: Well, jumping right into it, what is Fervo?
Tim Latimer: Fervo Energy is a geothermal energy developer and we have developed new technology in terms of drilling and reservoir characterization that allows us to develop geothermal in a more cost effective manner. It's gonna really expand the resource base for geothermal.
Jason Jacobs: And how did Fervo Energy come about?
Tim Latimer: How far back do you want me to go? It's been quite a journey [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: Take it as far back as you wanna go. What's the genesis? Was there a hit your head in the shower moment or... I guess, before we even talk about Fervo Energy, how much was climate a factor in what you're building today and where did your interest in climate come from?
Tim Latimer: So I actually started my career in a bit of a different place. I'm from Texas, went to college at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and my first job right out of school was actually in the oil and gas industry. So I worked for a company called BHP Billiton in Houston as a drilling engineer. And I joined that company in 2012 and it was an interesting time for the industry 'cause there, a few new technologies like horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, had really kind of upended what the oil and gas industry in the U.S. looked like. And that was kind of right at the beginning of what turned out to be quite a transformational decade in terms of oil and gas development so-
Jason Jacobs: Was climate on your mind before you made the decision to go into oil and gas?
Tim Latimer: It actually was. I would say one thing that had a profound impact on me growing up was... my hometown is Riesel, Texas, small town in central Texas. It's got about 900 people-
Jason Jacobs: Near Waco. I know that from listening to another interview that you gave.
Tim Latimer: ... That's right. Near Waco. And what's interesting is around the time that I was in junior high, a company came in and proposed building this very large coal power plant. It had like a one gigawatt scale, coal power plant, it's about three miles from my childhood home. And the permit process and the public review process and that took really most of my junior high and high school period. So this idea of energy and the environment was never really something that was far from me since it's something that actually impacted my community in a big way.
And I can tell you the interesting part about that is that through this discussion among my community, people kept highlighting the jobs and the economic impact and everything as the pro, but then the cons, of course, of this coal plant that had all kinds of local contaminants and pollution and ground water impacts, and it was a clear trade off. And so, that project after a multi-year review period, actually got built and it turns out those positive things did come true in an interesting way.
I mean, my high school at Riesel, they were able to build a brand new high school from that, fix the city budget, brought in a huge amount of jobs, but it's also had a huge impact, negatively, on the environment in the community. And so, that's a trade off I got to see very early on and it kinda has a profound view on how I see things. And one of the things that I came out of that, was that, if you're just trading off between existing solutions, a lot of times you have to make less than ideal decisions.
And even knowing what I know now, I don't know if I would go back and tell the community not to do that project because it was so vital for people all across the community in terms of the economic development, but it just is a really imperfect solution. I mean, we all know that, the major drawbacks of coal. And so that kind of trade off in technology was something that was in my mind even as I was picking my major and why I started studying engineering and also, one of the things that I think was interesting about my first job is at that time a lot of the new drillings focused around natural gas.
And if you take yourself back in time a decade ago where there was a lot of marketing around natural gas being a bridge fuel and it being better than coal for a lot of ways, and promoting American energy security and, in knowing what I knew then, I really kind of pawned into that narrative and I really liked the idea that I was working on something that was gonna lower the cost of energy, create jobs, and be better than coal. That was quite exciting to me and really kind of informed some of my decision to go into that.
Now, that hit the real world pretty quick and one of my other lessons, not just about how technology impacts things, but also about how markets and policy impacts things, what you saw, right after I joined the industry, is the price of oil stayed high and the price of natural gas tanked. And I joined this company because they put out a lot of promotional material about natural gas and I, and at the time bought into that narrative around it being a bridge fuel and what I saw is, as soon as that economic barrier shifted, we took all of our rigs that were drilling for gas and set 'em to drill for oil.
And that was kind of an interesting lesson for me about how, you know, it's not just about new technology, it's also about the markets and policy around this and, if you actually want to make a difference in terms of change, you may even have to do it at a bigger level because these companies are just gonna respond to economic incentives and we went from gas to oil just 'cause that was the market signal and a company that had put out a ton of promotional material about natural gas being the future, walked back on that immediately because the economics shifted and that was kind of an interesting lesson for me early in my career too about how quickly things can change and how it's not just about tech but also about the market forces and the policy.
Jason Jacobs: So I feel like we've never put in fancy graphics or animations or transition breaks or things like that, but if we did, this would be the time where there's like some fancy animation that pops up that says, "Chapter One summary, unbridled free markets may not be the answer."
Tim Latimer: Yeah, I think that would be perhaps a fair transition point. And so, that was a thought very much nagging on my mind as I entered my first couple years of my career. And also, just on the side, like I just kept reading more and more about climate change and just realizing how it's gonna touch every single impact of our lives. And just to give one example, you know, I was living in Houston when the first set of floods came. They called it The Tax Day Flood and the one everybody knows is Hurricane Harvey, but these are just year after year of one in 500, these extreme weather events that were just happening regularly.
It's a regular part of life in Houston now and it was a good lesson to me that climate change is real and it's happening and it's not a tomorrow problem it's a today problem. So all these thoughts were really naggin' on me when I got assigned to a really interesting project at work, which was, actually at the time I was drilling in South Texas in the Eagle Fjord and the Eagle Fjord actually has really high well temperatures compared to a lot of other oil and gas fields.
And so we were having some engineering challenges dealing with this high temperature and so one of my jobs as an early career engineer was, "Hey, Tim, go look into this." And so I was the standard thing, calling experts, reading technical papers, trying to figure out how to deal with these high temperatures and I stumbled into this thing called geothermal energy. And this was probably about 2013. And I, at this time, point in time, never heard of geothermal before, had no idea what it was, but I just kept reading and reading and pulling that thread and became fascinated by it.
