92: John Redfern | The Promise Of Geothermal Energy & The Company To Realise It - Eavor

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/john-redfern/

The following is a conversation with John Redfern who is the CEO of Eavor Technology which is one of the most exciting businesses in one of the most exciting industries in the world right now.

John Redfern has an extensive resume. He’s been described as an expert investor, advisor and serial entrepreneur in the data analytics, oil service and energy tech verticals. John spent his career in executive roles at multiple international oil corporations as a Director at Hess in London, President of Accumap in Calgary and President of IHS Energy in Denver. John spent 13 years in China co-founding a series of start-ups and holds a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University in Kingston, a Law degree from McGill University in Montreal, and an MBA degree from INSEAD in France.

It might sound like wild conjecture. But if you take John at his word, and as well recent guests on the podcast Magnus Brandberg and Patrick Hanson at theirs, the market potential for geothermal could be the most discounted opportunity in the world at the moment. And if that’s not wild enough for you, geothermal might also be the answer to carbon-free energy as well.

In This Podcast With John Redfern, You Can Expect To Hear About…

• What It Was Like Doing Business In China During The Greatest Economic Rise In History
• Eavor Technology & What Makes Them Different.
• Geothermal Top To Bottom. Its Limitations, Capital Raising, Digging Deeper & Universal Adoption Of Geothermal.

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• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 02:15 – What Is It Like Doing Business In China?
• 19:53 – Shenzen & Special Economic Zones
• 24:30 – Chinese Innovation & How The Country Has Changed.
• 29:15 – A Business Practice Of China You Don’t Like.
• 35:43 – The Transition To Geothermal Energy & Eavor Technology.
• 53:05 – How Is Eavor So Innovative?
• 1:04:51 – Quaise Energy, Galileo & The Non-Linearity Between Depth & Heat For Geothermal.
• 1:13:50 – VC In Geothermal & Eavor.
• 1:20:15 – The Problem Between Energy Generation & Energy Consumption.
• 1:25:40 – Explaining Eavor Tech By Example + Beauracratic Red Tape.
• 1:40:05 – Daniel Yergin & The Bearish Case For Geothermal.
• 1:47:09 – What Is A Country You Are Bullish On?
• 1:53:15 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History?
• 1:58:54 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The following is a conversation with John Redfern, who is the CEO of Ever Technology, easily one of the most exciting businesses in one of the most exciting industries in the world right now. John's got an extensive resume. He's been described as an expert investor, advisor, and serial entrepreneur in the data analytics, oil service, and energy tech verticals. John has spent his career in executive roles at multiple international oil corporations as a director at HEST in London. He was the president of Acumap in Calgary and president of IHS Energy in Denver. John also spent 13 years both living and operating in China whilst being there co-founding a series of startups. John holds a degree in engineering physics from Queen's University in Kingston, law degrees from McGill University in Montreal, and an MBA degree from InSeed in France. Now it might sound like wild conjecture, but if you take John at his word, and as well as recent guests on the podcast, Magnus Braddenberg and Patrick Hanson at theirs, the market potential for geothermal could be the most discounted opportunity in the world at the moment. And if that's not wild enough for you, geothermal might also be the answer to carbon-free energy as well. So while I'm typically over-optimistic and a dreamer, take that wild conjecture with a heavy dose of salt, and we actually might fall somewhere closer to reality. In this chat with John, the first 30 minutes cover John's extensive experience doing business in China before we then move on to Ever Technology and top to bottom the power and potential of geothermal energy. Specifically in the podcast, you can expect to hear about what it was like doing business in China during the greatest economic rise in history, ever technology, what makes them different, and then of course geothermal top to bottom. It's limitations, capital raising, what it takes to dig deeper. And of course, probably the most exciting thing for me as well. What does the universal adoption of this technology look like? How does it change the energy map? So, alrighty, hang around to the end for my afterthoughts as well as for me to explain my ambition for this podcast. And with absolutely no further delay, here is John Redfern. Mr. Redfern, thank you so much for uh sparing some of your very valuable time. So during your time at Partminder, which is a Chinese business, you were president for two years between 2003 and 2005. Of the 45 staff, you were the only non-Chinese. This was in 2003, and then for the next 15 years, before joining Eva, you were either CEO, founder, chairman, or president of four other companies in China. And these ran the these companies ran the gamut from semiconductors, search engines, social media, and various other technical solutions. Right. So I want to ask you to talk to me a little bit about business in China. Because from the outside one hears so much things, you know, that the Chinese don't innovate like the West. A lot of their popular apps are ripoffs, you know, horrible stories like Foxconn. As well, there is this great Chinese parable that a man who rises before dawn 365 days a year will never go hungry. So they're very hard workers. It's ingrained into the culture. Censorship, being the factory of the world, the documentary Ascension. Uh all of this just paints this.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

