← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
The Startup Trying to Put Geothermal Heat Pumps in America’s Homes
00:59:55
Rob and Jesse hang with Dig Energy co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden.
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- [00:00]
A
You are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, how to unlock insanely cheap heating and cooling for homes and businesses, we're talking with the co founder and CEO of a company working to build small modular drilling rigs that will let even single family homes pull heat out of the ground. So what is this technology called? It turns out it's a big debate. How does it work and why don't we have it everywhere already? The answer to all that and more, it's all coming up on Shift Key after this. America's future depends on reliable power provided where and when it's needed. It depends, in other words, on long duration energy storage. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology is helping build the grid of tomorrow with secure, reliable power and thousands of American jobs. With bipartisan support and a flexible supply chain, long duration energy storage is the missing puzzle piece to scale energy independ. Learn more about Hydrostor's Willow Rock project and the future of energy storage at Hydrostor Ca. This episode of Shift Key is brought to you by Shocked. So I want to tell you about a new podcast called Shocked from my friends at the University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. Each episode you'll hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and and cutting edge solutions to do things like win the battery race, reduce the risks of greenhouse gases that have already been released, and use artificial intelligence to predict polluters and the weather. To listen to Shocked. Search for Shocked in your podcast app. That's Shocked. Hi, I'm Robin Somayer, the founding Executive editor of heatmap News, and I'm Jesse.
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B
Jenkins, a professor of energy Systems engineering at Princeton University.
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A
And you are listening to shiftke Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show we are talking with the founder and CEO of a new company working on clean geothermal heat, but not geothermal heat at the scale of companies we've previously talked to. You often think of these as huge utility scale geothermal sized power plants? No, the company today they're called Dig Energy and they work at geothermal heating at the size of a house or a commercial building.
- [02:32]
B
Yeah, this is for heating and cooling homes much more efficiently, using the more constant temperature of the earth as your sort of heat buffer or heat battery for that heating and cooling process as opposed to say, the exterior temperature. If you're running a traditional air conditioner to cool your home in the summer, or air source heat pump, they call it, to heat heat your home in the winter. This is variously called ground source geothermal or ground source heat pumps. Geothermal heat exchange, geothermal heat pumps. There's lots of different terminology which we'll get into on the show about which is your favorite and the best one to use. But we'll be talking today with Dulcie Madden, who's the CEO of Dig Energy. I have been fortunate enough to serve as an advisor to Dig Energy for the last couple of years and I should say have an equity interest in the company as part of my role there. So I should state that right up the top for the listeners. But the reason I joined as an advisor is because of how exciting the technology and the potential it has to change how we heat cool. Basically every building in the world cuts the total addressable market at the end of the day. And so I'm excited to talk to Dulcie today on Shift Key and let her explain what Dig Energy is up to.
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A
And I should add before we start that while you might have an equity interest in Digg, Jesse heatmap does not. And I really enjoyed this conversation too. Of course, we're an independent news outlet. I just want to say that, however, it was great to talk to Dulci. I learned a lot and it's a fascinating company. Dulcie Madden, it's so great to have you here on Shift Key.
- [03:49]
C
Thanks so much for having me. Hey guys.
- [03:52]
B
Dulcie, I'm excited to dig in here with you. Sorry had to do that at the top, but let's start here. Can you describe what ground source geothermal energy is and how we might use it?
- [04:03]
C
Sure. It's actually pretty cool and some people have heard about it but might not know exactly what it is, so thanks for asking. But effectively below the frost line, so about 10 to 15ish feet underneath the surface of the earth, wherever you're standing. Underground temps are consistent year round. And so no matter where you are, they're typically between 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, literally anywhere in the world. And so for ground source heat pumps or geothermal, effectively, what we're doing is we're leveraging that temperature basically to bring it above the surface and use it to heat or cool buildings, depending on what you're trying to do.
- [04:37]
B
So I've heard that heat pumps are run by little gnomes who run outside and grab buckets of heat and then bring them inside the house. And I'm in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, so I'm pretty sure that's true. But maybe you can actually explain just briefly how heat pumps work in a basic terms, and why it's helpful to have access to that nice little comfy thermal blanket rather than the outside air.
- [04:56]
C
Yes. So basically what they do is they take the temperature of whatever you extracting heat from. So it could be the thermal gradient underneath the earth, it could be your outside air temperature, and then leverage that to heat or cool your space. Right. And so if you're outside, depending on where you are, it could be 20 degrees Fahrenheit, it could be 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you are trying to bridge the gap to whatever your internal building temperature is, which is typically between 65 and 70 degrees. If you. So you're using energy, usually electricity with an air source heat pump, always electricity with air source heat pump, to basically try to then heat or cool that external temperature.
- [05:33]
B
So even though it's colder outside, you're basically pulling little bits of heat out of that cold air or the ground and bringing it into your house to heat it in the winter. Or you're pulling heat out of your home and dumping it outside in order to cool it in the summer.
- [05:45]
C
Yeah, that's right. Yep.
- [05:46]
B
And so that that temperature difference then determines how efficient that process is. Right. So if it's really cold out, those heat pumps work extra hard to get that heat into your home if you're using the air, but if you're using the ground, it's nice and 60 degrees. So you're not pushing energy uphill too far. You're going from 60 to 68 or 70 as opposed to from say 15 degrees to 70 degrees. And that makes a huge difference in efficiency.
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C
Right, huge difference in efficiency. And you can look at usually like a 2x efficiency. And you're exactly right. It's because that delta is so much smaller that your system doesn't have to pull as much electricity or any other form of energy to try to heat or cool it.
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A
So how does Digg fit into the world of ground source heat pumps? What does the company do? Do you guys install ground source heat pumps? What's your. How do you plan to change the economics of this technology? Because it already exists. Right. Like we already have ground source heat pumps, we just don't use them that much.
- [06:37]
C
Yes, we already have ground source heat pumps. They've never really scaled, particularly in North America. So for the last several decades they've stated about 1% of all heating and cooling technology across the entire built environment, people know what it is, people are interested. They know that it's a reliable, high efficiency form of heat. And so if you talk to building owners or developers, they're like, oh yeah, that sounds great. The issue is that it's never scaled because it's a really expensive technology comparatively. So so basically what you have to do to access that nice thermal blanket is you have to drill down into the earth, right? And so there's a couple different ways that you can try to think about basically accessing that thermal energy. But at the end of the day, you have to put a bunch of casing of some kind underneath the ground to basically run water through to extract that thermal energy. To do that traditionally means that it's really expensive because you're either trenching a lot or you're drilling a lot. And that means that installing a geothermal heat pump or a ground source heat pump has been seven to ten times the cost of any other thermal energy out there.
