Tim Latimer
CEO AT FERVO ENERGY
TIM LATIMER TRACES HIS PASSION for engineering back to high school days watching the Discovery Channel show Build It Bigger: “The host would visit projects under construction, like the world’s deepest tunnel or the Singapore Sky Park,” Latimer recalled. "And I thought—what kind of job would let me do that?”
While Latimer may not be building rooftop landmarks, today he’s leading something equally transformative: the future of geothermal energy.
After earning a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Tulsa, Latimer started out as a drilling engineer at BHP Billiton, working in the Permian and Eagle Ford basins. He decided to switch streams as he became increasingly aware of climate change. In 2015, he left the oil and gas industry to pursue an MBA and an M.S. in Environment and Resources at Stanford University, where he co-founded Fervo Energy.
“Engineering is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of getting a mega-project done. Even the world’s most innovative engineering won’t make an impact on the real world if you can’t figure out how to get the financing to get it done, put a world class team in place, and manage communications and stakeholder engagement effectively.”
—Tim Latimer
When he’s not juggling major energy projects, Tim Latimer has another talent up his sleeve: “I can juggle! Both figuratively at work but also literally.”
As CEO of Fervo, Latimer is focused on scaling geothermal power to play a central role in a carbon-free energy future by applying cutting-edge technologies from the oil and gas sector to revolutionize geothermal power. The company is currently building Project Cape, a 500 MW geothermal power plant, in Beaver County, Utah.
“This is a huge scale up from our commercial pilot, but we’ve already achieved major technical breakthroughs that show this project will be transformative," Latimer said, sharing that its first production test demonstrated triple the per-well energy output of wells from its pilot, “Project Red,” while simultaneously reducing drilling costs by 70 percent.
Latimer described Project Red as the most productive enhanced geothermal system to date. Fervo reported that the 30-day well test completed in 2023 achieved a flowrate of 63 liters per second at high temperature, enabling 3.5 MW of electric production and setting new records for both flow and power output from an enhanced geothermal system. “This project proved that we could produce an entirely new form of geothermal power and has set the stage for rapid growth of a new energy system,” Latimer said.
Looking to the future, Latimer believes geothermal energy will play a critical role in decarbonization.
“Geothermal is poised to be the missing piece of the puzzle for a reliable, affordable carbon-free electric grid,” he said. “We think geothermal will one day be the largest source of electricity in the world and enable huge leaps forward in innovation while simultaneously addressing the emissions that cause climate change.”
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