My goodness, that's that's a long, that's a long question. But uh a lot of topics. Let me just random randomly answer some of them. You know, some of them were always, you know, I find entertaining. Just to mention Foxconn right from the start, the stat that always amazed me is everyone was very upset if you remember. I visited a Foxconn factory and it had almost half a million people in it when I went, that whole campus on the east side of the room.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Try to talk a bit closer to the mic, John. Sorry about that. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Sorry, sorry. Yeah, and the whole Foxconn issue. Uh back when I was there in the early days, I was there from about 2003. We went through one year where everyone was up in arms about Foxconn because they had been uh some suicides, which is tragic. And they had, you know, with much fanfare, put up some nets to catch people as they fell down. And everyone was going, oh my god, this terrible work environment, how can people survive? But what people didn't realize is that factory had almost a half million people in it. And if you'd actually did this stuff uh from a statistical point of view, they we were you were twice as likely to commit suicide in an American university than working for Foxconn. Yes, but but yeah, when you heard you heard there was X number of people, we just aren't used to dealing with that sort of scale of operations, so it makes no sense. This is an operation that had to hire a hundred thousand new people every year. You know, so when I went there and started hiring people, I I got all these resumes come in and go, what everyone worked for Foxconn? How is that possible? But everyone knew when they left the farm, first thing you do, you go out and go out down to Foxconn, you got no experience, they'll give you a place to live, they'll feed you, they'll put you on the assembly line. But you don't mind because you know six months to a year from now, you're going to be moved on and ahead of all the other people who are following in your footsteps. But uh so it was it was an interesting, interesting time to be alive there. I ended up going there very much by mistake. Some guy who uh on the part miner side, which was a component trading uh firm, and Senjun was a white, you know, white hot heart of the chip trading business in China. There was about 100,000 people in Sengen who did nothing all day but buy and sell electronic components on the phone. And so he was having a hard time getting someone to go there. Partminer at the time, it's now defunct, but at the time it had the definitive database of all the world's electronic components, and it was a shortage trader. So that was interesting. You can see he called me up and said, I was living in California at the time and said, John, move to Senshin and set up my office. And I go, like, where? What? I'd never heard of the place in 2003. And I said, Well, wait a sec, let me get me get this proposition correct. You want me to move to China, a place I'd never been, I don't speak the language, I don't know the industry. Shit, I'm never gonna get an offer like that again. You know, count me in. And uh, you know, arrived there, and as you can imagine, everything was a bit fast and loose back in back in those days. Yeah, every time, everywhere there, sort of pre-Olympics, pre-2008, was pretty open and wide. And that that was sort of the pivot point when things changed. A lot of foreigners started showing up after 2008, and you ended up, you know, there was a bit of tension around the Olympics, and it just got more restrictive after that. But at the start, you know, one of my main attractions to China was that you could do almost anything, you know. So we used it as a as a base to start up some um startups, and you would just call someone anywhere in the world, and but didn't matter whether the guy was coming from India or England or the States or whatever, you told them, look, fly to Hong Kong, go to the border, look for the guy with the suit and the briefcase over on the left. He'll give you a multiple entry visa. You come in, I'll pay you in Hong Kong, no one's gonna care. We have all this great infrastructure, cost of living is low, it's semi-tropical climate, and hub of innovation, you know, where you can get any possible piece of electronics, etc., that you can ever imagine. So it was a great startup spot and very open and free. It's not the same. We didn't even have censored internet at the start. So it was it it it all it all evolved over time. But you can imagine the excitement of being in a town that was, well, I put it this way, I'm 20 years older than the town, and the town has 15 million people in it, and a bunch of hundred-story buildings, and you know, a subway map that looks like a plate of spaghetti. But yeah, and it's this it's just mind-boggling when you think about it all in that way. So I don't know. I'm sort of rambling a bit, but uh, I can answer the one other thing I would say is on the innovation side, you know, innovation comes in many forms. And copying is a form of innovation. But you know, once you get good at copying, you can then start to innovate. And you can then start to innovate in a more profound level than the people who never got through the manufacturing or copying of it. I remember at the start, had a friend of mine come over from Apple, and we were looking at a bunch of the uh electronic phones there. You can get phones that look like anything, a pack of cigarettes, a Barbie phone, you know, you you name it. It was like thousands of different different phones. And we'd be looking at these iPhones, and he's going, wait a sec, they're they're not even charging enough here to pay for the components or the bill of materials. And I said, You don't get it. All all the all the components are fake too. You know, it's like an entire entire fake infrastructure. And you'll notice they don't just copy them. You'll where else are you getting an iPhone that has, you know, you can put multiple SIM cards in simultaneously? You know, key requirement of the Chinese market, but not something Apple would ever do themselves. So it was it was always uh always fascinating to see how uh how that worked. And in fact, you ended up with a term called Shenzhai, which was sort of a term of sort of the fakes got so good and were so creative and so unusual that it became a you'd almost want them, you know, as part of a status symbol uh at one point. But you know, you could go down. I had friends of mine who were electronic engineers who would come from Silicon Valley or India or whatever, and they would be used to having to go to Radio Shack or whatever to get their components, and I'd take them down to Hua Cham Bay, sort of the electronics market, which is a bunch of 50-story buildings, filled with little tiny booths selling every possible type of electronic. And they'd always come back and they'd say, I'd say it doesn't matter, whatever you need, they have it here. And I remember I had one friend came on and he wanted a one-watt laser pointer. I don't know if you realize how powerful that is, but most of them are like five million five milliwatts. And we went around and all these guys claimed they had it. And then finally we got a guy who got it. He said, Oh, you want a one-watt laser? He took one out and lit a cigarette with it. Right? And he said, That's that's that's the one, you know, but uh it's uh it was it was crazy, crazy times.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Give us an example of almost anything. You said you could do almost anything.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Well, I mean, you you you don't have a lot of oversight, you know. You don't have put it this way one of the things you could do is if you run into a border guard or a police officer in North America, you know that they're good guys and everything else, but you don't give them any lip. You don't, you know, argue with them, you know, if you think you're right, right? But in China, you definitely argue with the border guard or the policeman if you think you're right. You go like, what are you talking about? These guys, you know, they'll give them absolute shit and they'll you'll end up having a discussion. And you won't end up being, you know. So again, that's that was one that always striked me as unusual when we always think of China as this totalitarian regime where it's a police state, and there are problems in certain spots, but you know, the the general, you know, the general uh reality is you know, the local policeman is a young skinny kid on a bike. He's not he's not intimidating, right? And the number the amount of policing going on in a place to place like Sen Jin, where they had about one-third the number of policemen that Hong Kong did. You know. So China was one of those things where on paper, technically things were quite buttoned down, but no one was very good at following the rules. And every once in a while they'd try to, let's say, tighten up a rule to get rid of uh counterfeit DVDs. But you knew two weeks later you'd go back and they'd all be there, right? You know, okay, we tried. Uh but uh so it was this whole chaotic freedom of the place. And in reality, you know, it shouldn't have been that surprising because as we all know, Chinese people like business, they like doing their own thing. The joke used to be the only place you could find poor Chinese people in the world was in China, you know, which was which was not the Chinese person's fault, it was you know the government at the time was not enabling them to blossom in the way they should have.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Yeah, they had a tough late 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Yeah, I mean what's interesting is when I was there, you know, you talked about me being the only foreigner in some of the startups I was running there, but I was also the only guy, you know, over 30, or in in a lot of cases over 25. You know, no way. Yeah, because anyone my age, it with very few exceptions, was pretty well useless, you know, because they wouldn't they would have had their formative years in the Cultural Revolution and stuff like that. There was no employment experience to be gained. So people my age tended to be brought in by their kids or grandkids and stayed at home and you know looked after their grandkids, right? And that's that's about it. So, and then eventually what was interesting is I'd been there long enough that a lot of the younger, younger guys I had hired for peanuts at the start, you know, ten years later, would be meeting me for lunch and saying, Oh, how do you like my Maserati? And stuff like that. I go like, what the hell? You know, what's what's going on here? There was a lot of money made by a lot of people, and so it was one of those once in history opportunities that happens in every country. When the big transition from the farm to city happens, it creates this humongous conveyor belt. Yeah. That does not be a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

And you happen to be there during that transition in the most populous country the world's ever known.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Right. That's you're talking about hundreds of millions of people making that transition. And that's that's a pretty cool thing to see. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

You must have created the most unreal network. For example, if you wanted to, for instance, you know, I'm I I'm sure you've exported, but if there's any geothermal applications forever in China, I mean it'll be interesting.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

We yeah, I don't I don't want to compete with them right right away because because you you have to be ready for that. And because it would be copied? Well, because they're fearsome competitors, let's say. But geothermal, especially for heating purposes, has been growing quite rapidly in China, and we're gonna have the World Geothermal Congress in China next year. So it's certainly that'd be pretty good timing for us. So we'll go back at that time. I gotta go there. Yeah, I haven't got I haven't gone back the last two years because of pandemic, but uh yeah, definitely we'll be back for that, and it'd be interesting to see what's what's what's happening on that side of things. But again, it's a whole bunch of different countries. You know, going to Beijing is completely different than going to Sen.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Really? Even even still today.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Oh yeah. I mean Sen, what's the old saying? The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away. So it's it was always always a little more free and easy. And that's one of the things a lot of people don't realize, how there's really lots of regional power barons, you know. It's is the guys running the local state government don't always listen as closely as you expect to the you know federal uh the cap guys in Beijing. Just just think of those squabbling policemen arguing with you. Same same same higher up. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's changed a lot under the current guy, under Xi, but uh certainly in the in the past when I was there in uh a freer time uh right right now it's a bit miserable with the pandemic, of course. Sure it looks locked down. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

Um if I could just comment on what you said earlier in response to an example of doing almost anything, it does just sound like classic developing world corruption. So can you differentiate from it? Say, for example, in Mexico, if you know a guy, you can call a guy, you can grease a palm, and you can all of a sudden have access to a big market that in America, in Sweden, in Australia, it would take you years of legislation to get into it.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

The good thing you gotta remember in China, it's not like a petrostate. It's not something that has a bunch of wealth that people are just trying to divide up. All the wealth they had, they had to create. So they have to have competitive businesses, they gotta have stuff like that rewarded properly. Um, so you know, and I I think in China as well, too, the trauma they went through in the 20th century left everyone with a very, you know, a sense of wanting to do something big as well as get rich. Right? That that they there was something they wanted to they wanted to improve China and get rich, you know. The the classic story is the one of of uh you know the I won't say I I shouldn't really say, but some third world, you know, diplomat coming and visiting his Chinese equivalent, and the Chinese guy has this humongous, you know, house, it's beautiful, and uh the guy goes, Man, how do you do this on a you know civil servant's salary of you know whatever it was, 200 bucks a month? And the guy says, Oh, you see see that bridge in the bay? He said, Oh yeah. 50% of that was mine, or 10% of that was mine. The guy goes, Oh wow. Then you switch roles a year later, the Chinese guy is visiting his other third world you know diplomat, and the guy says, an even bigger house, and he goes, wait a sec, you know, you gotta explain this one to me. And the guy goes, see that bridge in the bay? The guy goes, No, exactly, it was all mine. So, you know, it was it was not, you know, there was a lot of um tipping, let's say, a lot of uh incentives going back and forth, but they tended to be functional ones, you know, it'd be 2% on this or 2% on that. Um I used to laugh that in China you you you know you would never tip on the stuff we did over here. Like, for example, you'd never tip on a restaurant bill or tip the taxi driver, certainly not when I first got there. Um but you know, you would tip on the contract or something, all these things that you'd be, you know, are just patently illegal back in the States and everything else. So so that was to be honest, that was one of my challenges because the original company I was with was an American-owned company. I was a foreigner, so obviously I couldn't do any of that, right? So, you know, I set the company up and got it going. And in the other, and in the other startups I did, you know, to the most extent it was more as a back office. The last one, I guess, we were selling locally, but mostly to international companies. I, you know, would keep my nose clean and not not be doing any of that. But it also meant that what was best for the company is in a pretty short order, once it was set up and running, if it was selling into the Chinese market, it's better a Chinese guy did that, you know, and ran that. Otherwise, you're in an impossible situation trying to bridge two cultures and satisfy both in an impossible way.