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A
And that just can never, you'll never make that back on efficiency gains, basically. It's just so expensive to do the capital installation. It's never going to pencil out.
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C
It's going to take a really long time to pencil out. And for most property owners, they're thinking about a much shorter window. And it's really interesting because if you talk to people, heating and cooling is a utility, right? So it's literally people decide how they're going to heat and cool their buildings almost exclusively based off of price. And so if you're asking people to pay a lot for something, they're sort of like, that's nice, but I'm not going to do it, which is why it stayed at 1% for the last 30, 50, 100 years.
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B
And what is Dig doing to change that equation?
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C
So what we're specifically doing is we've basically developed a new type of low cost drill, right? So our goal is to reduce the drilling cost by 80 to 90% so that we can put geothermal heating on an apples to apples sort of like plane with fossil fuels, with electricity. So the goal is to take that really long payback period, that really low return on investment and put it right there so that people can say, yes, we're going to choose this option because it's a better economic option and then we get all the other benefits to go along with it.
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B
So let's talk about like a typical single family home today. How much would it cost under today's market to install a ground source heat pump that could meet our winter heating needs in our summer cooling needs. What's the kind of range of costs?
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C
So this is the tricky thing. So it's basically you're looking at a tonnage, but if you're looking at your standard 22,000. Sorry, I'm so sorry. If you're looking at your standard 2200 square foot house. Yep. Huh. You're probably looking someplace in the 30 to $40,000 range, depending on where you are. And that is just a lot when you're looking at a $7,000. Yeah. Alternative. Yep.
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B
That sounds fairly good. I've heard higher quotes than that in, in some locations as well, depending on, of course, how hard it is to drill in the, whatever subsurface you've got there. And so if dig succeeds in dropping the drilling cost, what does that do to the economics of installation?
- [09:40]
C
If dig succeeds in dropping the drilling cost, we should be basically be able to put that down to some place in like the 10, 10 to $15,000 range is what our end goal is and potentially even less depending on where you are.
- [09:53]
B
And for those who haven't installed an H Vac system recently, how does that compare to I need to get a gas furnace and an air conditioner or an air source heat pump as another option.
- [10:04]
C
Yep. So a couple of caveats. If you're looking at the residential option, because you might have a few different systems, but it would be fair to say that you'd be looking at 7 to 10,000 ish, 7 to 12,000 ish, depending on what you're looking to do. Yep.
- [10:16]
B
Yep. So still a bit more expensive upfront, but then you make that up in the efficiency of the, of the heating.
- [10:21]
C
And our goal is to drop it. Like with scale manufacturing, we should be able to come right neck and neck with any of the other options that are out there.
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A
Are the main obstacles to cutting the costs of ground source heat pumps and to also just doing the drilling. Are they primarily technical or if you're drilling more than 10 or 15ft below the surface, like, do you need permits? Are there other regulatory burdens you face?
- [10:44]
C
Okay, you do need permits. Great, great question. So all, all of the above, like H Vac is H Vac is H Vac. Right. Which is not to say like, thank you to everyone who is still installing H Vac systems in the United States. We need more people to do it if you're going to be drilling. Yes, thank you very much to everyone who is running the trade. To do drilling, you do also have to get a drilling permit and you need to use a licensed driller. And so there is licensing. That has to happen with that. And then there's local municipal permitting. That has to happen. And it is variable depending on where you are.
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B
How deep are we talking about here? Help people understand that this is not like drilling a kilometer or two into the earth to the way you might for a geothermal power plant. This is a bit different.
- [11:23]
C
Yeah. We're not producing electricity. The rule of thumb is typically that you need about 150ft per ton of heating and cooling. So it's 150ft per 600 square feet of living space. And that can happen in a few different ways. You could just do one long borehole. So if you are in your standard four ton house, you could do 600ft and one long borehole. You could also do an array. And so you could do 450ft boreholes or eight 75ft boreholes. You really just need a specific amount subsurface to extract that thermal energy and.
- [11:55]
B
Which looks like it's cheaper. I guess that just depends on the geology of where you are and.
- [11:58]
C
Yeah, yeah, it does depend on the geology. You could be in where you live, Jesse, in New Jersey and in Princeton. And it's pretty soft material for us. We would go really quickly through that. So we'd probably think about one type of array. If you're up here in New Hampshire, there's a lot of granite ledge right underneath the surface. We think about it another way. We built a pretty solid simulation tool that can look at your subsurface geology, look at the type of building that you're trying to heat or cool, look at what you're trying to optimize for in terms of installation or operational cost, and then go from there.
- [12:28]
B
So it's not a necessarily one size fits all. It's a bit of a customized job for a region. Right. Not house to house necessarily within the same region, but use a different strategy in New Hampshire than you would in Florida or New Jersey or, you know.
- [12:40]
C
Yeah. And it's actually kind of interesting because our rig is really small. It's about 2ft by 2ft. We can get it into a lot of tight spaces. And that's different than how drilling happens traditionally because those are big rigs that are about the size of fire trucks. There's a high mobilization cost that comes with it. Getting the borehole started is a tough thing. Whereas we can sort of like move around, get borehole started, drill and do that really quickly and efficiently. So we have much more creativity to your point, Jesse, about what can that array look like? Can you go with more boreholes? How do you space them? Could you do shallow or could you do deeper? So that's a pretty exciting part of what we're trying to do.
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A
I mean, you kind of just answered the question, but like, how would this be different in different parts of the the country? Slash, like, where would more ground source heat pumps make more sense sooner?
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B
It just, it strikes me that early adopter markets.
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A
Yeah, it seems like now you're a Manchester, you're a Manchester, New Hampshire based company. It seems like New England, where fuel costs are really high and winter heating costs are like actually a major outlay for households, is like a great market. But like, is that where you're thinking, where would it be really appealing to have this technology? Where should it go first?
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C
That's a great question. So it's worth noting, heating and cooling buildings is a crazy amount of energy. Right. It uses 35% of all global energy usage. So like we just need thermal energy, period. And there's a lot of reasons that we can talk about, like why this should, we should be like transition to geothermal versus just like cranking on the grid or lighting fuels on fire. But going back to your entry market question, it's a great point. We're in New England. New England uses a really high level of delivered fuels. So think about your propanes, your heating oils. There is natural gas, but there's a lot of different stuff that's happening at it from a regulatory perspective there. And there's not as much potential for natural gas lines to expand. And in our little corner of the world. So if we're thinking about as those fuel costs rise, which they are significantly, people are looking to make a shift. The other problem is that if they make a shift going back to the start of what we talked about, to a low efficiency electrical product like air source heat pumps, there just is not enough power on the grid to go from like 60% of delivered fuels to a 100% low efficiency electrical heating and cooling. And so there's just this crunch that's about to happen on the grid. And if you really think about how we're going to move New England off of delivered fuels, the only way to do it is ground source heat pumps. Like we can't supply that much generation, we can't do the transmission lines. It's tough up here. Yep.
