Tim Latimer’s road to Cape Station, the enhanced geothermal plant his company now runs in Utah, started with a maintenance problem. In 2012 he was a junior drilling engineer for BHP in the Eagle Ford shale of South Texas, and the motors used to drill the wells kept failing, which the engineers blamed on the heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“My very first job as an engineer was, hey Tim, here’s a pattern of motors that have failed. We think it’s due to heat. Can you research what we do about this?” Latimer recalls in the first episode of Ground Truth<\/a>, a podcast his company released on Oct. 8. “I had never heard of geothermal before, but geothermal popped up in all the searches.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fourteen years later, the company he co-founded has a power plant selling electricity in Beaver County, Utah. Fervo Energy says its Cape Station is the first greenfield enhanced geothermal development in the world to reach contractual commercial operation, which it declared on Sept. 30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first unit was tied into the grid on Sept. 24. Six days later, on Sept. 30, Fervo declared commercial operation, one day before the Oct. 1 date in its contract, after the unit reached the 33 megawatts of net power expected under the deal. Fervo says it is now earning revenue under that contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “No team has ever built a project like this anywhere in the world, and we did it ahead of schedule,” Latimer, now Fervo’s CEO, said in the announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those searches led Latimer to The Future of Geothermal Energy, a 2006 MIT report. It said geothermal could work almost anywhere if engineers learned to drill deep wells cheaply and pull high flow rates out of tight rock, which, as he saw it, the shale industry around him had largely solved by 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Wow, they wrote this report in 2006 and described these drilling and production challenges like they were moonshots,” he remembers thinking on the rig. “I just became obsessed with the idea that geothermal was a technology that was going to work because we’d unlock these new drilling innovations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He figured dozens of companies were already doing it and went looking for one to join. Instead he found doubters. “I had so many conversations with people who were in the geothermal industry that ranged from, oh, geothermal is dead. Don’t come work in this industry. There’s no hope. There’s no future. To we tried that, it didn’t work. To we’ll never be able to drill horizontal,” he says on the podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I sometimes describe myself as a reluctant entrepreneur,” Latimer says. “The world needs to try novel drilling techniques for enhanced geothermal systems and if no other company’s going to do it maybe I got to start my own.” He went to Stanford, and in 2017 he co-founded Fervo with Jack Norbeck, a Stanford geothermal Ph.D. who is now its chief technology officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In written testimony for a House Natural Resources subcommittee field hearing in Cedar City, Utah, in May 2025, Latimer spelled out what the company borrowed. “We have applied proven oil and gas technologies \u2013 such as horizontal drilling, multi-stage stimulation, and distributed fiber optic sensing \u2013 to geothermal reservoir development,” he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geothermal plants have usually gone where nature did most of the work. New Zealand’s Wairakei station, the first to run on flash steam<\/a>, sits on a field where hot water already moves through cracked rock. Britain now has deep geothermal power too, from a project near Redruth in Cornwall that drilled five kilometers down<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Southern Utah had the heat without the plumbing. Fervo drills wells, turns them sideways and pumps fluid down to break open the rock, which the Department of Energy describes as a way “to create new fractures and cause pre-existing fractures to re-open, creating permeability.” Water then circulates through those cracks and comes back up hot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Cape Station came Project Red, Fervo’s commercial pilot in Nevada, which came online in 2023 and delivers power to the local grid, including Google’s data centers in the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Latimer told Congress that Project Red “set new records for both flow and power output from an enhanced geothermal system, and confirmed the viability of our subsurface engineering approach.” Norbeck was blunter in September, when Cape Station first sent power to the grid. “First Power is proof the science works,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA 2006 report that read like a list of moonshots<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Hot rock that needed a way in<\/h2>\n\n\n\n