SPEAKER_02 19:56

So you were there for 17 years, 2017. 13 years, forgive me. Yeah. Have done several interviews on this podcast about special economic zones. And I know that they played a absolutely fundamental role in transitioning China into a market economy, especially with the rest of the world. I wonder how much you interacted with them and whether you have any sort of anecdote about needing to interact with them.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Well, I mean, Shenzhen was the original special economic zone. And it was a bit of a walled garden at the start. When I first moved there, you still needed your passport, whether you're, you know, or identity card, whether you're Chinese or foreigner, to get in and out of Senjin. And not every Chinese person could get in. Uh, so there's sort of like an internal border. By the time I left, you know, a lot of that distinction had gone away and it was pretty well free movement everywhere. But at the start, I think it was it was just more a form of control where they could control a bit the speed with it with which people moved into the city. And I think to be fair to them, part of the reason you want to do that so you don't end up with urban squalor or shanty towns or anything else. Uh, you know, Sen Gen apartments originally were pretty small, I believe, you know, before I got there. But you never got you know things that would you'd count as a shanty town. They got to build, you know, they got to control it so that too many people didn't come in immediately, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 21:25

Yeah. For the audience, uh and actually for me as well, can you put Shenzhen on the map?

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Just cross the border from Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Yeah, okay. So that's a crazy populated part of the world, isn't it? Because isn't Shuangshu just a little bit south of that as well?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

You have you have the Pearl River Delta, which is a huge thing. So you have Hong Kong, then as you go inland, you have Sen, then you have I always loved this Dungwan and Guangdong, the the town of Dungguan in the state of Guangdong, which also is about ten million people. And then you get up to Guangzhou, A.K.A. Canton, and that's at the peak of it, and then you go down the other side, Fauxhan, uh, you know, right down to Macau. And you add up the you know, the population. That's sixty years. Hold on the mic, John. Yeah. That's sixty or seventy million people, uh, in that one little area. Yeah, there's not a lot of equipment. Yeah, it's it's a fair size. Yeah. But in anyways, it was it was it was crazy to see all that. Crazy to see all the subways built, crazy to see all the high speed rail links appear from nowhere. It's very crazy to see the you know things like the airports they built appear out of nowhere, you know, like kilometers long.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

I I I find it uh so romantic, this idea of um, like you said earlier, very well, it happens once in a country's lifetime. But you were there for the transition, you know. Um a former guest on the podcast was a guy called Jeff Raby, who's a diplomat, an Australian diplomat, who was in um Beijing. Right, but he was uh he was an economist there at the same time as you in the early 2000s, and he just says it was uh it was like a you know, it was a romantic old little it it was just a romantic time because people were still riding around on bikes, you had this great expat community, everything you did had just boundless opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Everyone was you know unbelievably optimistic. Yeah, I remember being in that same situation in Moscow when it happened to the Soviet Union, but that didn't last very long. China it lasted you were there too. China it lasted around John China it lasted pretty pretty well, and it's your one chance to you know really be a visible minority. You you know you're the you walk around for several weeks and then you see this one funny looking guy walking down the road and you realize, oh wait a sec, he's funny looking because he looks like me. But you for you forget you forget everything else. It's such a uh you know ethnic block of hand Chinese. I remember get people come and visit me, and after a couple of weeks they come up to me and go and they get a little worried and they go, John, no one even looks Chinese anymore. They know that it's the fat guy, the tall guy, the blonde guy, the well not blonde, but the bald guy, you know. And uh you know, it's once the ambient temperature is Chinese, no one looks Chinese. It's just it's just strange how that works.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

You sort of um snubbed the idea earlier that the Chinese couldn't innovate. Can you give some examples of Chinese innovation?

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Well, I'll give you well, how about uh you know they were the leaders in drone manufacturer, they have certainly were cutting edge in social media if you've used any of the Tencent products like WeChat. No, it's not a good idea. But a better statement. Yeah, yeah, that that's like crack, social media crack. But and the Chinese did that. So but I think a better a better way of looking at it is that when I moved there, China's you know production of international patents was like zero. You know, more recently, they're they're up there with the US sort of co-leading the amount of you know patents, international patents per year that are issued. And what's mind-boggling is about last time I looked at the statistics, about half of those were from Sengen. A town without even a decent you know research university. And so there's all you know, it's not being published, it's not public university stuff. But there you've got you know, Sengen, I think, personally generating more patents than any other town on the planet, probably by a long shot. That that is phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

So you've hinted a little bit about it changed over the time you were there, and certainly now it would be quite different. Can you give some uh personal anecdotes to describe how the change happened? Because it sounds like if last year Shenzhen produced more international patents than any other city in the world, I mean they're doing something right, but then there is clearly this very authoritarian undertone that is coming out of China.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

That's coming back from you know one individual who's leading that. But I think you know, to stay too much out of the politics, the real transition I saw was like I say from 2003 to 2005 in a place like Senjin. You know, I I I arrived just after SARS went away, right? So there weren't a lot of foreigners. You felt very unique. You know, when my kids came and visited, they loved it because they were rock stars, everyone would want their picture taken with them, type of thing. Like, well, foreign kids. That's what a concept. But then starting 2008, the West sort of went into recession. There was the Beijing Olympics, and I'd go down to my local Starbucks, and all of a sudden it they were all filled with foreigners. You know, they just sort of it's like everyone sat down and said, Well, nothing's happening here. China looks interesting, and they all they all they they all just got in the plane and showed up. And that sort of changed it a bit.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

It was about the wealth creation, wasn't it? I mean, people just saw gold on the streets.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Right. They saw they saw potential for gold at a time when there wasn't a lot of gold in the West. You know, the 2008-2009 recession was a bit scary for a lot of people. A lot of people got wiped out. Uh and yeah, China, China looked like the brave new world. They and the rest of it is happened. That that was a very, you know, noticeable shift, but since that time it's been a more gradual change. But then it's, you know, I it's in a universe right now, the post-pandemic, that I have no experience with, because I haven't been there for two years, but it sounds like it's completely changed again. Like a lot of places, probably not for the better.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

You know, but it's very Can you speak to that at all? I mean, I assume that's kind of conversations with old friends and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yeah, I I'm I'm not an expert on it, but I I just know it shut down a lot of stuff. Um, you know, my last business there finally got shut down. You know, we were we were doing a store location planning business where we mapped every store in China and you know, mapped every shopping mall and all that. But all our clients were the foreign you know multinational retailers, the McDonald's and Nikes of the world, you know, where do you put your next 10,000 stores? That all came grinding to a halt, obviously, once the pandemic happened. Um but you know, there's lots of businesses like that. But the main thing is it's just hard to get in and out with the pandemic, or it has been. And even if you're in, who who wants a lockdown? I mean, that's no thank you. So what about geothermal? Maybe we should talk a little Yes, yes, no, John. But anyway, got any got any other questions?

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Sure, I have no problem. Forgive me. Um I do want to ask you two quick ones on China, but they'll they're they're they're less sort of you know broad commentary. It's just a quick um from your experience. So what's a practice in China that you wish you could write into the Western business culture?

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Uh I mean at the time just the entrepreneurial nature of it, you know, and the there was no and it was all driven by optimism. You know, people believed anything was possible, which of course is essential if you're gonna be an entrepreneur. Whereas too often in the West it all gets ground down, and you know, it's you can't do that, you can't try that. There you had sort of bold experimentation. The guy would be, you know, you'd run into a guy who had a shoe factory, and he said, Oh, I'm tired of shoes, I'm gonna make TVs now. And you go, like, what the hell? You can't just decide that. Oh, yeah, no, it's simple. You know, I I just different components, but you know, and you'd get sort of conversations like that, and you go, Man, I just wasn't thinking. Or the whole fact that, you know, so often in the West, we're thinking, oh, there's been so much change, you know, it's how can we possibly adapt that quickly? And then you'll go and meet people in China who've been through way more change. You know, I'd be interviewing someone who'd be speaking English to me, but you'd see they'd sort of be looking around at you, trying to triangulate my nose or something. A big nose is considered something great in China, by the way. But you know, and I'd say, Why are you why are you looking like that? And so, well, you know, I've never actually spoken to a non-Chinese person before. And your sort of head sort of blows up and you go, Oh, wait, you're speaking English and you never, you know, because it's just that big block. Or the other, the other takeaway that I found just charming. And I hired this one guy to be a representative in Changhai. And uh he was going, John, one of the first things he asked, he said, John, how many countries have you been to? And I said, Oh, that's a good question. Let me think about it. He said, Wait, wait, you have to think about it? Yeah, I've been the one. How can you have to think about it? You know, how can there possibly be so many? And so there's this whole you know disconnect that was always throwing up amusing, uh amusing insights, and we just took for advantage.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

You you get this impression though, because I I I I've only been to the country once, and it was by accident. I took the cheapest flight possible between Europe and Australia, and we had a domestic layover in China, and visa problems happened, the whole plane was full of Dutch people, the whole plane was um not allowed on. We had this whole thing. We were there for a while, and the it was the point was made to me that a lot of the people we were interacting with potentially had never even read an English word in their life. Not only had they never heard it spoken, and it just makes me think this man you're speaking to who's making a big deal out about you've been to so many countries, how much international wonder last is there in an in in in a culture that has its internet censored and um you know, like uh yeah, I'm trying to avoid uh just leaning into sort of stereotypical um takes on China.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