- [15:12]
B
So New England seems like the right, right mix of conditions for initial market opportunities. Are there other parts of the country that look attractive as well.
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C
Yeah, I think, I mean, to be clear, I want geothermal heating cooling to be everywhere. As a company, I think realistically the Mid Atlantic is pretty interesting. You could really look at the Great Lakes. There's a good amount of geothermal there. There's a couple different things that make that sort of special. And then I think that you could really think about any of the places that have really, really high cooling demand, like the South. I will say, as you think about it, like it still is a heat pump product. And so part of our calculus in those entry markets is thinking about like, where are the places where there's higher electricity prices, where people really are going to want to minimize their operational expense over time and again. That comes back to New England. Right. If you look up here, we've got pretty high electrical costs.
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B
So you think about the typical substitution factor for, you know, if I'm going to switch from gas heating to an air source heat pump. I'm looking right now at that comparison between gas prices and electric prices. Those are of course pretty correlated in large parts of the country because gas power plants contribute a lot to the wholesale power price at least, but not tightly coupled because of all the distribution networks and policy costs and other things we throw on top of that. Is an environment with both expensive gas and expensive electricity better for you or are you looking for a place with the right ratio between those two? How does a comparative advantage of ground source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps shake out as the energy prices change?
- [16:33]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. We've actually mapped everything onto a grid to basically look at what we're calling like opportunity pricing. High electricity prices are good for us, even though we don't want people to be playing high electricity prices. High gas prices are also good for us. So I think when you mix those two things combined and then layer on high delivered fuels of other kinds, it's a really, really good spot in places where it's just going to be low, low. And that's the hardest for us to compete with out of the gate. Like part of our product is it's pure commodity. So as we basically increase our manufacturing volume, we drop really, really quickly in price. And so those are things that we think about where there are lower entrenched energy prices. We want to get to there once we're at scale. And we can be ultra competitive to.
- [17:14]
B
Get a ride the sort of cost curve to some degree after a beachhead market. So one of the key challenges that you alluded to earlier, in case of New England especially is if we pursue this electrify everything strategy to decarbonize heating and transportation for that matter, then we're going to see the peak electricity demand in a lot of regions shift from summer afternoo. Like even in New England, the peak in electricity demand is in the summer, not the winter. Today driven by the summer afternoon, muggy August day when you've got all the air conditioning cranking away and it's going to shift to winter overnight, particularly as heating kicks in from air source heat pumps. If we're electrifying that way and people are charging their cars to get ready to go to work, all that's going to drive up the winter peak. And this I would say is like the one argument that the natural gas industry pushing back against the electrify everything narrative, will latch onto and point to these extremely high winter peak demand scenarios and say, look, like you said, the grid is just not going to be able to handle this. This is why we need to maintain our gas networks. What do you say to that? And how does geothermal heating fit into that picture?
- [18:13]
C
Yeah, I mean, and I think that this is what a lot of the utilities up here are really thinking about, right. Like they can see that winter peak coming. And that is also when I think that people really think about the fact that this is like a true utility where you have to be as a human at a certain temperature. And so if you get blackouts in wintertime, it's a whole different ballg game. I just think that like the ability to really think about what is the efficiency of the product that we're moving to that is available everywhere. Right. This is a distributed resource. It is like abundant, it's not even renewable because it's just there, Right. It is the single best thermal product that we have. There is no real delivery cost, it is low cost, it is high efficiency. And I think that this is the best thing that New England can do and a lot of places can do. And I think the last part is that when you think about it, you really want to think about what is the operational cost going to be over time as we think about where people are feeling stress in their day to day economic lives. This is something that people talk about, right? Like utilities are it like how do we reduce that cost and reduce that burden. Yeah.
- [19:10]
B
And those winter heating bills are hard to take sometimes, right. I mean it's just such a variable cost. You, you might have say 60, 70, 90 bucks a month when you're not running the air conditioning or the heating and Then you get in these peak seasons and all of a sudden your bill is several hundred dollars. And that variability is hard. Having a more efficient heating solution will dampen that month to month variation that people have to absorb in their pocketbooks too. So ISO New England, which is the grid operator for the New England region, actually recently shared projections that as soon as 2033 their winter and summer peaks will be about equal. So transforming their system from a summer peaking system to a kind of dual peak where they have to manage both the summer and winter peaks. This isn't that far off. 2033 and probably other regions like New York are headed in a similar direction. Those that have relatively cold winters and are pushing towards electrification. So finding ways to do that without overstressing a grid, I should add, is also already dealing with data center demand growth and other drivers of peak demand growth is certainly an important piece of the solution.
- [20:07]
A
This episode of ShiftKey is brought to you by Hydrostor. The US economy is growing fast and so is its demand for reliable energy. But generation alone isn't enough. Long duration energy storage is the key to building a resilient, secure grid that can meet tomorrow's needs. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology stores clean energy for hours at a time and then delivers base load power when it's needed most. Hydrostor's Willow Rock energy Storage center in California will provide 500 megawatts of storage, enough to power a city of half a million people for more than eight hours and employ over 6,500 people during construction. Backed by bipartisan support at all levels of government, Hydrostor is leading the charge in utility scale storage. With projects underway across America, we're helping communities unlock economic growth and achieve energy independence. Learn more about Hydrostor's unique technology and how it's powering America's future. @ hydrostor ca so I have a geological question which is that you said 10 to 15ft underground below the frost layer, the temperature is basically always the same. It's in that 50 to 60 degree range. Will the ground's ability to receive heat depress over time? Because I remember this is like a famous story, or at least as a story I've heard about the London Underground. Is that part of the selling point for the underground was like it's cool underground in the summer because it's automatically heat cooled by the earth. And after 100 or 110 years of running that system, now it's like just as hot underground as it was at the surface. Because a century of trains and friction and people have soaked into the subsurface and it's just warm there. Do subsurface heat pumps lose their efficiency over time or do they gradually saturate the ground with heat over the course of an installation?
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C
Great question. Yes, they do. And so I think the other thing to think about is is there something to think about called load balancing. So you, with this you can really think about those temperatures not just as like blanket, right, where it's the same temperature, but also as a battery. And so if you're a building that has a predominant and high cooling demand, Right. So if you're a grocery store, if you're cold storage, if you're a data center, you're just going to be cooling, cooling, cooling that space, meaning that you're extracting heat out of the space. And with the geothermal system you're going to be needing a place to put that. Right. You're going to be pumping that back into the ground. Which to your point, Rob, means that you're just like heating, heating, heating subsurface. And that does change your ability to be efficient and continue to keep cooling. Same thing, right. If you just have a high heating demand, you're just going to be cooling down the ground over time and that's less of an issue because the heat, you know, the ground is heating it up. But in these high cooling demand operations it is a real consideration. And in that case you need to either over drill or you have to think about like a diurnal recharge. We're able to use cooler temperatures overnight and do off peak charging as it's called. And Jesse's doing some work with this and this is something we're looking pretty carefully at.