And I really liked the fact that it was a clean energy resource, and I really liked the fact that it applied a lot of the technology that I'd learned already. Drilling is something I spent, at that time, several years getting good at and I wanted to do something different with my career but I didn't want to leave all this hard work that I'd put together behind. So I read more about geothermal and, in particular, came across this one report that had been put out my MIT called The Future of Geothermal Energy that was published over a decade ago now.
And it talked about how there's big technical challenges to geothermal but if we could solve them in terms of getting really high flow rates out of wells and being more repeatable in our development you can actually expand this resource to be something that isn't just a small resource, the way we think of it today, being in Northern California or Kenya or Iceland but it could actually be tens of gigawatts or hundreds of gigawatts, 20% or more of U.S. electricity supply. And I just got so captivated by this idea that I wanted to do something about it.
And so I spent the next couple years learning everything that I could about geothermal energy and got to a point where I saw that the technology gap between the oil and gas industry, which had just perfected horizontal drilling, just made it a broad scale thing, and geothermal was fairly huge and it could actually be a huge benefit actually closing that technology gap. But as a young engineer I didn't quite know what to do about that. So I ended up leaving my job at BHP in around 2015 and decided to go to grad school to just explore this idea further, figure out how I could make an impact from this idea-
Jason Jacobs: It's like if you already knew that geothermal was where you wanted to be, then why was grad school the right vehicle for you to pursue that?
Tim Latimer: The first thing I ever do whenever I come across a new thing is I just look up who the right experts in the world are and I call 'em [laughs]. And I always found that... I think that one of the reasons I admire your podcast is you'd be amazed at how many times people pick up the phone and answer your questions. And one of the things that is impactful for me is really early in that career I looked out and saw that SMU had a geothermal program and I called the woman who's the Director of the Geothermal Program and I said, "Hey, here's what I'm thinkin' about doing, what should I do?"
She said, and at that time I was thinkin' should I go get a PhD and prove that this works? Or should I go join a company that's workin' on it? And she told me, "There's actually a ton of really good ideas kind of at the lab scale, conceptual scale in geothermal, but the real big barriers are actually getting projects financed and done." And so geothermal projects are so expensive to develop that you need really tens of millions of dollars even to test one new idea.
And she was like, "Tim, we don't actually need more new ideas in this industry, we need to test them. And so, if you want to solve the bottleneck for geothermal, figure out how to line up the tens of millions of dollars in finance we need to go test out some new ideas." And, that was kind of profound for me in terms of kinda my lesson in how you enact change and how you drive innovation. Realizing that we didn't actually need one more person to come up with a different way to drill geothermal wells on paper.
There's really brilliant people who've already done a lot of that work, but what we need to do is actually go out and collect the field results to show that that works. So I just thought there's a lot that I needed to learn in terms of financing, company building, policy, innovation, that I needed a little bit more foundation in before I could jump off and do it myself.
Jason Jacobs: So you're at school and you're drinking from a fire hose and-
Tim Latimer: [Laughs].
Jason Jacobs: ... at what point in that journey did the concept for Fervo Energy emerge and what brought it about?
Tim Latimer: I kinda entered business school with the idea of, look, there's great tech in oil and gas, hasn't made it's way to geothermal, how do I close that gap? And I didn't necessarily start with the idea of starting the company I still explored a lot of different options and I also spent a lot of time making sure that it even made sense to do. Energy is a field that changes really rapidly and with the declining cost of wind and solar and natural gas and batteries, it took me a while to convince myself that there was still a role for this.
So I spent a lot of time just kind of exploring around, but by the time I entered my second year, I'd realized that there's this piece of decarbonization getting what's... deep decarbonization, the last 20% out of the electricity sector even with the falling costs of other sources of clean energy, it was still gonna be really, really hard to get that last 20%. And so there was actually a huge opportunity for yet one more resource to come in and help be the compliment to our wind and our solar and our batteries and that, if you could do that, it actually enables these deep levels of decarbonization that we need.
So I got convinced that the idea was right and there was actually a moment that I had, I actually specifically remember when I stopped looking at other job options and turned down other offers and decided to go all in on Fervo Energy. It was in the middle of my second year and, and I went to a lecture by, a lecturer there named Dave Danielson, who's now an investor and a close friend who had just left his role as Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency in Renewable Energy. And he gave a talk that had a really profound impact on me that he calls, The Fierce Urgency of Now.
And he mapped out that we need to get absolutely gigatons of carbon out of the economy between now and 2050, if we wanna have any chance of addressing climate change. And, to do that, we have a lotta solutions that we need to scale really really rapidly and we have a lot of solutions that we actually need to develop and get out of the lab and get into the real world. And then he walks through some timelines of really successful companies that he would consider in this decarbonization space and Tesla's obviously one to think about.
And showing that, by the time you actually scale to where you're having an impact, that could be like a, a half a gigaton a year, ah, carbon emissions, that's a huge global business, huge global industry and it takes a while to get there. It takes probably 10 to 15 years or more from the time you launch your first product 'til you can grow there. And then to launch your first product, it takes five to 10 years of R & D work and prototyping to actually get to where you have your first product out there. And then to even understand what's R & D and prototype with a new innovation, it's five to 10 years of conceptual work to get there.
And so you're talking about a 20, 30 time frame to actually have something that's scalable enough to make an impact. And so, and then he puts up a chart that shows 2050 and maps it back to today and essentially the take away message is, if you wanna make an impact on climate emissions from a new technology by 2050, now is about the time to start and if you wait at all, it's too late. Now, I was very inspired by that and I actually, like I said, walked out and turned down some other job offers I had and said, "All right. We're going all in on Fervo. We've learned enough now that we know it's viable and we actually don't have the luxury of delay."