But yeah, you know I mean again anyone who's interested will have a VPN anyways. And even during the internet censorship area, we are still able in Sengen to openly buy a direct link into Hong Kong for our business purposes. Uh so there people always went around. And you know, the fact that the internet would be censored actually increases the interest in traveling to actually see things, right? I mean, you know, one of the people don't want a censored view. One of the things, for example, people don't realize is to say, well, why were all the Chinese always buying those bootleg you know CDs? Was it because they were cheap? No. They don't mind going to the theater and paying more than you are or you or I was to sit in big lazy boy chairs. They went all and got all the bootleg ones because they wanted the non-censored version, right? That that was the big attraction. So, you know, guys like the guy who I just told you about, Whaley, he's traveled to a whole bunch of countries now. Almost all my Chinese friends, they've all done a ton of travel. That was one of the first things they all wanted. And they still they still like it. And they still, as much as possible, to the extent it's legal, love the idea of getting a beach head outside of China, just in case, right? So I I I think if anything, all the changes right now, I'm guessing, but I'm guessing for the right people, it's probably made the attraction of travel even greater. Yeah, and if you go to Paris, you and if you go to Paris, you'll see what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

The number of Chinese people there. Okay, and now one more quick one, John, which you'll be able to knock off quickly. A Chinese business practice. Um no, the other way around. A Western business practice that uh needs to be written into the Chinese DNA.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Uh Western practice of Chinese. Well, I mean it it would, you know, all those cliches about um you know not just China but Japan and everyone else liking very loosey-goosey, broad agreements that are impossible to enforce. You know, I think that that one, it's just it'd just be nice to have a a better middle ground. You know, not the US version where unless it says it in the contract, it doesn't exist, and not the Chinese version of saying, well, let's just have this sort of general principles, and then we'll worry about you know the actual implementing of it later. That would that would be a nice middle ground to get. And I'm sure we'll get there eventually as things you know continue to internationalize, even so they tend to seem to be going in reverse at the moment. I think you know, history is hard to turn around, even if people try for short periods of time.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

Nice. Well, John, look, um I could it's just I've never spoken to someone before with so much tangible experience operating in China, and I really wanted to get a sense for what you thought about it. But let's talk about an extremely exciting company. The future, man. The future. Yes. So why the transition into energy?

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Well, I mean, energy-wise, I mean, I've worked for oil companies like Hess uh in the UK and in Canada. So I did have that oil company background. I also did work for service companies, used to run IHS uh, which has now been merged with Market and then Dow Jones or whatever. So been on the service company side. But yeah, um, when I was in China, obviously you're not an oil and gas entrepreneur because that's one of those pillars that's owned by the states and by the state itself, and you don't, you know, as an individual, you can't play there. Um so yeah, while I was in China, we got more onto the techie side, the data side, things like that. In fact, technic, you know, anyways, we'll leave we'll leave that. But this whole thing came out, this whole ever thing came about because there's a bunch of people I tend to innovate with, and one of them was this guy named Paul Cairns in Alberta. And Paul was the one who was looking for an idea. You know, we were sitting there back in 2014, 2015, 2016. Were terrible years for the oil industry, especially in Canada, you know, because you had the low prices, but then you had the lack of pipelines, no offtake. It was it was desperate. And at the same time, there was this $80 billion unfunded uh orphan well liability that someone had to pay, and it looked like the public purse was gonna have to pick it up, and they're gonna pay $80 billion to turn a bunch of old oil well sites into little patches of grass, which seemed to be not a great use of funds. So this whole thing started by Paul sitting there and brainstorming with me and saying, God, there's got to be something better we can do with all those oil and gas sites. And like by the thousand other people, we all came up with the same idea to say, geez, it'd be great if we could turn those old wells, those old assets back into uh you know geothermal wells and produce something from them. There were already brownfield sites, why not? And we looked into that, and unfortunately, for all the people still following that business model, we could tell it was never gonna scale. It was never gonna, you know, and the key is the energy industry, unless you have something that scales massively, you're not part of the solution, right? You just you're a niche product. And you know, reusing oil wells was always gonna be that. It's gonna be a little bit here, a little bit there. You're never gonna add gigawatts of power where you need it, when you need it. So we sort of gave up on that. Uh, but Paul kept thinking about it. And you know, one of the things we had noticed as to why geothermal wouldn't work in a place like Alberta, in general, whether you used an oil old oil well or not, was because the temperatures were so low that you ended up, you know, to produce the power, you gotta pump water in and out of the aquifer, the reservoir that you find at the bottom of the well. The rock temperature. Yeah, the rock temperature in Alberta is not very high. The temperature gradient isn't very high. Typically around the world, the temperature gradient is about 30 degrees C per kilometer. If you're in a good place for traditional geothermal, you want it maybe to be 60, maybe double that 60 degrees C per kilometer. And so, in fact, you take a big country like Canada, geothermal is so niche that you know there has never been a single kilowatt of geothermal power produced anywhere in Canada, which is incredible when you think about it. It's all in a few places like Iceland, like Kenya, like the geysers in California. Uh, but in general, part of the problem with geothermal is you gotta produce a lot of fluid, a lot of hot brine from a reservoir, and then re-inject it back into that same reservoir. That takes a lot of power, it's got about a 50% parasitic pump load. So you produce two megawatts just to have net one megawatt type of thing. So, what Paul said, he said, geez, instead of pumping the water in and out of the aquifer, what if we just took a couple of oil wells, drilled down, turned towards each other, connected them, made a big U loop, tied it back on the surface with a pipeline. Couldn't you flow the water a lot easier? And we actually looked at that and said, that seems terribly expensive, Paul. But you know what? It's better than you think because not only do you not have to pump it, it pumps itself. Once it starts moving, you have hotter water on this side and that's lighter density, so that'll rise. It's cooler water on the other side, so that's something so you end up with this thermocyte in the back. We say it pumps itself. And it was that first, it's still totally uneconomic, but it was that first eureka moment that got us sort of interested in saying, what could we do if we took all the learnings we had from the sheriff revolution and the oil sands and all the experience they have there drilling multilateral wells and doing thermodynamic subsurface and driving down drilling costs? Is there something here? And at that point, we said, like any good entrepreneur, okay, our gut says yes. I have no idea how it's going to work out, but our gut says yes. Let's spend, you know, the next five years if it keeps working, doing everything we need to do, every possible innovation to make this idea of the closed loop work. And that's how we got started. Now, of course, you know, once we're sick. Yeah, once we started doing it, of course, then we realized that you know there was a lot of people, especially experts in the geosmoral field, who said, no, that'll never work. You know, geos thermal is hard enough, closed loop geothermal is impossible, you guys are a bunch of quacks. And the last five years has been, you know, we used to joke the fact that people thought we were crazy was our original barrier to entry. You know, now that we've slowly, slowly convinced one group after another, one individual, one company after another, including some big ones like some oil companies and that that can actually evaluate you know our learning curve ideas. You know, now we've got to start running because now other people are are are chasing us. But essentially it's that five-year initial head start, just going through and every aspect of it, you know, the design of the well, how we complete them, how we drill them, what we put in the fluid and all that. And there was another Eureka moment where after we had started and people were giving us a hard time, there's a guy, and you'll love this, who worked for Shell. On his business card, it actually said black swan detector. So this guy well, you know what that means.

SPEAKER_02 42:35

Well, like he can he can predict the Taleb's black swan.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Yeah, exactly. Where he's to look out for potential black swans, things that are outside their their current uh defined remit. What and GeoS Thermal was one of them amazing job title and job to have.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

So you can just seek those high.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