- [23:22]
B
Yeah. So thinking about the earth as a battery, you can actually do diurnal or even seasonal heat shifting. Basically this is something that university, the Princeton campus is trying to do. So we should say that Princeton University campus has a network geothermal system that relies on these kinds of boreholes. They're I think about 850ft here trying to get bang for your buck because we've got large load here. And they're ultimately planning to drill about 2,000 boreholes across the campus to switch the whole campus off of steam driven heating to hot water heating. So we'll circulate hot water at 120 degrees or something like that instead of steam at 300 degrees. So much less loss of heat into the earth as we distribute that energy around that gets, makes it more efficient. And then we of course are using ground source heat Pumps. So the whole system is far more efficient than air source. One of the things we can do with that potentially is this sort of diurnal shifting which we do with both the ground and a large hot water and cold water storage tanks. So you just heat up and cool the water in advance and then potentially even seasonal load shifting, something that operators here are exploring where we would basically be using those shoulder seasons of spring and fall to pre cool the ground in the spring in anticipation of the summer and preheat it in the fall in anticipation of the winter heating needs. And so when power prices are low in those two seasons, you're basically running the heat pump to just dump heat into the ground or take it out to drive that imbalance purposefully to get it ahead of the season that you're planning. So there's some interesting potential there to basically use inbuilt storage to shift heating demand demand around in addition to making the whole thing more efficient.
- [24:49]
A
Who would manage that in an installation? Is the heat pump have software that would manage this or would you? Eventually, I would imagine like a large enough building would have kind of building operators who think about these things. But if you're a single family home, what manages this process for you?
- [25:06]
C
I mean, I think every building has some sort of controls that you can look at. And with anything that's geothermal, you can look at what your temperatures into the ground and out of the ground are and start to be able to monitor those over time. If you're a large enough building. There is a lot of sophisticated math that I think a lot of people are doing to try to minimize their energy costs specifically. And the Princeton does a exceptional job at a very high resolution fidelity to really manage costs down to like pinpoint accuracy. And then there's other, other sort of operators who are just spending so much on thermal energy or refrigeration or heating. They are also thinking very carefully about this, right? It is meaningful dollars from a cost perspective.
- [25:48]
B
Yes. It depends on the scale. As a company, are you thinking about those sort of like consumer facing products, like the control side of things, or is that you know, an opportunity for somebody else? Once you make geothermal heating cheap and everybody starts adopting it, then somebody else can sell the software and controls and those kinds of things.
- [26:03]
C
It's a great question. So on the commercial side of things, there's like controls companies, right? That this is like their bread and butter. And we're starting to have conversations with them to think about what are we doing, how are we doing this? What does the Monitoring look like how are we optimizing over time? That hasn't been the biggest technical area focus to date. It's sort of secondary to drilling. But that's something we're starting to think about now. And as a company we're really thinking about. We are drillers. Right. We want to be thinking about like we are building drilling rigs and in the early days we're going to be doing drilling services because that's where the most need in the market is. There are many shops that do a great job at running controls. Yep.
- [26:37]
B
So if I think about things that the United States is really good at, drilling would probably be on the top of my list. Right. Given the massive oil and gas industry that we have, that's something that companies like Fervo Energy, we've had folks on from in the past that are doing deeper geothermal for power generation where they're tapping into heat that's a couple hundred degrees or more in order to produce electricity. They're leveraging that. Know how? I guess two questions. One, why hasn't anybody figured out a good cost effective way to do this drilling yet? What's different about drilling for geothermal heating than these heat pumps, than other deeper drilling that we do for oil and gas? And is there anything that you're learning or taking from the oil and gas industry's net technical know how into the design of your drill rig or is it just an entirely different ballgame?
- [27:20]
C
So I think, yeah, so for geothermal heating and cooling. Right. Almost all the drilling has come out of as you said, oil and gas. Right. Which has a very specific purpose of extracting millions of barrel of oil from beneath the surface of the earth. Those are traditionally really deep wells, tens of thousands of feet and they are carrying oil up. Those tend to result in large boreholes or very large installations. You can look at like the rigs that Fervo is using there real big as they should be. Right. That's not a small operation. If you're thinking about for a building though, there is, you could use the same technology, but it's basically overpowered. Right. It's sort of like driving an 18, 18 wheeler to go get your groceries from the grocery store. Like it can do the job, but like it's kind of overkill. So like in a land, the United States, where electricity prices have historically been really low, delivery tools have been really low. Ambient temperatures in a lot of parts of the country weren't too crazy. There just hasn't been a real need to think about what does this alternative going to look like. And so we basically thought about, okay, if we were actually going to think about just geothermal heating and cooling, we weren't trying to adapt anything from oil and gas. What is the best way to extract that energy and then start sort of knocking off technology pieces from there and thinking about what the best way to do it is.
- [28:34]
B
We've been thrown a few different terms around here to describe this. We talked about geothermal heating and cooling, ground source heat pumps, geo exchange. There's a little bit of ambiguity here in the language people use to talk about these things. What's your favorite way to talk about this product and what you do and why? Or is this just an endless debate that is not resolved?
- [28:53]
C
It's a big debate. I think the Geo Exchange, when I think of Geo Exchange, just so everyone knows it's really about like are you able to basically create a larger array potentially across buildings, like more like a exchanging heating and cooling, like both point source. And I think about it more in the context of Princeton where it's like also across buildings. Right. And that sort of starts to move into what some people call a thermal energy network. And so there's some work there. There is a lot of back and forth between geothermal heat pump and ground source heat pump and a lot of people use them interchangeably. I think that there is technically a differentiation, but I don't know if there's like a didactic like this is what it is. It's just you have to be interchangeable. Yeah, yeah.
- [29:31]
B
I'm curious what the best marketing term is like, what people actually resonate with beyond the sort of technical crowd I got. I was describing what you guys were doing. I think when you closed your seed series round on X or Blue sky and somebody jumped into the replies, that's not geothermal energy, it's ground source heat pump. And it's like okay, okay. And I guess the argument is that because it's basically just using it as a, as a source for heat exchange and the heat pump operation as opposed to extracting heating out of the ground, which you can just do direct heating from geothermal, you know, deep geothermal drilling as well. It's something that ever which is an Alberta based deep geothermal company that I advise as well is working on their first commercial project in Bavaria that's going to go into like a district heating system. So they're going to produce a little bit of power, but a lot of that is just direct heat. But again they're drilling five, six kilometers deep and pulling out heat at high temperatures. And so it's because it's kind of back and forth. You're using this kind of buffer for both heating and cooling. I think that's why people might push back on the idea that it's geothermal. But you're using the heat in the ground. What's. That's.