And so, that had a big impact on me. And my other time in Stanford I met some really important people. People who are now advisors to the company and people who had done a lot of really good work on geothermal. You know, the person I'd flag, of course, is my co-founder, Dr. Jack Norbeck, who did his PhD in Stanford's Geothermal Research Program on new ways of drilling and developing these things that actually proved a central part of Fervo's thesis that horizontal drilling would have a huge impact on the efficacy of geothermal in a really substantive way, back, backed up by quantitative modeling, backed up by field results.
And so my intuition that I'd had out on a drilling rig three or four years before that had been married up with Jack in a strong really conceptual foundation to say, hey, this is actually something really worth pursuing that actually could leverage geothermal at the right economics. And so by the time I graduated a couple years later, we were both all in and really ready to take Fervo wherever it led us.
Jason Jacobs: And what year was that?
Tim Latimer: The end of 2017. So I graduated in December 2017 and we kinda consider that to be, the beginning of 2018, to be the real foundation of Fervo Energy so, a little over two years ago.
Jason Jacobs: And what was the initial hypothesis in terms of what was different about Fervo... What was the innovation would enable this cost reduction?
Tim Latimer: So maybe it's worthwhile to back up a little bit and think about how geothermal systems work. This is something I've learned I need to do in a lot of places 'cause one of the big challenges to geothermal is actually that just a lot of people don't know about it. And even people who do know about it think that it's some far off thing that can happen in Iceland and no where else, but in reality it's all over the U.S., it's in 25 different countries, it's a fairly sizable resource already, it could just be a lot bigger, but a lot of people don't know. So maybe I'll spend a little bit of time talking about what geothermal is.
So, you know, think about geothermal, it's a clean energy resource where you drill different wells into the ground, deep into areas that are hot geologically because there is volcanic activity or because there's maybe faults or some other reason that brings the heat close to the surface and, of course, you can think of Iceland or Kenya and, or Yellowstone and geysers. I mean, those are areas where there's a lot of geothermal activity right underneath the surface. So in certain areas you can actually drill into those and produce that steam directly, capture it at the surface and use it to power turbines.
And so you're powering these energy generation facilities and because you're using the natural heat of the earth to do it, there's no emissions associated with it. But the problem is drilling is complicated, it's complex, it's expensive, and it can also be uncertain. And if you look across the board at geothermal facilities about one out of three wells that are drilled for geothermals turn out to be what we call dry holes. They're just not economic at all, you may spend five million dollars drilling it but at the end of the day you get nothing out of that resource.
And so, if you think about electricity, electricity is a highly competitive industry. And eating the cost of a bunch of five million dollar projects to go nowhere is not really a recipe for success. So if you wanna be successful in geothermal, you really need to figure out how to eliminate that tendency for there to be dry holes and big economic losses that end up being a major barrier on the costs. And so, what we looked at is traditionally wells are drilled vertically or close to vertically and that gives you, the span would be 8" wide, eh, with the well, something on that order, that actually makes it very uncertain if you're actually gonna hit anything in the, in the ground, in the subsurface, it's actually productive, and that actually lets you have a successful well.
And the biggest issue is flow rates, you don't actually hit anywhere that can support the flow rates you need to have on economic projects. So that's kinda the state of the art and what we're working on at Fervo, and what we've developed, is really two things. The first is the capacity and capability to drill horizontally at that. So rather than drill 8,000' down and you miss something and that's the end of it, we would drill 8,000' down and then turn horizontally and drill perhaps thousands of feet in a horizontal direction at depth and actually, you remove a ton of the uncertainty there because you're not just relying on this small 8" hole to hit something, you've got actually thousands of feet of well can access a huge amount of the subsurface and, and geology.
And so that's one thing we're working on. The second thing, it's not enough to just access that, you've actually gotta be able to efficiently distribute the flow throughout that horizontal section so that it's even and you're actually sweeping the heat effectively across all of it. So the second thing that we've developed to work on is ways to effectively distribute the flow throughout that whole horizontal section so that every part of the well is useful. And when you look at it, the combination of drilling horizontally and distributing that heat effectively, changes your development risk tremendously and makes these wells far, far more repeatably and as a result, you eliminate or reduce your number of dry holes and that translates into much more successful projects and much lower costs.
And so those are the two key innovations that we're working on and what we've been able to show is that it leads to far higher flow rates and far more economic projects and a much wider range of geographies and geologies than what has been done traditionally in geothermal drilling.
Jason Jacobs: And who is it historically that brings these geothermal projects to bear and then, is it a subcontractor to them or vendor that does the drilling? Or is it the project owner themselves?
Tim Latimer: There's a number of project owners all over the world that have been really successful. I mean, the, probably the biggest independent one in the U.S. is called Ormat, which is a very well run company. They're based in Nevada and they develop a huge geothermal pipeline here in the U.S. and around the world. And there's also several other players, [Calfide 00:23:01] and Berkshire Hathaway, both active in California who've got a lot of geothermal in their portfolio.
And when you look around the world, it's companies like KenGen, who develops geothermal in Kenya where it's now about 50% of the electricity supply in Kenya, is geothermal. And then Iceland has their own companies that do it so there's a lot of development that goes on already. And what you find is these projects are really big and complex so you end up partnering, even the product developer, owner, will partner with many different companies along the way. Both to build a power plant and to drill the wells.