He also pointed out that BSD also could stand for bullshit detector, but we'll leave that. But yeah, but that's very T-Leb as well. Yeah. But the whole the whole thing was that we went and talked to this guy, and he said, Look, look, I'll save you time. I've actually compiled a list, he said, of the 10 reasons geothermal will never scale. And if it doesn't scale, it's of no, it's in no one's interest, not even the oil companies, not even given that they have all these skill sets they can apply there. And we went and looked at this list, and we had already solved all 10 of them just by our original premise of moving into a closed loop. You know, and I can give you that list if you want, I got it here somewhere. But it was that that was the Eureka second Eureka moment. We said, okay, we're really on to something now. And then we started raising money, hiring people who actually knew something. And it's just been ongoing that the farther you go, the more wrinkles you uncover. It all ended up being way harder than we originally expected, but that's pretty normal in startups. But that's actually a good thing, because my original fear was we're going to be able to do this, but that anyone would then be able to replicate it, which means we don't make any big return on it. But now, knowing what I know, I know no one's going to replicate it, not without you know all the patents and the know-how and the exclusive arrangements and the land holdings and everything else that we put together to try to capture and ring fence this particular type of energy. And you know what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah, it it is. And so, you know, we've started raising money and getting alliances based on that. But it's interesting when you think of the number of different ways this particular energy source is incredible. You know, the the obvious one at the start was that it's firm and not, you know, intermittent like wind and solar. Wind and solar will always be the cheapest power around, but you get them when they come. You don't get to direct it. Our thing was firm being geosthermal, but then what we found out later it was actually dispatchable. It was inherent in the design, and we didn't even realize it at the start. It's also what do you mean by that, dispatchable? What I mean, hey, is sorry about that, still getting over COVID. But what I mean by that is when you have something like an a nuclear plant or something, it's gonna be it's gonna be um firm. Yeah, it produces the same amount every day, and you can't really turn it up and down easily without having a lot of complications. But what do you need right now? Right now you need a dispatchable source because you got all this wind and solar going on and off depending on when the wind's blowing, when the sun's out, and everything else. And ours, just by loosening up or choking back on that thermocipant effect, we can change the circulation rate of the water, and we can use what we have almost like a big battery. So if our thing is 10 megawatts capacity, you know, that's 240 megawatt hours per day. We can either produce that as a firm baseload at 10 megawatts every hour, or we could let's say pair it with solar, shut down the power output completely at midday when you got too much solar, and then open it up and produce twice as much, let's say in the evening when you really need it, and the sun goes down, and you need you know intermittent power after dark, so to speak. And that's that's super valuable. And who else does that? There's no you know, you can have a gas peaker plant to do that, but you there's no other green solution that does that. So we do we do that. One of the other big things with wind and solar is simply it requires a big footprint. Uh so if you're gonna take the current electric grid, double or triple it to take care of all the electric vehicles and all the electrification that you want to do, and then try to do that all 100% in wind and solar plus a ton of batteries, you need a lot of land. And maybe that maybe that even works in the states, because what else are you gonna do with Nevada anyways, right? Except cover it with solar panels. But for most other places, back Australia, yeah. Yeah, or yeah, Western Australia is another example. But if you're in Europe or something, you don't want to cover half of Europe and and that sort of stuff. And in places like Singapore, let's say, you're already you know precluded from doing much wind and solar. They do a little bit of solar, but it's you know a fraction of what they need overall. So, you know, for us to come to those guys and say, hey, Singapore, you want to be green and you want to be independent, and you're currently you know relying on 95% of your energy from imported LNG hydrocarbons, you know, is that really what you want? And we show them that they could be energy independent, that's pretty impressive. Or you go to Europe and say, hey, not only do you not want to cover your beautiful countryside with solar panels and windmills, but you don't really want to be reliant on Russian gas anymore. Russian gas for you know district heating or Russian gas for picker plants to make the whole thing go around. You know, so from the whole energy security side, use of space sort of side, just you know, dispatchability side, you name it, we we're this sort of unique fix. And I know it's a unique fix because what's one of the only other alternatives that they're even discussing that could make the same impact? If all you're interested in is decarbonization, nuclear is probably your ticket, right? But why would you do nuclear if what we have is there and works? You know, the very s the very fact that people are even reconsidering nuclear shows they got no other options. Because politically it's a it's a disaster, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:55

It doesn't nuclear have a higher density than nuclear has a J Femmel at the depth we have now could produce?

SPEAKER_00 49:01

Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely got a higher density than most things. But you know, we're we're still way denser than uh, you know, we're 35 times more denser than solar, 300 times more dense than wind. We're we're dense enough that we can replace, and we're looking at lots of places where they're taking out things like coal plants, which are also very dense, and replacing them with our stuff.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

And our surface footprint is proximity to the grid, so it can be immediately consumed.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Right. That's why that's why that's a good good uh location. You know, you just f fill in what's missing. So yeah, nuclear is somewhat somewhat more dense, but you know what we're doing is dense enough, especially when you're looking at just a surface footprint. Most of what we do is underground, so you don't even see it. And you can stack them up, you know, just like slices of toast underground and get pretty high density.

SPEAKER_02 49:58

So it's a such a crazy coincidence, but today I was at Uppsala University, an hour aside Stockholm. They're having this thing called energy week. Okay. I went today to sit in on the one niche sidebar geothermal chat that they were having. Okay. And um the woman who gave the keynote speech was the head of the British Geological Survey, I think that was her name. But on that point just there, on the uh type of land that you would actually occupy, she said that to for the equivalent um geothermal energy that is being produced by a well in Southampton, you would require 20,000 acres of solar panels. And that's you know, that's such a great way to think about the with Eva Technology um or any other, well not any other, but some other geothermal applications, how effective they can be at powering a city. Because in your, you know, just in Central Park, you know, put up a nice little barrier, set up your uh set up your technology, and bada bing, bada boom, you've got clean, green, reliable energy at the cost of, you know, a mausoleum.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

And what she probably didn't emphasize, and so is Hampton, the geology is not that hot. So, you know, if you had a hot area, it would even be higher density. No. The other the other thing of doing it, she's talking about electricity. Of course, geothermal's ten times more efficient at providing direct heat than electricity. Just because the conversion ratio at the temperatures we're dealing with, they're not very efficient. So if you think that there's a good trade-off, you know, footprint-wise on the electricity side, on the heat side it's even even better. Even better.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Um, I think Sweden, I could be wrong, but I think Sweden has the largest application of that super shallow um geothermal application to heat housing and to heat buildings.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

Yeah. All all over Scandinavia and Northern Europe, there's lots of people for, you know, you have individual houses or even large individual buildings. You can install geothermal heat pumps. That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 52:14

Out in Cabby and Dundee, which are the really rich suburbs, everyone's got their own little geothermal setup to independence.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Now you you still need to be powered by the grid or something that provides the electricity to run the heat pump. But it's a lot more efficient. You it's a little bit different than what we're we're doing. It is direct uh conduction based like ours, but it's very shallow, and what you're essentially doing is using the near subsurface as a heat sink just to operate your heat pump off. So, you know, it's good to helps it helps the load in the summer when you're trying to keep it cool and vice versa. But it's still a little bit uh different than the sort of thing we're doing, where you'd put in an Everloop and it'd heat or cool the whole town or you know produce its own power based on you know bringing up some reasonably higher temperatures.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

So so we're we're addressing what the Everloop does, I think, at the periphery. Could you explain what the product is today um and then compare it to what the initial you know plans were in 2014?

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Well, where it where it is today is we've got just one functioning um prototype in our field demonstration, I should call it, in Alberta, which we built back in 2019. And that was there not to produce power, but really to prove up technically the concept. So we went to all our potential clients at that time and say, what do you still need proof on? You know, one of the things they didn't need proof on was that we could take an org system and convert heat into power. That's an off-the-shelf component. But they did want to make sure we could do the well intersection reliably and repeatedly. They did want to see that we could go and drill all the multilaterals open hole and seal them with a rock pipe product instead of putting casing in because that cuts cost about 50% right there. But mainly they wanted us to show that we could build these things on time, on budget, and that the thermodynamic modeling we're doing would actually work. At the start, there was a big fear that, oh, wouldn't that cool off too quickly and it won't really work, and we don't believe it. So, you know, what's ironic, of course, is one of the big advantages of what we're doing is it is predictable and you can forecast it, and it is stable. So, anyways, we did that in, you know, before we built it, we estimated what the power output was going to be within a couple of percentage points, and it continues to perform in that tight range since then. And that's one of the reasons it's scalable and financeable and everything else, because it's predictable. Just like wind and solar. Wind and solar are super unpredictable on a day, but over you know, the first 10 years of life, you know, it all averages out and you know exactly what it's gonna produce, which is very different than traditional geothermal or oil and gas, where you have all this reservoir risk, even when once it's up and running. You don't know when there's gonna be some cold water breakthrough or the whole plant is gonna start you know going into decline. So we've got that one demo plant that's costs about 13 million, uh, but it's sort of like two and a half kilometers by two and a half kilometers. What we have now is we've been working on the whole portfolio of other prospects. I think we've got about 70 of them. Much deeper, right? You're looking at. Yeah, we have much deeper. We got about 70 of them in Germany alone. We've got our first commercial project going to happen in Bavaria on the site of a former failed traditional GSTRL plant, which always is fun because all the infrastructure's there, the data's there, and it sort of proves that we can go places other people can't. But that'll be not two and a half kilometers down, about four and a half kilometers down, with many more multilaterals, and that'll be a power and combined power and heat project. And then, but the one we're actually gonna drill first, that that'll start in the fall. But the one we're gonna be drilling in the summer is the our you know, moving past our 1.0 technology we demoed in Alberta. We then gotta take that same thing and show how we can do it deeper and hotter. So we'd be drilling probably down to about seven kilometers uh this August and September in New Mexico. And the bottom of that well, which would be the deepest onshore commercial well ever drilled at seven kilometers, should get us down to places that are three where the rock temperature is 350 to 400 degrees C. So if we can do that, we're proving a system that allows us to use all our other technology, but in those hot temperatures by keeping it cool. But also by keeping that, you know, the drill bit cool and the bottom hole assembly cool. We also are planning on inducing something that's called shock cooling. So if you've got you know the drilling mud coming down, a special setup that we've got basically, so it arrives at the rock face, let's say 200 degrees C less than the rock temperature, it sets up all these little micro fractures that end up making it easy to drill. And so if this all works the way we'd like to work it to work, the deeper we get landscape. Yeah, the deeper we get and the hotter it gets, the faster we should drill. Which is mind-boggling. You know, you go to talk to some guy, I don't know, if you've been out Kostla, but he's always had a little bit of an interest in geothermal, his famous VC in the valley. And his thing, he'd always say, John, the thing you want is you want if you can prove linear costs, you won. Because the energy content of the heat goes up almost exponentially as it gets hotter and hotter. But if your drilling costs only go up linearly, you you win. You just go deep enough and you've got economics. Absolutely. Well, what we've got is you know something that's the opposite. That actually gets faster the deeper and hotter you go. If it works out the way we'd say it is. So that'll be an exciting.