- [30:26]
C
We're using the heat of the ground. Yeah. I also think from a marketing perspective, like, ground source is not necessarily clear to people. Right.
- [30:33]
B
Like, it needs very well there. Yeah.
- [30:34]
C
No, no. And I would say overall, everyone in geothermal, the geothermal industry, and then those of us working what I would call shallow geothermal, we have a lot of education and a little bit of marketing to do because it's just not well known.
- [30:48]
A
It's so funny in this discussion because it's like, I think both this technology and heat pumps themselves are the subject of. At this point, I feel like I've observed 10 years of discussion about what the right name for these things.
- [31:03]
B
Yeah. Nobody likes the word heat pump either, as a market.
- [31:05]
A
Nobody likes the word heat pump either.
- [31:06]
B
Nobody's come up with a better solution.
- [31:08]
A
The funny thing is that the competition here is air conditioner, which is also totally unclear. What. It's a weird word. The air.
- [31:16]
B
Like, it conditions your hair. Yeah.
- [31:18]
A
Yes, exactly. We're up against this technology, right? I mean, not up against, but, like, the kind of natural competitor for heat pumps or the things that heat pumps are the technological successor to is, like, still has the name that it got in 1925, which, like, doesn't make any more sense. You know what I mean? Like, it's all. You can hear the Hoover administration and like, oh, it's the air conditioner for Mrs. Smith down the street.
- [31:44]
C
It's a great point. And I actually think that. And it's really interesting because anything with two words tends to struggle, I think. Right. Like, if it's a furnace, great. If it's a boiler, great. Those feel very tangible and real. Anything that is like heat pump or ground source, heat pump or geothermal, people are just like, you know, it doesn't feel as tangible. So we've got some.
- [32:02]
B
That's why we call it the. We call it AC now. It is like. We've shortened it to, like, it's just this thing. Right. Everybody knows what it is. We don't have to. Yeah. Well, someday. Someday that's what we'll all describe geothermal heating that way.
- [32:13]
C
Yeah.
- [32:13]
A
The hp turn on the HP doing.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah. I've heard folks say, like, we should just call it A reversible air conditioner, which I guess it's like none of this quite works, right?
- [32:22]
A
It's like, no, no. How are you going to manufacture these rigs, right? These like drilling machines because you. Are they the kind of thing you can make in the United States or do you need the kind of large scale, sprawling contract manufacturing ecosystem like exists in China or East Asia?
- [32:44]
C
When we started designing this really there was two defining ethos for how we were going to get to cost. And one was like any of the commodity parts we had to be able to get from Home Depot or McMaster, right? So nothing super specialized and we had to be able to machine them in our own machine shop so that it didn't require like extraordinary specialized machining that would also in turn and drive up costs. And so yes, our entire goal is to manufacture domestically in the United States and to use as we scale, localized and then distributed machine shops that can help us do components for the rig. We will likely do assembly for the rig in the early days, but that's something that can also happen locally and then certainly with the drill string, which is sort of what goes down into the ground as we're drilling. But it should all be here. Big fan of local domestic manufacturing. Those are important jobs. And it also reduces transportation costs, which is great.
- [33:35]
B
Let's talk about network geothermal. You mentioned this earlier. We talked about the Princeton campus is on this sort of network system where we've got a couple big centralized borehole fields and a big industrial scale heat pump building that is running the hot water cold water network across campus. It's augmented of course by our traditional steam driven chillers and electric driven chillers and equipment that we've had installed for years on the campus. It's quite a complicated system. Lots of different pieces that we can all tap into. And there are more and more utilities thinking about this as a direction to go as they especially gas network utilities as they're forced to decarbonize and shift away from gas. What are your thoughts on the future of network heating systems and how critical is it that we have cheap drilling for geothermal heating and cooling in order to make those work?
- [34:20]
C
So there's been a couple pilots, as you know, across the countries that have thought about this network geothermal system. Eversource has done it in Framingham, Mass. And they're continuing to get, I think, really exceptional data from that about the concern consistency of the temperatures that they're delivering. And then there's campuses like Princeton that are doing this right, because it's basically going to be over the long term, ultimately the lowest cost way to deliver decarbonized energy. I think that really as you know, in politics or politics, but as the move to move away from delivered fuels of any kind, whether it's piped gas or propane or heating fuel, heating oil, I do think that there's going to be a real conundrum that's going to happen as people try to make the move away from natural gas. Right. But that's a huge piece of the utility landscape landscape. And this is where I think network geothermal comes in. Right. And so like instead of basically having connected piped homes on natural gas, it's really can we have those homes and those buildings be piped together on geothermal energy or like a ground loop source that's able to basically heat and cool them? It has not. It's been a tough set. I've talked to a lot of utilities. It's been tough economics to try to do it at current drilling costs like it is. It requires also for a utility a very, very long payback period. I think that as we reduce these drilling costs so significantly, this is something that's going to make and more sense. And I think this is something that a lot of different people across the landscape are starting to really perk up their ears and start to. To take a hard long look at, which is cool.
- [35:42]
B
What are some of the advantages of going to that network scale? Is it that there are economies of scale to the drilling or to the heat pumps? Or is it the balancing out of different loads? Like why is it better to do it networked as opposed to just you going to every home and drilling their own set of boreholes and having a self contained system.
- [35:58]
C
There's pros and cons. I do think that you're able to get some efficiency over time if it's shared infrastructure and if you're in like a pretty tight urban SL suburban landscape, Specifically if you're a utility and you want to own the boreholes and own the equipment and recognize like your capex return off of it that provides fits.
- [36:14]
B
Nicely in the cost of service regulation that we've talked about on the show in the past where utilities make money.
- [36:18]
A
In other words, basically. In other words, basically if you're a utility you're like used to these big outlays and then these are the big expenses that you then pay back over time while returning a reasonable profit to investors. And drilling fits well into that.
- [36:35]
C
That's right. That's exactly right. And it sort of Lets you think about how you're going to recognize that and use it.
- [36:40]
A
Does it let you reuse the gas network at all or.
- [36:43]
C
Oh, I think. No, I think that that's like a pretty tricky. I think that you could go next.