And so, if you look just at the drilling component of what the geothermal industry does, it's often times a lot of the same companies as oil and gas companies use. So rig contractors, pump suppliers, casing and cement suppliers, a lot of the same supply chain that works for oil and gas, works for geothermal as well. And so there's a lot of overlap there between the two industries.
Jason Jacobs: So who buys your product and what is your product replacing?
Tim Latimer: What we developed is clean electricity. So Fervo is a geothermal energy developer so we're in the business of identifying resources, developing them, and then selling electricity. And so we essentially can sell to anybody who has a need to supplement their portfolio with a 24/7 clean energy resource.
Jason Jacobs: So do you compete with the developers?
Tim Latimer: I mean, we are developers.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. So these other ones that you mentioned, you might bid with them on a project and you are a lower cost option because of your proprietary drilling and then, what was the other word about the flow?
Tim Latimer: The flow? Distribution, just even distribution.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. So because of your proprietary drilling and distribution, you can come in lower cost and quality that is good enough.
Tim Latimer: And that's a big key with it. And so, yes, of course there's an element of competing with other geothermal developers. But really, if you look at the status of the geothermal sector, it's not so much that you lose out on, that there's a lot of competition between geothermal developers, it's more that it's competition against other electricity resources that are trying to supply the utilities and the CCAs and the corporations that are buying electricity.
So we think of our competition more as coal and natural gas power generation, nuclear generation, solar plus storage, wind, and what we want to show is across the portfolio that we have a cost and a load profile being a 24/7 resource and an emission profile being a carbon-free resource that provides a lot of value to the end customer to put into their portfolio for electricity purchases.
Jason Jacobs: And forgive the newbie question here, but if mission is what you're driving for, could one take your propriety drilling and distribution and license it to all the geothermal developers?
Tim Latimer: I think you can but it's interesting, licensing technology in the states is tricky because innovating in an area like geothermal is, at the end of the day, kind of a big systems problem. So it's not about having one widget that works and magically makes the whole system work. It's about understanding what technologies apply where, what geologies they apply to, what needs to be packaged together in a certain way to actually deliver an economic project.
It can actually be a challenging thing to license technology because there's so many different components to it, but we're clearly driven by mission so I think the, the fastest way to have an impact is to show people that this works and this works at scale. And what we've always said is, "Our mission at Fervo is to leverage innovation and geo-science to accelerate the clean energy transition." And so, speed is in a lotta ways what we try to solve for because the same reasons I talked about before about the Fierce Urgency of Now.
And so we have a firm belief that if we can prove this works, we're gonna do very well for ourselves and our investors but also be the first mover in an industry where we hopefully get people that wanna work with us or wanna compete directly for us here in the U.S. and all over the world and build a really healthy and valuable ecosystem around geothermal energy that can scale really, really quickly.
Jason Jacobs: Is the model then to f- essentially finance the drilling almost as speculation and then, of course you can increase the probability with these more innovative techniques of drilling and distribution, but then it's really about striking gold, if you will, and tapping into geothermal that is above the bar and then being able to sell that to customers that need energy. So is that, what it is, it's like up front financing and then it's a bit of a gamble, but the higher the batting average and the bigger the windfall of these projects, it's like a big potful of cash as a one time return?
Tim Latimer: I mean, it could be, yeah, I mean, you look at development projects, they traditionally have really strong pay outs for an extended period of time. There's also opportunities to refinance or resell. I mean, you look in the development world, there's all kinds of different models that people take. You can build, own, operate projects. You can build and flip projects, I mean, there's all kinds of ways to do it there. I think where we want to show the value is, is that we can make these resources that people currently have written off as uneconomic, economic.
And as a result, geothermal is no longer a small part of the energy mix like it is today. In the U.S. it's only about one half of one percent of electricity supply, but it's a much bigger part. You know, the number I talked about earlier from the MIT report of the geo vision study is around that 20% lever. And so you take something that's a really small industry and increase its size by an order of 25 to 50 times bigger than it is today and there's a lot of meaningful return to be made out across the board from different ways that people can do that.
Jason Jacobs: Only because I had Kurt House on as a prior guest, is this what KoBold Metals is for cobalt, Fervo Energy is for geothermal. Does that analogy work?
Tim Latimer: I think that's fair. I think there're some differences obviously in the resource we're going after and business model and some other things. I can tell you during my time at graduate school at Stanford I took a couple classes from Kurt and he's an incredibly sharp person and we shared some similar investors and as I was going through the thought process of how to set up Fervo Energy in a way that's gonna be financially sustainable and maximize impact, Kurt was certainly a big influence on me as we were kinda iterating through business models. So I think it's, I'm a bit flattered to be compared to Kurt in this context and I think it's accurate to say that a lot of our business model shares overlap with the efforts that cobalt is doing.
Jason Jacobs: And where are you guys in terms of progress, traction, what's the stage of the business, and how many of these projects have been brought to bear?
Tim Latimer: So the company, I guess, from 2018, when we founded it, to today has gone through a few important milestones. We've been successful in raising financing from both, some really important grant sources starting with the Tomcat Program, Stanford, and then going on to the Geothermal Technology Office financing some of our technology as well as our P. And also, importantly we became part of the Cyclotron Road Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
I know you had Elan on the show before and we've benefited tremendously from being in that program. And then on the private sector side, we've been financed through a couple rounds of venture financing led by different VCs in this case, so Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 3x5 Partners, Baruch Future Ventures, Congruent Ventures, and a couple other, couple rounds of financing, and the goal for us at this point in the company is to establish a track record of field results that show that this is a viable way of generating electricity and doing it in resources that were previously inaccessible.