SPEAKER_02 58:14

I mean that that in itself sounds like the innovation. I mean, well, where where is your innovation coming from? Because aren't you know a lot of really smart geophysicists and former oil and gas people working on these hard engineering problems? How is Eva the ones who happen to have the right talent?

SPEAKER_00 58:35

First of all, all oil and gas technology sort of tops out at about 150 to 175 degrees C. Why? Because if it's much hotter than that, you probably baked all the hydrocarbons out of existence, they've broken down or whatever. So, you know, all the oil and gas technology, and we're reusing a lot of it, but you know, a large part of it is, or there hasn't been a lot of incentive, let's say, for the oil industry to find out how to operate at 400 degrees C because they weren't in geothermal and you don't need it for oil and gas. But as to the question of where our innovation comes from, we've just been very lucky that we've started to mine a very rich, you know, sort of vein of innovation. So it again, it all started with that, hey, let's make it closed loop and it pumps itself. Well, that has just led to a whole series of other questions that have led to us innovations.

SPEAKER_02 59:32

The same labor is coming up with these innovations?

SPEAKER_00 59:34

The same people. I mean, I think about 15 of our 45 people have all found their names onto a patent, so it's pretty broad based in the company. Some people contribute a lot more than others, and we got some pretty smart cookies. But it's more than having smart, smart people. It's got to be in a position where you're lucky enough that you're asking the right questions. Like, for example, the solution that we're using to be able to do this shock cooling wouldn't work in a traditional setup. You know, we're doing it by cooling the cooling the cooling the mud and keeping it cool. So a way I won't tell you right now, but the patent you know is coming public soon. But but if I was a traditional one and I was just pumping mud down into permeable aquifers and the mud itself could dissipate from the well and go into the reservoir, it wouldn't be able to keep the bit drill bit cool. So it's just there's dozens of situations like that where you say, well, how do we solve this problem? We take another little step forward and then we realize, man, the reason we figured that out is because it wouldn't have been valuable to anyone else, right? Or it wouldn't, they don't need it, or it doesn't fit in their operating paradigm. So because we are the first one to tackle a lot of these problems with closed-loop geothermal, because we're the only one to spend five years and intensively research it, we're by default the ones who come up with all the solutions. You know, how there's all this co-invention theory, right? Two people came up with the theory of evolution at the same time, because it was in the air, you know, so it's this question of who's looking at it first or slightly having to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:15

That's such a fascinating question to think about. Yeah. Well why was that that a few people happened to come up with the theory of evolution at the same time? Because all the precursors were there.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:26

All the precursors were there. You know, uniformitarianism and the geological side that reformulated the sort of timescales you're talking about that allowed you know these slow processes to happen. There's this a whole bunch of stuff. And the ultimate you know, it's not like there's this and then all of a sudden you're over here. It there's a whole bunch of little innovations that make it by the end, when the Eureka moment comes, it's obvious to everyone. It's like the end of the mystery, mystery movie. Oh, yeah, of course, of course it was a butler. Oh, why why didn't I think that?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:58

Can you can you think of any other great innovations that maybe have that uh co-innovation, like you just said? I mean, maybe electricity, I mean Tesla and the other people that are.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:08

Yeah, they would they all they all in the same time. Yeah, work on the same time. But you know, I I yeah, I I'm trying to think of one that would be uh the car. The car, or you look at uh electric cars right now, right? I'm projecting onto your Canadian accent.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

The car. The car, yeah, out and about. Um but um no, I can't really nothing really strikes me at the top.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:37

But there must be that I'm sorry, that that's such a tangent, but um that's something I've never thought about, which is fascinating. And you think so? You think that that potentially that moment is happening in very deep drilling at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:50

Yeah, um well, in a closed loop geothermal, anyways, because it's more than just being able to treat drill deeply and all that. But you know, I mean, there's other all I can say is I can't tell you all of them, but there's about six or seven different innovations. When I've asked the guys the same thing, I go, that's you know, incredibly obvious now that you explained it to me. Why did no one else do it? And then they'll explain yes, but no one else would have seen value in it because of this, or no one else would have made that leap because they don't care about things that temperature, or you know, there's all there's been a bunch of that, and there's always a bit of an explanation afterward as to why no one else came up with it again. But you can look at something like um you know modern-day Tesla, you know, the electric car. What you know, what what is driving that? You know, and you could say that there's lots of people following them because the real innovation was you know the battery technology, the battery innovation and stuff like that. And you couple that with all the self-driving stuff, which again was in the air. It's it's just taking the elements that are already there and seeing where they can be applied. But yeah, the evolution is a is the famous one. I mean, Darwin only published it because when he realized someone else was about to publish something, he had written.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

Yeah, wasn't there some poor Russian fella who no one's ever heard of who basically came to the same conclusion? Well, no, his name was.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:14

I think it was the guy's name was Wallace. I think he was another British guy who came to have it even worse. Yeah, but I think you're thinking of um uh genetics, modern genetics, was uh again some monk. Oh really.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:30

No, I I think it was I think it was a competing theory of evolution. Okay, I think the guy's name was Wallace. He's in the biography of Von Humboldt, they spoke about it a lot because that guy was very good. But um I've now lost the question, the follow-up that I really wanted to ask you. So I'm gonna defer to my notes. Um and if it comes back to me, forgive me if it if it doesn't make sense, but if it comes back to me, I really want to ask it. Um but this is a your revelation that you could perhaps drill deeper, not even at a linear cost, but a cheapening cost, uh-huh is so significant because of the following reason. And so could you explain the non-linearity between the deeper you go, the more wattage you can then uh you know extract from. I mean that's the wrong way to put it, but the hotter the rock means the more energy you can produce. So can you just explain, for example, the difference between five kilometers and fifteen kilometers societally, what it means if you can actually dig that deep and then extract the heat.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:36

Um, well, maybe I should first explain why it's usually not even linear, right? And that's because the deeper you go, usually deeper you go, usually the hotter it goes, which is difficult, but it's also the harder the rock. You go deep enough, you're into the granite basement, which is really hard, difficult rock to go into. And then what also happens when you're drilling? You got these little mechanical drill bits at the at the front end that are being Ground down, and there's a certain bit life, right? So you can imagine the harder the rock and the deeper you are, the harder the rock, the more frequently you got to change out that bit. How do you change out that bit? You have to back up the entire drill stream. So if you're down seven kilometers of drill stream, imagine how long it takes to bring all that out just to change the bit and to go back down again.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:26

I think today, funnily enough, it's such a coincidence that I happened to be at a conference today talking about it. But they said at this uh site in Southampton it took 20 hours to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:35

Right. So you don't want to do it too often. You don't want to do it once a day, or you're never going to be doing much drilling, right? You never get anything done. So that's that's part of the problem. And so slower rate of penetration and decreasing bit life, and you end up getting, you know, amongst other issues. The other problem is, you know, you get into physical limitations. Why do you usually stop off maybe at seven kilometers? Because by that point the drill sting is so heavy, it it you can't hang it off the same, you know rig. You can't you can't lift it out. It's too seven kilometers of heavy steel pipe, that's a lot of weight to hoist up. And so if you want to go below seven kilometers today, you've got to have some lighter alloy. So it's you know the weight of a you know a six-kilometer pipe instead of a seven. So all these all these problems are there. The other problem is, of course, as you go down, the easiest way of looking at it is what's the energy content of that brine? You know, traditionally it goes up a little bit, each degree it goes up. But once you get down deep enough and hot enough, you get in you know past liquid, past gas into a super critical condition that you know has a lot more, has a lot more energy in it than just you know heating up a bunch of water a little, you know, a degree here or a degree there. You you we all know about phase transitions and everything else. You're heating up water, it's you know the transition from solid to liquid, from liquid to gas, where the big energy absorption or release is. And so when you go down deep, the costs go up, but you know, the energy content goes up as well. And so if you can remember electricity at a depth. Yeah. Well, you have you bring stuff up that's hot enough that you can generate electricity.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:28