- [36:49]
B
To it maybe when you're digging out the old gas pipes to shut them off, you can lay down the water pipe next to it or something like that. The biggest expense, I would say on the campus here and probably the biggest disruption which is notable for deployment in residential areas as is that in order to switch to this hot water cold water system, we have to rip out all the old 100 year old steam pipe that we have running under the campus. And so different parts of the campus are shut down. The walkways are pulled up and they're drilling and pulling, or they're digging and pulling out the old steam pipe and laying in the water pipe all across campus. I could see that being a major challenge in urban settings as well for making this transition. Then again, we already have that kind of road repair. I mean the entire town was ripped up up here in Princeton recently to repair, upgrade all of the gas pipes to reduce leaks and install steel pipe and things like that. An expense that may end up stranded, but was certainly very disruptive in terms of the impact. But people do that all the time with conventional utilities too.
- [37:43]
C
These improvements are going to happen. There's going to be repairs to be made. And I think, like when I think about it, you just have to plan for it and be able to get in there when stuff is being dug up. And so to the extent that you don't have to keep redoing work, the.
- [37:54]
B
Better, you know, are the right utilities to do this. Gas utilities or water utilities?
- [38:01]
C
Oh, interesting question. I. Wow, great cue. I would. I mean the natural gas utilities are going to make the big move for it. Right. And I think also like a lot of the water utilities are municipal and it's a little different, but I mean.
- [38:17]
B
The water utilities are thinking about it. Yeah, that's interesting.
- [38:19]
C
I'll make some calls.
- [38:20]
A
Yeah, well, okay, wait. On that note though, how different is this from drilling a well? Because rural customers across the country already are used to drilling a well. Is it just much deeper than a well? The borehole is bigger than a well?
- [38:35]
C
Yeah, it's the same thing. Like a lot of the water well drillers like especially are also your geothermal drillers, regardless of where you are, and they're going to think about doing that water well up to where you're going to hit water or an aquifer and then they're going to put their pump down, they're going to run that through and you see that in a lot of different places that are not on municipal water. Same thing where that's also great. It's just still, if you're going to do this at scale for heating and cooling, it's just not as low cost as you want it to be. And so thinking about a purpose built geothermal rig that in long term, like it would be great if those water well drillers could use our drill to drill for geothermal heating and cooling, right? Same thing. Like is anyone else who's going out and doing any other type of drilling? The long term goal is that this is the highest margin, lowest cost product that can be in any driller's toolbox. Right.
- [39:17]
A
Could someone do any mineral extraction with this rig or we already have minerals and oil and gas extraction, I would think like this.
- [39:26]
C
The specific oil and gas and mineral rigs are like pretty purpose built for moving a lot of, a lot of stuff. Not necessarily just like running water through a system to get thermal energy. That said, Rob, to your point, there is a lot of work that needs to be done around what I would call interrogative drilling. So if you're going around, you're trying to figure out what exactly is happening subsurface and that could happen for a foundation and site work that could happen if you're trying to do surveying to figure out what are your subsurface assets. Being able to have a highly portable, highly transportable modular drill that does not cost a ton would be great.
- [40:01]
A
Earlier in the show, I mentioned a new podcast I'm excited to listen to. It's called Shocked and it's from my friends at the University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. Shocked is about facing the reality that a warmer our world is here. So now what it's about, questions like, is using less energy really the answer? What will it cost to adapt? Republicans invented cap and trade, so why is it controversial? The idea of Shocked is sometimes we need to start by re examining things we thought we knew. Each episode you'll hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone do just that. Shocked is fun and insightful for those of us who weren't in climate and energy. And it's the perfect primer for the climate curious. It's a podcast you could share with your boss and your mom. To listen to Shocked, search for Shocked in your podcast app. That's Shocked from the University of Chicago's Institute for climate and sustainable growth.
- [40:59]
B
We talked about some of the regions that this makes sense to be kind of early adopters. What are some of the sectors or like customers types that you're looking at that are most likely to be the early adopters here versus some that might be later on and down the line as the technology gets cheaper and matures?
- [41:14]
C
Yeah, this is something we have spent a long time thinking about and I think is there's two pieces where one, it's like, yes, the baseline is that everyone should be using this regardless of what type of building that you're using. The second part is like that, that cost curve point and like we are a company that is, I think, trying to be really thoughtful about how we go to market and where do we make the most sense. There's three ish markets that we're looking really closely at. One is what I would call like thermally intensive industries, like grocery stores, like cold storage, like data centers, who are just spending wild amounts of money on their thermal energy usage. And so really thinking about how do we get them a higher efficiency product that can help reduce that cost outlay and that also offers like a nice, really short payback period, higher roi. There is this sort of campus thermal network model that I think we've seen a lot of interest in. And then there's sort of other pieces of commercial real estate where people have shown a lot of interest as well.
- [42:11]
A
Do you need a greenfield site to do this kind of work? Does it work better basically in suburbs and exurbs than, let's say you wouldn't want to put it in a city because nobody ever really knows what's like the utilities kind of know sort of what's under there. But you don't want to know that. You don't, you don't know that much about what's under there.
- [42:30]
C
Well, it's interesting because there's a lot of urban campuses that are actually trying to figure out how to decarbonize. I think about this long term and being able to have a smaller drill that's able to get into small parcels of land where there might be like really like highly specific setbacks. We do pretty well there. That said, we are not going to be the drilling technology of choice. If you're looking to retrofit the Empire State Building, right. Like you're going to need a whole lot of extremely vertical, extremely deep depth for those buildings that have a ton of vertical value on top of a very small parcel. Like we would probably be looking for like more of a, like Less horizontal. Less vertical height. Bigger horizontal.
- [43:10]
B
Washington D.C. rather than Manhattan.
- [43:12]
C
That's right. Yeah. Manhattan's tough. Yeah. Yeah.
- [43:15]
B
What's the rest of the sort of industry look like right now? Who are your competitors? Slash compatriots. And is this a space that is likely to grow with more interesting new innovative offerings coming down the pipe, or are you guys sort of the only game in town?
- [43:28]
C
No, there's a bunch of companies that are out there and there's Bedrock Energy, which is doing, I'd say like, like AI informed drilling so that they can predict the subsurface and sort of like automate their processes better. There's a company called Borobotics in Europe that has this slow but like highly automated rig. There is Celsius Energy, which is doing directional drilling there has been out of Schlumberger. I think that there is. There's a lot of people who are starting to work in the space. It's a huge, huge field. Right. And so like, I think there will be a lot of different players thinking about how we help help property owners make this leap. But it's picking up for sure. It's helpful that geothermal is one of the last, last things standing and sort of, you know, a purpley clean energy option.