So the next 12 to 18 months for us is getting our first couple of projects up and running and producing in a meaningful way so we have that data point. We've got several ongoing projects that we are working on in geothermal systems throughout the Western U.S. and they're in varying phases of development, but we're anticipating completing our first full scale commercial facility by the end of 2021.
Jason Jacobs: Do you own the land?
Tim Latimer: We do not own the land. It's also not really how geothermal facilities are developed. You don't really need to be the owner of the land to develop geothermal resources.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And so, I guess, do you need to get permission from the land owner and is there anything in it for them?
Tim Latimer: Yeah, you do need to get permission from the landowner. You can think about this a lot like mining or the way that oil and gas works. Geothermal resources are actually, their own resource class that you can go and, if you're a land owner you can license or sell it to somebody else. And if you're a developer, you can go and lease the rights to develop for a specific resource and come up with a contract payment to share some of the revenue or the use with this specific land owner.
And it's much the same way that a solar or wind deal would make a deal with the land owners, kinda structured in a very similar fashion. One thing that I think is a bit unique to geothermal is because most of geothermal is developed in the Western United States. When you look at who the biggest land owner is in the Western United States, it's actually the U.S. Government. And, in fact, you could go to a big geothermal state like Nevada, 88% of the land in the state of Nevada is owned by the U.S. Government. And so, the land owner that you're dealing with by and large in most cases with geothermal is actually the U.S. Government.
Jason Jacobs: But assuming you make a project viable where it was otherwise deemed unviable, does the value of that land go up a lot?
Tim Latimer: Yes, I think it would. I wouldn't say the value of the land, but I'd say the value of the geothermal development rights go up a lot.
Jason Jacobs: So you could own those rights, right? As an expansion path?
Tim Latimer: Yes, that's one business model that you can pursue in the geothermal space, yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Great, and what's the state of geothermal today and what does end state look like? How big a role do you think it could play in the clean energy transition? Where are we and where should we aspire to get to?
Tim Latimer: Geothermal is a sizable and growing industry. I mentioned before there's operating geothermal plants in over 25 countries, it's a really meaningful part of the electricity supply in a lot of markets. Kenya has 50%, Iceland, it's about a third of their electricity, and California, it's six percent of their generation. And so, and these places that have been geologically set up well for geothermal development, it's been around for a while, but if you look at the global scale, it's still a relatively small part of the picture.
And in the U.S. it's one half of one percent, but we've only barely scratched the surface of a potential resource that's out there and the Department of Energy, last year, finished a, a multi-year study that asked this very question of, what's a reasonable technology pathway for geothermal and how much could we get? And the answer they came up with was that a reasonable technology pathway for geothermal can get us to 120 gigawatts of geothermal electricity by mid-century.
And, you know, a lot in the beginning, but then a, an exponential growth up from there. And so, you look at the low profile of geothermal and what does 120 gigawatts turn into? Well, first off it's a investment opportunity worth hundreds of billions and so it's a very sizable industry at that level, but then importantly for a decarbonization standpoint, if you were to hit that 120 number, you're talkin' about, about 16% of projected U.S. electricity and that's both really meaningful and I think also important.
And, especially in the role that's electricity decarbonization, we talk a lot about how getting that last bit out of the electric sector's gonna be the hardest because it's challenging to get there with enough wind, solar, and battery. So I think that I agree with most people where we say, just with the resources we have today, 60 or 80 percent decarbonization is well within our sights and we need to be aggressively pursuing it. But I also think it's important that we're looking at solutions that can keep us continuing that vast project through the mid-century because it's really important that we don't just get a little bit decarbonized, but fully decarbonized.
And so 16% ends up being an important number because it can be actually quite meaningful in terms of getting the most challenging part of the electricity sector decarbonized, which is your night time electricity, your winter time electricity, things when there's other weather events, and other stuff. So having geothermal there, to compliment there, with this role and that 15 to 20 percent level actually could be very meaningful in our ability to fully decarbonate [inaudible 00:35:07] micro system.
And those numbers are for the U.S., but you can imagine that it would have a similar impact around the world. So even today there's about five times more geothermal developed outside the U.S. then there is inside the U.S., so I think that if we kinda hit these technology pathways in the U.S. you'd see a similar thing around the world where the global impact would be tremendously more than just the impact here in the U.S. alone.
Jason Jacobs: And where is geothermal competitive today and in order for it to fulfill that 120 gigawatt potential that you spoke of, what are the things that need to happen in order for it to get there? The key things.
Tim Latimer: We're actually at a really exciting time for geothermal in the United States. Most of the last few years have had a bit of a geothermal drought in terms of development, new sales, but something changed, well, not something changed, several factors led to a really big shift starting this year. So even though there have been almost no geothermal contracts signed in the last several years in the United States, just since the start of 2020, we've now had seven new long term power purchase agreements for geothermal signed in the U.S. and these are all really sizable projects. And so the industry is starting to come back in a really big way, it's quite exciting and there's a lot of things that are driving that.
And a big part of it is, the SP 100 regulation that came in, in California recently. And a lot of people, of course, focused on the difference of reaching a fully decarbonized electricity sector by 2045, but another important change it made was it upped the renewable target for 2030 from 50% to 60%. And to put that in perspective, in California, we're at about 33% right now, so it's close to doubling the amount of renewable energy we need on the grid and what you're seeing is that as we get more and more solar, the day time hours of electricity in California become really, really clean.
But we've barely moved the needle at all on night time electricity. It's still just as dirty today as it was at the beginning of the decade because we just haven't had the right solutions there. So more and more, the people who are responsible for pursing out, whether it's the utilities or the community choice advocate or others, are really looking at geothermals as a viable solution and has really led to this up ticking in contract.