Okay, well, I have to ask you about um what I think is a very exciting technology, and this is coming from someone outside of the industry, so I don't necessarily have the insight that you do, but someone trying to dig really deep, more than 15 kilometers deep, is a company out of Boston called Quase Energy. Yeah, I know Carlos. Um so what do you think about them?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:47

Uh like I say, I know Carlos, they're good guys, they're smart guys. They're working on the next generation bitless drilling, as you know, um microwave technology. And you know, they're in a little bit different um situation than us. We're trying to, you know, we're we're at the high TRL level, so we're looking how do we take these technologies and apply them right now to produce power right now. Uh Carlos over at Quays, their stuff's super revolutionary, but he's just working on that bit itself and will be probably for the next 10 years, and then maybe it might evolve into a commercial tool. So he's much lower down than the TRL scale, but of course aiming big time, because to drill 15 kilometers down, that would be totally revolutionary. That solves the problem. Yeah, and that's certainly farther than we can. We think we can you know solve solve the problem without going down 15 kilometers, but you know, deeper is always better if you can do it cost effectively. But uh so no, they're they're good guys, they're serious. But I what what I what I what I would say is if their system works, we're happy to use it to drill ever loops. So, you know, all these innovations are all cost inputs for all of us, and if he wins, we all win.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:06

Yeah. My my my question actually just came back to me from before. Um, perhaps an explanation of the isolated innovation you're talking about, or maybe not isolated, but rapid innovation um in short succession, multiple innovation. Basically, what you've experienced at Eva in the last um yeah, the last couple of years. It could be explained by this lack of connection between the academics and the commercial. Because, for example, today this conference, I brought up Quaze, they'd never heard of it. I brought up Eva and they were like, Oh yeah, that Canadian company. The these academics who live, they're geophysicists, you know, they they live in it and they were so passionate and excited about it, but they had this they had essentially zero understanding of the commercial side of the business outside of Sweden. They could just talk about Klimion and you know Shalefthiel.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:00

Yeah, no, Klein again, it's not it's not um by accident that Kleimon developed in Sweden and we developed in Canada. Neither country has a geothermal industry, right? And that means we're free to innovate without being dumped upon. You like the historical examples, think of uh Galileo, who was the primary opponent to him? It wasn't the Pope. It was the other you know, astronomers and people who would watch the skies and say that's ridiculous. And part of the problem, it wasn't really that they were necessarily closed-minded. They had some very good arguments as to why Galileo was wrong that Galileo himself couldn't answer. You know, one of them would be if the Earth really moved around the sun, where is the stellar parallax? Stellar parallax meaning that if you're moving that far, you know, the closer stars would be seen to move compared to the farther stars. And there was no stellar parallax. Now the answer turned out to be stars were infinitely farther away than anyone could even imagine, right? That that was but they had a good argument. And it's the same thing, you know, right now. There's been, I think we're up to the 47th annual Stanford Geothermal Workshop. And they've been working on you know reservoir modeling for geothermal air for years and years and years. And those guys, they know a lot of experience, they've wrestled with the issue, and something new comes up, their brain will naturally think of everything that's wrong with it. You know, sure. Yeah. Uh and it's it's I'm not picking on them or anything. Uh it happens in every industry and everywhere. And it's there has to be that interplay between the conservative establishment and the new thing to really test the new ideas. You can't you can't have one without the other. So I'd like to think there's a you know, symbiotic relationship there, even so at the time, you know, both parties keep cursing the other one and going, like, who are the who you know? I'm sure the guys at the Stanford Geothermal Workshop is going, who are these clowns and ever? You know, I think they can just waltz in here. And we're going, who are these old toadies who you know who this can never change everything? But you know, you've got to be these bureaucrats. We we we've got to be fair to all of them. Everyone's you know working with their own background, and every side has some good arguments. But yeah, it's it's it's a common process you see everywhere. And it's definitely happened in the geothermal side as well. They all think uh the future is EGS, you know, fracking to create a better reservoir. We think we just want to get rid of the reservoir completely and this build our big radiator. Oh no, the history, history will prove. You know, maybe we're both right, and they both work in different circumstances. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:45

I I am chomping at the bit to ask you this uh Daniel Jurgen question, but we'll save that for the next time. With the final minutes we have here, um, you said off-air that a lot of the VC money comes from Singapore, which I found very interesting. Could you explain the venture capital landscape for geothermal um and a peculiar reason for why it might be coming from Singapore and maybe not the United States, you know, where most of the wealth creation and wealth well center of the wealth is.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:16

It's interesting. When you do a startup, there's a whole bunch of steps, and you know, you decide to make sure you got a funder at each step, right? So you start with the sweat equity, you can take we can take care of that. Then you need a good angel investor to get you the next few steps. We found a few people like that in Alberta, actually. Uh a guy named Ross McCurdy and a guy named uh uh Doug Beach. And you know, guys like Doug Beach are an interesting character because his background was in coke industries, not a beacon of renewable energy. But Doug got it immediately. You know, he was a former energy trader, so he could understand it, and he he put in a very sizable investment himself. But once once you get past that, you know, you're into you're needing tens of millions, then you need some VC type money. We we went around to a few places and only by chance ended up talking to the guys down at Vickers. I think they just, you know, because they weren't, they're a little bit like us, uh, because they didn't have any other energy investments, they could look at what we had with an open mind and make a decision on the merits. Whereas a lot of other people were, you know, tied up in a lot of comparisons and was it is it really cheaper than gas and you know stuff? What about solar? And you know, this this this didn't bother these guys. So they went in, they've been around for a couple of rounds. So Fickers venture partners were the ones in in Singapore, and we've also got Tomasic, which is a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, also invested in us. Now, at the time, I mean, I'd like to say in hindsight, one of the reasons they did it was because we're a fantastic solution for Singapore. But but I don't yeah, because how else are they gonna get energy independence? They they've got no natural resources, they can get a little bit of solar if they cover every rooftop and their water reservoir with solar panels, but it's like a tiny amount of their total power. Sure. They're reliant 95% on imported LNG, so they want to be green, but now here they are not only being not green, but not energy independent. So if we go in and say, hey, we could drill under your very own island without taking up too much space and give you a bunch of reliable power, that's that's good.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:39

It must be amazing having the sovereign wealth fund being a a a financer because it means when you know the the the the product the you would be able to maybe skip a few lines of red tape to install in Singapore, you know, just being Yeah, but they they're also very good at planning and doing things rationally.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:01

And so they'll they'll do it properly, but they'll take their time. So after after Singapore, you know, after after the VC money, then we moved on to the strategic money. That's when we get the BPs and the chevrons and the BHPs and people who could really evaluate our technology come on. But those were key investors because not only do they understand the technology and can vet it and validate it, they're also ones who can implement it. Once we've got a number of these up and running, we're we're 50 people. We're not going to change the world on our own, you know, drilling our own ever loops. But if we can equip people like uh BP or Chevron or BHP to go out and drill a bunch of their own using our technology, that's fantastic. That's how you really scale things up.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:46

So exciting, so exciting. And also, we'll touch on this next time, but the uh the geopolitical um implication of many, many, many nations around the world being able to create energy independence is in itself, you know, so radically transitional and um no, absolutely, it's a game changer. Um finally, these are two very short answers for you before you leave. Um, can you say how much funding you've received so far? Per 100 million and uh can what do you say when you are pitching ever? What is your total addressable market?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:26

Total addressable market, that's a hard question to say. Um, you know, if you look at the heating market in Western Europe, that's you know, almost $100 billion. If you look at the electricity market in Western US, that's also about the same size, you know, 80 to 100 million billion. The way I like to think of it is a bit different, you know. When it comes to direct heating, I mean I think we should be all of it, but who knows? It takes time. Who knows much it should be. So big greedy, man. Yeah. But we but we, when it came to the electric side, which is a more pertinent thing that can be modeled, he did a lot of work with a guy named Jesse Jenkins, who's one of our advisors down at Princeton, and he has this net zero America model where he sort of does what-if scenarios on the entire US energy grid. And he said, looking at the Western Interconnect, given what we think our performance metrics are going to be, and assuming wind and solar continue to improve and all the other energy sources are there, the optimal design would have 20 to 40 percent of the grid be Everloop, which is a a lot. What is what is 40% of the American grid? Uh I don't even know how much that is power-wise, but I they talked about potentially saving you know tens of billions of dollars a year. Yeah, yeah. By having that option. Amazing. Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:51

Can you explain the problem between where energy is generated and then where energy is consumed for renewables, and then however solves that problem?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:02