- [44:13]
A
Yeah, well, it's so funny because, you know, the United States economy, it's such an interesting beast. And we're so good at drilling. Like we're so good at chemicals and we're so good at drilling of various kinds. Not mineral extraction per se, but like if you can get it out with a drill, oh my gosh, best in.
- [44:28]
C
The world, 100% well. And it feels, I think, super American. And so like, you know, the current administration talks about drill baby, drill. Like that's the entire ethos of like parts of Texas. And I think that if you can think about drilling with decarbonizing energy, that's like an incredible mix that is able to also feel like uniquely, uniquely American, which is awesome.
- [44:51]
B
What is the landscape like in Europe though? I mean, you've got, you know, European markets that are, I think have recently turned towards heat pumps to try to get off of natural gas after the war in Ukraine began. And more consistent decarbonization policy, shall we say. Is this sort of, you know, like a global phenomena or is really the activity mostly concentrated in the US right now?
- [45:10]
C
No, it is definitely global. I think that the EU and Europe in general from an energy independence. And then if you've looked and watched any of the headlines coming out of France and Spain over the course of this past summer, it is the fastest warming continent. And so like when you look at those really hot summers in a place that like, like a does not have sufficient grid capacity and does not have cooling capacity.
- [45:31]
B
Right. People, a lot of homes don't have air conditioning.
- [45:34]
C
Yeah, that's right. It's not like America where it's like 60 degrees no matter what. So it's become really politicized. And Marine Le Pen has said that like air conditioning is like a fundamental human right. And then you have the other side that's really worried about what would a high degree of air conditioning due to the grid and to their emissions. And so being able to think about a. Your own country can produce it. It's right there. We can think about how to get this into buildings. There's a lot of interest from European utilities as well.
- [46:01]
A
We were talking about how with perfect segue, we were talking about how geothermal kind of retains this purplish, bipartisan, cross partisan appeal. What policy, if any, do we have right now to support these technologies? And like, what policy would get you down the cost curve and allow DIG or other companies in this space to move faster and to deploy?
- [46:23]
C
So one of the commercial ITC for 30% and Jesse helped me out with a specific language since you basically wrote it, that there's a 30% commercial ITC for geothermal direct use heating cooling technologies, which is great. That does no longer is there for residential, but it's there on the commercial side.
- [46:43]
B
A business tax credit.
- [46:45]
A
The tax credit for businesses that build geothermal heat pumps on their site is still on the books. Is on the books right now and it allows that and it's on the books through 2032.
- [46:56]
B
Yeah. So it actually was not modified at all by the one big beautiful bill. That piece was left on its own, which also includes the domestic content bonus and the energy community's bonus. So it could be as much as a 50% investment tax credit that basically cut half the cost off the top.
- [47:15]
C
I think there's also a brownfield credit as well. Right. So there's a few different pieces that you can sort of stack on there, which is kind of crazy. In addition to that, many states have also developed their own incentive or rebate structure through their efficiency or saves programs or whatever is coming down through their states. Utilities may or may not operate through that or have an additional incentive. Right. So if you're thinking about capital avoidance from that peak demand piece that Jesse was talking about earlier, utilities are really looking at, is there a way that we can incentivize moving to a higher efficiency heating and cooling product so that we can start to offset some of that projected sort of peak economic outlay we're going to have to make. So that's one part I say that there's the economic part of it. As a company, we do not want to, and I said this before, we do not want to rely on incentives, rebates, subsidies of any kind. I will say that as we get to market, like I will take those tailwinds, right? Whatever we can do to be the best economic product out there, like, terrific. And then we can get for whatever happens to the extent that we can just be the best product that's the cheapest. Amazing. Alongside that, from a regulatory perspective, I would love to start to think about how can we start thinking about licensing drillers? It's a small workforce. It's a very proud and a very tribal workforce with very specialized knowledge. But as we think about moving to potentially a smaller, easier to operate drill, I want to get more drillers into the workforce. Right. Like we need a lot of drillers to drill. The amount of heating and cooling infrastructure that we need across the country and being able to be really thoughtful about how we do that is a big piece of what I'm thinking about.
- [48:52]
B
Awesome. Well, Dulcie, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to talk about Digg. I love sharing the news about what you all are up to and I'm excited to be an advisor and I'm excited to see where you all go soon.
- [49:02]
C
Thank you guys. I can't believe I got to be on shift key. Thanks so much.
- [49:15]
A
What an interesting company. That's so cool.
- [49:17]
B
Yeah, they're exciting. I mean, I. The reason I was excited to join them as an advisor is not only because Dulcie is just a fabulous human, but also because like once they started explaining what they're doing and I kind of groked the economics of it, I was just like, oh wait, this is just how we're going to heat and cool like every building in the world someday. Okay, let's do that. That sounds good. So it is really a massive potential market, which is really exciting and one that like, I mean, there's some high tech stuff they're doing to design this rig appropriately, but it's just, it's kind of like old fashioned engineering. It's not like you're doing some fundamental new material science like perovskite solar cells or trying to make fusion work. Right. It's kind of just like, let's do some good product engineering here, design a good drill rig and make this really cheap and easy and non disruptive. Right. And then we can decarbonize a third of all energy consumption, which is kind of crazy.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah, which is crazy. Let's talk about upshift downshifts every week here on Shift Key. As you know, if you've listened this far into the episode, we do a little segment we call up shift downshifts where Jesse and I grab one item from energy or climate news from the week. And if that item is making us feel more optimistic about the energy transition, it's an upshift. If it's making us feel more pessimistic, it's a downshift. We used to talk about doing all sorts of other closing segments and we'd still do upshift downshift. We should experiment some time. But for now, what's your upshift or downshift for us?