So I think a big part of it is just the market timing for this is right. And what you see is, these geothermal contracts can be signed anywhere from $65 to $75 a megawatt hour, which is quite expensive if you're comparing it to a new built solar project. But the value of being able to have it produce 24/7 with capacity value and at night, whenever it's needed, less customers be willing to pay a premium for that.
And so you find a few customers today that are willing to pay for that kind of electricity in the $65 to $75 range, I think what we see is if we can have the right technology to move that even a little bit cheaper, you would see a huge uptick in purchasing and it would make a really big difference in our ability to meet these near term targets. And so the cost for geothermal doesn't need to come down by much and it's a very different target than it would have been five years ago just because we've got so many places like California and Nevada and New Mexico that are implementing these really ambitious, you know, electricity standards.
Jason Jacobs: So with the standards that have these mandates of certain allocations by certain time frames that are driving people to find other alternatives than dirty for the times that solar and wind can't deliver, geothermal's an option. When geothermal loses, what is it losing to today?
Tim Latimer: I mean, one of the things that, if you look, at least for California, night time electricity is met in a lotta ways with natural gas and imported energy. And so that's a big competition and natural gas is of course so cheap that it's difficult to move out without the right policy support. And so that's kinda the state of the game and for a lot of the electricity today, is, it's still fossil fuel.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And so, other than the RPS, what else needs to happen in order to nudge things in the favor of clean versus natural gas when the prices are so cheap?
Tim Latimer: There's a lot of things. I think one thing that probably has made the biggest difference at the federal level in the last several years, is that geothermal no longer gets the same tax credit treatment that wind and solar get. And so, historically, it's kinda treat equivalently to solar and that was really a big boost for development, but one of the tax extender bills a couple years ago, geothermal was just left out entirely, so rather than getting a 30% tax credit like solar has been able to take advantage of for several years, geothermal's only gotten a 10% tax credit for the last several years.
And you think about how competitive electricity projects are, that makes a really big difference. And especially if you think about... I already talked to you about how actually moving the price just $5 or $10 a megawatt hour lower could make a huge difference for the market. Restoring the tax credits to where they're just at equal levels to other clean energy resources would solve a lot of that barrier for you. So that's a big thing that needs to happen.
So that's really important on the policy side, and then on the technology side, I think it's incumbent on Fervo and the other developers to show that we have gotten better about drilling technology and exploration and other things. That these projects have a much better cost profile and development profile than they did a decade ago when the last time people took a serious look at geothermal. And I think there's a lot of exciting things underway there.
And then the last piece of it I think that's important is something I mentioned before already that, it's interesting from a permitting standpoint because most of the geothermal is located on federal lands, what you see is a lot of developers of other energy resources like wind and solar just try to avoid government lands because it can be a really big challenge from a permitting standpoint, but geothermal needs to go where the resources are and a lot of times those are on federal lands.
And so we do deal with some extended permitting timelines and there's certain things that could be changed that would lead to a lot more geothermal development. And NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories modified one of them and made some recommendations on a couple changes to make permitting more simplified and they've shown that just that change alone could double the amount of geothermal we generate in the U.S. in a pretty short timeframe.
And so it's important to be focusing on issues like that and what you find is, even though you're drilling wells for geothermal, it's a very similar process to oil and gas. Oil and gas actually has access to a lot more categorical exclusions and streamlined permitting than the geothermal industry does. So if I'm gonna go out and drill a gas well, in a lotta ways from a permitting standpoint, it's way simpler than drilling a geothermal well. And that's a huge drag to developer opportunity.
Jason Jacobs: Where does storage and long duration storage fit into all this?
Tim Latimer: Yeah, so, I think storage and long duration storages, I think... Long duration storage in particular, is the other technology that I think is quite exciting in terms of getting to a fully decarbonized system from the electricity sector. And I think that when we think about our competitors, we don't necessarily think about short duration storage like lithium ion storage because even with some battery back up, you're still talkin' about low profile. It's very, very different from a 24/7 resource.
So we do think a lot more in terms of a competitive landscape about long duration storage. And so what happens not to projects with four hours of back up, but what happens to projects with 10 hours or 24 hours of, of energy storage back up? Under these different technology scenarios is I think the right thing to think about in terms of what should be cost competitive with geothermal?
And it's one of those that I think, me as a geothermal developer, I keep my eye on it and it's interesting and part of our competitive landscape, but me as a human who's passionate about climate change, I'm really excited about a lot of long duration storage companies that are coming out as proof storage associated with like Cyclotron Road or Breakthrough Energy Ventures and it's one of those, we all kind of laugh about this like, man, we hope your successful and I hope I'm successful and maybe we'll all be successful or not, but at least as long as one of us then we'll be able to achieve deep decarbonization [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: And what are the oil and gas majors and what do the utilities think of Fervo Energy and what's your relationship with them, if any?
Tim Latimer: Yeah, so, you're finding that oil companies, I would say traditionally have had an on again, off again, relationship with geothermal. In the 1970s when it first became a thing in the U.S. a lot of it was led by oil companies then, they've all flooded out and come back in, and then, but now... And so it's like a lot of my experience in oil and gas, boom and bust. And I'd say their interest in geothermal is also boom and bust, they're probably a good way to, way to phrase it.
So you've seen, I think, relatively low interest in geo thermal from them in the last few years, but what's fascinating is in the last year or two that's changed dramatically and to the point that, when we've gone out and talked to the innovation groups, the venture groups, some of these oil majors in the last couple years, you know, when we were first for fund raising a couple years ago, a lot of 'em just told us straight up that geothermal's not on their road map and so they don't want to waste anybody's time talking to us.
