How to power the world 24/7 — without oil | Cindy Taff

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Everywhere in the world, deep underneath our feet is an enormous and powerful source of heat. The potential of geothermal energy is something we hear about a lot in the conversation around sustainable energy alternatives. You've probably heard about it on this very show. In this talk, geothermal trailblazer Cindy Taff shares how she's redeploying oil and gas drilling tools to tap the energy stored in the deep, hot, dry rock that exists everywhere. And I also spent my career in the oil and gas industry. So do you hate me yet? Let's hope not. So I went into oil and gas because energy is life. And I wanted to be able to provide people with lights, air conditioning, heat, and of course, the ability to watch funny cat videos on their phone, but energy also evolves. So humans used to burn wood for heat and light. We then transitioned to whale oil and to coal and then to oil and gas. But we're now using renewables like solar and wind. And it's this exciting evolution to clean renewable energy that inspired me to leave shell and start my own geothermal company with my partners. And so we're now using that mud on your boots know how from the oil and gas industry to drill for heat instead of for hydrocarbons. So most people don't know this, but there's a lot of heat deep in the earth. And the deeper you drill, the hotter it gets. And it's this heat, this energy, it's always on, it's clean. And it actually holds 50,000 times more energy than all of the oil and gas reserves on the planet. So why am I still talking about oil and gas? It's because we're going to take the technologies that the oil and gas have developed over the last 100 years at a cost of trillions of dollars and we're going to start drilling for heat instead of hydrocarbons. So let's talk a little bit about drilling just to give you guys a basis on it. Oil used to be found in puddles on the ground. So people figured out that they could use it to run machineries, cars, airplanes, and the demand skyrocketed. The oil line on the ground ran out because people were using it. So we started to dig, so we dug deeper and deeper. And despite what you may have heard or think about, rough necks and oil field work is actually quite complex and technical. The industry was able to advance the technologies even more to unlock oil that was previously out of reach and at a cost the world could afford. And so using amazing innovation, the industry learned how to basically turn the bit sideways in the subsurface, be able to drill horizontally within the layers that actually carried the oil and gas. The industry also learned how to frack the rock to release oil that would have otherwise been stuck in there. And so I know not everybody's a fan of fracking, but it really did bring in a error of lower cost energy, and I'll tell you in a minute why fracking is important for geothermal energy. So the oil and gas industry with all of this turning and steering underground was able to drill deeper, drill hotter, and actually drill with some pinpoint precision. So for example, imagine hitting a target the size of a pizza at the depth of five miles under the ground into the earth and being able to do this over and over again. The technology is pretty amazing. And so we are now going to use that technology for geothermal, but we're not going to have to learn over those hundred years so we can apply it straight away. So you guys may ask, why do we even need geothermal? Because let's admit, wind and solar have done a great job greening the grid. Well, geothermal can do what wind and solar can't. And that is provide power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of what the weather is. You can also use geothermal as a giant battery to store extra energy from wind and solar and to make those intermittent power resources base low because we can then use that extra energy during the day when the sun is not shining, the wind is not blowing. And so where is the real prize for geothermal? So I think a lot of us know about Iceland or the geysers in California where they've done a great job of exploiting the shallow pools of hot water that's just below the surface, but the challenge with those areas is that it's kind of a unique unicorn geology. So the real prize in geothermal is in rock that's deep hot and so you're going to have to drill deeper. So we call this next generation geothermal. And that's where we're going and we're going there by drilling deeper, hotter and horizontal. And I would say that there are several companies that are racing toward this future, ours is one of them. I'm proud to say that we are not just talking about it. We're actually in the field drilling wells, building systems and proving that geothermal technology can work in unassuming places like Texas, who had ever heard of geothermal in Texas. It's there. Okay. That's the F word fracking, and why is it important to geothermal? So in this deep hot rock, there's not a lot of cracks for water to flow through. And the way we get geothermal to work is to flow water through fracts to absorb the heat. And then we use that water to carry the heat to the surface. And when you get that heat to the surface, you can use it to drive turbines to power electricity or you can use the heat directly. The reason why we use fracturing is we can create those cracks in the rock or those pathways through which the water can flow through. So what we do during fracking operations is we are creating cracks in the rock or we're widening cracks that are already there. And we're using it with a liquid that is mainly water. We do add crushed rock called Baywright in the water to make it more dense. The thing I want to note is that we're pumping at lower pressures and lower rates than the oil and gas industry. And we're actually wanting to avoid natural occurring faults. And this allows us to make our risk of earthquakes low. We're not talking about technology that's decades in the future. This is footage from our energy storage facility, which is actually built at a coal plant. This coal plant is delivering people electricity 24 hours a day and they are making the bold move to solar. And it was without our energy storage facility, they're not able to make that move because the solar alone cannot replace that power 24 hours a day. And then soon we're going to be powering a meta data center with our next generation geothermal technologies. Imagine again, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and of course, funny cat videos being powered by the Earth's seat. So how big can this get and how fast? If we're able to take next generation geothermal, get the cost comparable to other power sources, we're going to be able to use the geologists, the drillers, the service companies, the engineers from the oil and gas industry, who are currently drilling 70,000 wells a year for oil and gas, and instead have them drill for heat. So the result by 2050, we can deliver almost 80% of the electricity demand that the world needs, and over 100% of the heat for all homes, all businesses on the planet. So energy solved, climate change solved, that better future that our kids deserve. I'm hoping this leaves you guys energized. There's people like me that are already working toward this end. And the thing I want to leave you with is that energy is everywhere beneath our feet. We just need to tap into it. Thank you. That was Cindy Taff at the Ted Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at Ted.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the Ted Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the Ted Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsaka Sungmar Nivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan, additional support from Emma Taubner and Danielle Bollarezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.