- [50:37]
B
I'm afraid I have a downshift today which is the outcome of a vote that was held last week at the International Maritime Organization, the imo, which is, I believe, a UN chartered international organization that helps set the rules for the high seas. Right. And one of the things that was on the docket was a proposal to basically establish a carbon price for fuels and emissions within the maritime shipping industry. There's a similar effort for aviation that's been underway. This would tackle the maritime trade. This is one of the ones I was actually pretty optimistic about. I've been skeptical of the political economy of carbon pricing for a long time. It's obviously hard to raise energy costs and forces sort of a direct trade off between people's concerns about affordability of energy and goods versus climate. But in this case, because shipping is so incredibly efficient, you use very little fuel actually to move massive amounts of goods around the world of oil, of coal, of finished products that it, you know, increasing the cost of fuel, the carbon price has very little impact on the landed cost of whatever you're shipping, as opposed to aviation, where fuel cost is a substantial chunk of what you're paying for when you pay for a, you know, an airline ticket. So this is one where there was quite a bit of consensus across the industry that as long as everybody is subject to the same carbon price, it doesn't disadvantage any one country over another or one shipper over another. All of the major shipping companies, Maersk and that ilk, were in favor of these rules and were planning lower carbon ships to switch to that use things like ammonia or Methanol or just are more efficient. And so there was this heading towards a vote to adopt a proposal that was made by a more kind of steering committee last year to implement this carbon pricing program. In the run up to that vote last week, the Trump administration went hardcore mob boss on the rest of the world here. Not just sort of whipping votes to oppose it, but actually calling up at cabinet level, maybe even apparently even at the president level, specific countries and threatening them with very specific economic penalties if they were to vote for this provision. And in this case, the administration, who just implemented across the board tariffs that have dramatically raised the cost of importing everything, was fighting this provision, arguing that it was going to dramatically increase the cost of international trade, which the irony of which is, is quite rich, but they basically threatened other countries with sanctions, with fees, with blocking, you know, their flagged vessels from US waters or ports, canceling specific investments, international investments that the US is making in these countries. All kinds of threats to try to convince countries to vote no. The outcome in the end is not that they voted down the provision, but rather a simple majority voted to adjourn the meeting and revisit this a year from now. There were 57 countries that voted to adjourn, 49 that voted against the delay, meaning they voted to actually implement it now, and 21 who abstained. So very close vote. They needed a 2/3 majority, I should say, to actually implement it, but only a majority vote to table the measure. And so while they didn't vote it down entirely, which is what the Trump administration was hoping for, they did kick the can down the road another year and they'll have to revisit this in the future. So unfortunately that that provision, which has almost unanimous support amongst the actual shipping industry itself, was blocked, at least for now.
- [53:51]
A
I just love the Trump administration fighting anyway. I mean, you said this, look. Yeah, but like they finally found a trade barrier they didn't like, like the, the, the emergency of this whole thing is that it was going to raise the cost of international trade and raise costs for consumers, and they couldn't possibly tolerate that. And so therefore they had to pull out every diplomatic stop.
- [54:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, they were claiming that it was going to raise the cost of goods by 10%, which is not true. That's like an extreme case. Maybe certain ships might see costs go up that much, but it's much smaller than that. It's probably a couple percent increase and again, 10% increase in delivering goods. Like, don't we have across the board universal tariffs? We have tariffs Now?
- [54:32]
A
Yes.
- [54:32]
B
I mean, like, what are we talking about?
- [54:33]
A
They want this. Well, the funny thing is that if you, like, if you're raising costs to. Anyway, it's crazy that their whole worldview, like not only the stated worldview of people in the Trump administration is like, neoliberalism has failed. Like the regime of international free trade has failed. Having low cost free trade has destroyed the American worker. And we therefore need to raise all these barriers to trade to, like, right. The historical wrong of neoliberalism and free trade. But also this policy is bad. They say all that. And then simultaneously they say, and a global carbon fee is bad on ships because it might raise the cost of international shipping. It's.
- [55:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, obviously they don't like it because it's a climate policy. And it's interesting, I should say that there is a lot of, of course, UN conspiracy memes, theories on, on, you know, both the far right and far left, like the idea that the UN and the world government is coming to take away our sovereignty. I mean, it's rare that the un, any UN agenc, has the authority to do something binding or that actually raises or changes cost. And the entire UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is now basically a voluntary process of pledging what each country is going to do, and then that's it. But this is one of those cases where the, this UN agency, the imo, actually was going to implement a carbon tax that would increase the cost for goods. And so I think it was fairly easy for folks on the right to demagogue as this international tax being imposed, threatening U.S. sovereignty, increasing cost for consumers. So easy to attack from that perspective, unfortunately. And I think that's where they leaned into the public side of things. All right, Rob, what about you? You have an upshift or downshift for us?
- [56:13]
A
I have a downshift, Jesse. This, this downshift is unusually close to the metal for climate change, which is that last week, the World Meteorological Organization, which is another UN organization, although the World Meteorological Organization actually predates the un, existed before the war. Its predecessor organization existed before World War II. It said in a new report that the average level of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere climbed by the largest mountain on record between 2023 and 2024. So this is obviously two years ago, but it takes them a long time to kind of collect and calibrate and collate and process the data. So we're just getting back the 2024 record now. In 2024, the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 423.9 parts per million, which was was 3.5 parts per million above where it had been in 2023. That is the largest year on year record ever. It edges out a 3.3 parts per million increase in 2016. And the new York Times story I'll link to compares it to, you know, back in the 1960s, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increased by like 0.08 parts per million every year. And now it's like multiple parts. It's 3.5. Right. It's multiple parts per million every year. The World Meteorological Organization thinks that this isn't just from fossil fuels. It's probably also from wildfires which just dumped a ton of carbon into the atmosphere.
- [57:34]
B
That's good thing that those aren't getting worse.
- [57:36]
A
Luckily they're not getting worse at all and we have nothing to worry about. What is shocking to me here is that when I started out being climate reporter, I would write a newsletter for the Atlantic every week. It's just about climate news. And every week at the top of the newsletter I put, put the amount of parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere at the top of the newsletter just as like an orienting number and it was like 400. Like we only crossed 400. Like I remember I've only been a climate reporter at this point for under a decade, just under a decade. And like a full time climate reporter shorter than that. But I remember when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was like still started with a number 385 or something.
- [58:18]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:19]
A
I mean, okay, when I, when I got into this I was three. It was, we were talking 399, 398, 401. But it was still not in the four hundreds.
- [58:29]
B
When I got into this, the debate right was are we trying to stabilize emissions at 450ppm or 550ppm that evolved into the kind of 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees kind of story. And of course the activist organization 350. Org is named for the kind of pre industrial baseline that have emissions levels of 350ppm that, that hopefully someday we potentially return to as we draw down atmospheric CO2. But yeah, these numbers keep climbing up and that's at a faster rate. That's not, not great.
- [58:57]
A
Not great. No, it's not.
- [58:59]
B
Got to bend the curve on the emissions, global emissions and yeah, someone's got.
- [59:04]
A
To do something about all the climate change, Jesse. Someone should do something about it.
- [59:09]
B
Hopefully some of our listeners are all right.
- [59:12]
A
Yes, luckily, here we are at heatmap and here we are at Shift Key trying to do just that. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Shift Key. You can follow me on X at Robinsonmeyer or on Bluesky or LinkedIn under my name. There's only one of me, Jesse. Where can people find you?
- [59:29]
B
I'm at xessejenkins on blueskyessiedjenkins.com or on LinkedIn under my name.
- [59:35]
A
If you enjoyed Shift Key, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Shift Key is a production of heatmap News. Our editors are Gillian Goodman and Nicoloricello. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Chica Flamber and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kramolow. I'm Robinson Meyer. My loyal co host is Jesse Jenkins. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.