And, and that was fine, because we had plenty of signings and offers from recent people that had a different view of how the energy sector was gonna play out compared to the oil and gas majors. But what's interesting, and I think it's a combination of challenges in the oil environment plus stepping up of investor pressure and other things, is it's come 180 degrees in the last two years. And now these oil companies are actively seeking after us and want to know what we're working on and have added geothermal as a major focus because I think they've gotten interested in decarbonization in, in a way that they hadn't been previously, and the light bulb for geothermal has gone off in many ways.
So it's quite fascinating to see the complete shift where it was tough for us to get the time of day from these companies two or three years ago 'cause we weren't on their energy strategic road map and now we're highly sought after and it's something they're going after pretty aggressively. It's been quite an interesting thing to watch.
Jason Jacobs: If I were an investor, what are the biggest risks that Fervo Energy faces that would inhibit its ability to be successful.
Tim Latimer: The first thing that you've gotta flag is how challenging work in the field and work in the subsurface is. And I think we've done a lotta good work to put ourselves in a position to succeed computational, simulation, and modeling, questioning field results, building a best in class engineering team. It's got the sharpest people in terms of subsurface development from around the world to help us put in, us in a position of success in these projects. But, you look, mining companies, geothermal companies, all kinds of companies have had a great plan until they got punched in the face like [laughs] the saying goes.
And so I think that we won't be able to tell you that Fervo's considerably a success for several more years because we've gotta go out and get good field results, then we've gotta do it again, we've got to do it again, and we gotta show that it's repeatable. And that's the real work [inaudible 00:45:29]. And so that, that's a big piece of it, and that's one area. I think the second area is just that the development environment in may ways is challenging and I've highlighted some of them already, longer timelines than other energy resources have, we can't get permits as quickly as wind and solar or oil projects. That's a big area.
The tax treatment is a big area. Even if the technology works, if you're forever fighting a 20% cost up hill battle against your main competitors before the project even starts, that's gonna be challenging. And so I think that unless we get the right policy and supportive financing environment, then there's limits to even what good technology can do. I mean, these things really have to work together.
So those are the things that I think about. If we're gonna be successful as a company, we have gotta absolutely nail the technology and team we put together has to stay on it and continue to work hard to develop these resources and we've also gotta have jurisdictions and a policy environment and a financial environment where people are actually passionate about solving climate change. And I think that's a really important critical factor for this, for our success.
Jason Jacobs: And what's the success case? What does success look like? And then how does Fervo Energy in that success case generate liquidity for the investors and venture scale returns?
Tim Latimer: Success looks like we have been the first mover in a very large geothermal industry. I mean, so what we talk about all the time, right, the numbers that are in those reports, 100 plus gigawatts. And that's a 300 billion dollar opportunity and Fervo wants to be the first and the fastest to get there. So that we're a sizable part of that market. And that's very important to us. And the way, I think, that we get a return for our investors, which is clearly very important.
If you wanna actually scale solutions you gotta show that they provide attractive returns is, is showing that this technology works and showing that it works enough resources that you can actually scale those very quickly. And that that's not just a far off thing, but you've actually got a multi [inaudible 00:47:21] pipeline prospects that you could work on today that will appreciate tremendously in value as you show that the technology works.
Ah, that developing these prospects is actually highly realistic. And so I think that building that portfolio, making sure that it's something that your customers want, and that we've got the right supportive policy environment to do it, and then showing that the technology works across a really really diverse and broad set of locations, is gonna be what creates all the value.
Jason Jacobs: A couple final questions that are more general in nature, one is just, if you had 100 billion dollars, you could put it towards anything to accelerate the clean energy transition, where would you put that money and how would you allocate it?
Tim Latimer: From my own experience, there's a lot of really exciting hard tech solutions that I think have been proven to work and need to scale up a lot. So I'd already mentioned Cyclotron Road and Activate, we're a big beneficiary from tremendous network there, tremendous mentorship for early stage companies that are passionate about sustainability. And there's also organizations like RPE that I think have been proven to work and just are chronically underfunded relevant to the size of the problem.
So creating 10 more Cyclotron Road or Activates, or 20 more, or f- or 100 more, and, you know, 10x the budget of RPE and doing all those kinds of things is, would be kinda first on my list. And I think those are really high leverage points but just to kind of put it in perspective, I mean, you could do all that then, create orders of magnitude more Cyclotron Roads, 10x the budget of RPE, do all this stuff and out of that 100 billion dollars, still have 90% of it leftover.
I mean, that's the exciting thing about attacking problems at the early stage, is that your dollars go really, really far. And so now, I guess, what am I gonna do with the other 90 billion dollars? And I think that what I'm a big believer in, in terms of technology, is very much the virtuous cycle between technology, finance, and policy. They all three have to work together and all feed on each other.
And so if I have that remaining 90 billion dollars, I would think a lot about, what are the areas of highest leverage that touch all three of those things? The technology and the policy and finance, and looking at my role at geothermal where I've seen dollars make a really big impact... I'll talk about one specific program that I think it tremendous. It's called the Geothermal Risk Mitigation Facility for East Africa, and it's set up by KFW and a couple other development banks.
And what they do is that, if you wanna develop a geothermal prospect in Kenya or Ethiopia or Rwanda or Uganda, you come to them with the project and they'll provide matching funds for you to do the really risky up front steps of that. And they can be relatively small amounts of funding. A few hundred thousand dollars to do a magnetic survey, a couple million dollars to drill a first confirmation well.
And what they've shown is those early stage dollars have catalyzed then finding resources that can be developed in a really huge way so that the investment that comes after that from private sector or from lending institutions can be measured in your hundreds of dollars or billions of dollars all for a small up front investment in a team that was passionate about geothermal resource that needed to be proven out that they couldn't get private sector funding for.
And that just to me, says a lot about tremendous amounts of leverage. I think it's been a fantastic program and I think about that a lot in terms of scaling technology and scaling projects. So there's a lot of reasons why lending institutions won't or private finance groups won't touch projects. There's the case of Fervo that it's a new technology, there's the case of being in a developing market they don't like, there's the case of not really having the business model figured out. That, you know, a lotta storage projects face right now. Even though we know we need it, it's necessary.
And so I think something interesting would be take the 90 billion dollars and devote it specifically to attacking these rests on early project development and being kind of that back stop in much the same way that like the loan program office says, that lets these projects actually get up and going, and opens the pipeline for tens of billions of dollars private sector investing to come down. So you can take that 90 billion and focus it on these areas of new tech, new markets, new business models, first in kind demonstration projects, providing a back stop.
I think you'd create tremendous numbers of new industries and new markets and it could be interesting because you might actually make a decent return on that. You could just take it and have it draw down over time and maybe over 10 years you provide the back stop of 90 billion dollars to projects, but at the end of the day, what you're gonna catalyze is trillions of dollars of growth of projects that would've never gotten built had somebody not been willing to come in and take the riskiest part of that financing step early on. So something that touches all those areas of policy and finance and technology, and, and really lets those projects get through those early valleys of death, I think is where you'd have a huge amount of impact in getting more clean infrastructure built.
Jason Jacobs: And last question is just, what advice to you have for people like me that are newcomers that are filled with ambition and optimism and plowing through aggressively tryin' to figure out where they can make the biggest impact on this problem? What should they do? How should they think about it?
Tim Latimer: I think that the important thing to remember is that this problem is huge and there's so many ways to make an impact. And whenever I get questioned by people, hey, how do I do something? A lot of times I send them to the Project Drawdown website 'cause you can look at it and it's not just one or two things when you do, to address climate change. There's literally dozens of them and just click through and find one until it piques your interest.
And what you find is, for me, I got really passionate about geothermal and then I spent, you know, a couple years just researching it my nights and weekends and a couple years in school tryin' to tease it out and then, now I've been able to launch Fervo Energy and have a lot of f- fun and impact on doing geothermal and geothermal, it's one of the options on there. And I think that you can't get too caught up in trying to find the perfect option. I think, look at really good curated sources like Drawdown.
Say, hey, here's 100 ways I can make a difference and find one that you like and then dig into it deep enough until you're the expert in it and go from there. And, I don't know, there's just not one, there's not only one way to make a difference and one perfect way to have impact. It's, pick something outta this long, long menu of options that looks fun and just tackle it.
Jason Jacobs: Anything that I didn't ask that I should have? Or any parting words for listeners?
Tim Latimer: That's a great question. Maybe I can turn it around on you, I think it's been a year since we've met and it's interesting, I think you did kinda start in the hard tech space and then have broadened your horizons out from that. So, I mean, like what do you think the role of hard tech innovation is in addressing climate now?
Jason Jacobs: I mean, I certainly don't claim to be an expert even a year and a half in, I feel like I've just scratched the surface especially because I have been so broad in my pursuit, but it, I mean, it seems like in order to turn the tanker ship that is our big global economy, it takes everybody and everything pulling and that's from consumers to big companies to R&D to innovation to media and journalism to the government to voters to scientists in a lab to nonprofits to philanthropy and foundations and, I mean, it really, it takes a village, and I think hard tech innovation is an absolutely critical piece.
I also think, as we discussed before, there are no silver bullets. And so, it is a critical piece, but there's no one critical piece that can wear a cape and carry things on its back. It takes kinda pushing from all sides and ultimately there's a tipping point where you get the boulder goin' down the mountain and it starts to pick up momentum and the more you can kinda push it, a part of it is pushing it faster, but a part of it is like removing barriers in its way and part of it is getting more people pushing on it at once and so, i- it's like the more things you can do to help facilitate it, the faster it's gonna go but that momentum can come from anywhere so like progress that we make on the regulatory landscape is gonna help you guys, and progress that you guys make on the innovation side is gonna help with adoption.
And, I mean, I wish it were simpler, but it, it just kinda seems like don't over think it like just pick your lane and one that energizes you and that you feel equipped to tackle that's gonna point us in the right direction and just get going and the bigger percentage of people and entities and governments that we can get that feel the same and are acting on it in that way and communicating and collaborating and cross, then the more progress we'll make.
Tim Latimer: I think that's exactly right and I'm excited that's where you've landed 'cause I, that's exactly what my views are and, I guess, thinking about parting thoughts, you just nailed it there. I think if there's one message that I could ever communicate to people, it's that these aren't different levers that they may pick from, it's that they truly are collaborative tools and policy and finance and technology all work together.
They're not something that compete against each other. They're all things that need to work in concert to drive solutions. And so I think having somebody find their lane or whatever they're best at, and you move the dimension on one of those things forward and it helps with the others. And the virtuous cycle is real and true and each part of it's important to actually make this thing work.
Jason Jacobs: Well, Tim, I'm so glad we finally got the chance to have this discussion and you're definitely an inspiration for me, you're ambitious, mission driven, and a capitalist, and they're aligned in your situation where they go together and if Fervo Energy wins, then we all win. So, I wish you every success and thanks again for comin' on the show.
Tim Latimer: Appreciate it. Thanks. Same to you Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone, Jason here, thanks again for joining me on my climate journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co, note that is .co, not .com. Someday, we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter at jjacobs22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And, before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