The the problem of creating energy in a different spot than you consume it isn't just for renewables, it's for traditional oil and gas as well. I mean, you look at all the oil that's been bottled up in Alberta because they don't have a pipeline out. So traditional energy sources usually you don't want in your backyard, and usually they're close to some resource or some special asset. And then you've got to get the energy from there to your house. And in between, you've got the NIMBY problem, not in my backyard. So you got a pipeline or power lines between the two. And if you think it's hard to get permitting and everything sorted out for one location, try two locations with a thousand kilometers in between where the power line is. It just multiplies where you can be attacked, where you can run into problems, where you can be held to ransom. It's a pain in the neck and it's never, never very popular. Whereas if you have something that's modular, something that can be implemented in small size and scaled up to big, a power source that can go anywhere, isn't reliant on some rare resource, and uh which is innocuous enough that you could have it in your backyard and not worry about it, all of a sudden that all becomes easy. And I guess renewables are a little bit worse than traditional uh energy sources, because usually traditional energy sources you have the power plant, and then you have all the lines to the customers. In a smart grid to balance all these intermittent supplies, you've got to get a whole network, a whole matrix of lines. So when it's windy over here, you can take all the power down there and vice versa and mix and match. And it makes the whole thing more resilient in some cases, but more complex and easier to break down in another sense. So it's a challenge. And it's expensive. Power lines are expensive. And worse than being expensive, they're slow to get approved. Decades. And who's got that time? The world's gonna end in a few decades. We can't spend 20 years putting in some smart grid. Let's just put the power where we need it. Power to the people.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:16

Yeah, the US has like a famously bad grid, don't they? Or at least a famously old grid.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:21

Um it's famously old, but it's also just complex because you've got so many private actors in it. It's you know, if you go to let's say Saskatchewan, it's simple. It's all run by a state monopoly. So it's it's a you end up with a simpler grid, which has some advan, you know, some disadvantages in certain senses, but a lot of advantages as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:46

Um, but with oil, right? So you make um you you comment on Alberta, maybe having a lot of reserves that uh can't be uh pipelined down to a more uh densely populated area for consumption. But that oil can be barreled and then consumed directly in an engine with essentially very small energy loss in between. But the problem with renewables is that it requires a grid to then charge a battery, and there's a lot of energy lost in there. So I'm more speaking about this broader problem, the distance between renewable generation and renewable consumption, but then Eva's solution for that um as well being quite neat that it's um produced very close to the final endpoint.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:34

Right, because we're you know, unlike traditional geothermal or some other you know modern renewables, it doesn't have to be in a particular spot. If we end up being able to drill as deep and as hot as we'd like, we can produce the power anywhere. Especially for district heating, direct heat uses. If if you know, if we're generating electricity, you can transport that a bit in the traditional way. But even if you wanted to, you can't transport hot water, you know, hundreds of kilometers. So you've got to put, if you're doing district heating, which is one of our big markets, especially in Europe, especially when people want to decarbonize and get rid of Russian gas for their heating networks, which I might add is just as big a market as electricity, then you really have to locate the energy source right below the town. And the fact that we're not reliant on any particular geology means as we develop our project, we'll eventually be able to go to any town that wants that and just drill down. And you don't need as high high a temperature for a direct heat use like district heating than you do to generate electricity. So you can really do it anywhere, and you can pick the location that's best, and the location that's best is wherever it's going to be consumed. So you you end up bringing source and use together in one spot, and that's reduces the NIMBY problem, the local objections. It's also the most efficient, it's also the most reliant, because again, you have a thousand kilometer power line or or pipeline, that those that's a thousand kilometers where something can go wrong, or something can be sabotaged, or you name it.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:17

Alright then, so paint the bring the Eva Tech to life and uh explain to the audience, say, take Paris as an example. Very, very big city. Is it possible that Eva could produce enough electricity through multiple different sites to power Paris through geothermal energy?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:45

You could power Paris through geothermal energy, uh, but that's not going to be our first stop uh for two reasons. One, France is one of the few countries in the world that has embraced nuclear and so has very cheap electricity. But I should have said Belly go to Germany. But no, no, we're still in Paris. But what Paris does have is it does have a bunch of geothermal district heating. It's one of the few places. But what's happening, they've already tapped into all the existing aquifers. They want to do more, but they can't do more because there's no water down, no extra water down there that they're not already tapping. So we could go there and definitely make it 100% uh district heating from geothermal by just filling in where the traditional geothermal can't. And you mentioned Berlin. Berlin's very much the same thing, except they're currently getting all of their heating from things like uh exhaust from coal plants and stuff that's going to be shut down anyways, or nuclear plants. And the only alternative they have is to you know burn biomass or something, which isn't that green, isn't that scalable. The price of biomass has just gone through the roof because people want more of it than exists. And as we say, it's it's not even that green. So we're the only real solution other than nuclear that can scale, and there's lots of reasons you prefer us to nuclear.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:12

I'm thinking about the I'm thinking about the promotional video um on Eva's site that highlights the sort of tiny surface footprint of the Eva machine that then goes underground. So how much energy would that produce? How many of those installations would it require to produce enough electricity to run Berlin, say for example?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:33

I don't know what the actual uh energy demand is in Berlin. Maybe you can look it up afterwards. But in one particular site, if it was something with a reasonable gradient, you could produce between six to eight to maybe even ten megawatts per Everloop, and you could fit ten Everloops off one pad. So you could do fifty, sixty, seventy megawatts in one location. And then you'd have to move over a kilometer or so and then do another one. That's a reasonably high energy density. And most places, other than Vatican City, have enough space to that you can power everything. Well, like I say, we've we've done more detailed studies in places like Singapore, for example, and are pretty sure that uh we could you know supply all its electricity demand and all its direct heat demand from geothermal. You might not do all of it. They're gonna have a couple of gigawatts of of uh solar power out of the ten they need, but everything else you could, and you would certainly have a very easy time of having several gigawatts that was there just to do everything essential, from running the trains to the airport to the desalination water plants to you name it. So we've got all the density we need. We just need to implement it. And again, remember it's only it's only the district heating that has to be on location in a particular geography. With electricity, we're more likely to go and pick a nice high temperature gradient or the closest one within 100 miles, and then just build that out, scale it, just have a couple of drilling rigs there that just keep drilling until you get as much energy as you need.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:22

And that's with the tech that you currently have proven is effective.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:28

The technology we've proven at Everlight up near Rocky Mountain House in Alberta is for sedimentary basins and more temperatures that are better for district heating, but they also can be used to produce power, as we're going to at Garrett's Reed. That'll be combined heat and power. But to be able to produce electricity in a large number of places by being able to go down deep enough and hot enough, that's what we're proving up at uh in New Mexico this summer.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:57

Okay. So this is, I mean, and that's the tremendously exciting development, isn't it? You know, when you can start to produce the city. Yeah, everyone, precisely.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:08

District heating is district heating is a massive elephant of an opportunity, as big as the electricity one. But it's district heating. People get much more excited about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:19

Like it's less sexy, even though it might have a more essential.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:27

Yeah, no, it's it's more essential and it gets them off Russian gas in Europe and stuff like that. So it's huge, huge opportunity. It's just not sexy. So we'll talk about drilling a well super deep. That's always more essential.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:40

Yeah, exactly. And and then producing enough energy to to charge, you know, to turn on a TV and to charge a car and to run a train.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:49

The whole world is being electrified, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:52

Um, so then talk about the red tape and the bureaucracy headaches that you are running up against every day that hinder your ability to iterate faster, or say, for example, in Europe, hinder your ability to install faster.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:15

You know, to be totally honest, uh regulatory issues have not been the biggest factor. I mean, that's partially because when we started out, we did a global survey and we decided where we were going to go and where we were gonna operate. So we picked, you know, in Europe, places like the Netherlands, places like Germany that already had some geothermal, so they already had a regulatory regime that was up and operating. We avoided purposely places that have never had geothermal, other than Canada, because we were there. And uh, you know, and that took a while to get in there, but that the regulatory regime was not what was really holding us up. What was holding us up was this solving all the technical issues we ran into over the last five years and had to take care of one by one. And two, like any startup, it's raising the bloody money. It takes a takes a lot of time because you're always in a chicken and egg thing, you know. Give me some money so I can prove up this, and they'll say, prove that up, and then they'll give you some money, you know, and you go around and around and around. So, you know, a lot of our time is taken up raising money, and raising money never happens just like that, right? It's even when everything goes perfectly, you know, it's like a year delay to get it all lined up, and then you get your fifty million dollars or whatever it is you're raising. And doing a new technology, that's just hard, and that's just slow. And then once you start building it, especially now when you've got a resurgent oil price and gas price, and so the whole supply chain for casing and drill pipe and you know uh drilling rigs is all of a sudden tightened up. The other the other thing that takes time is just to get all the resources lined up that are on the critical path, or even building the org systems to convert the heat to electricity. That's like an 18-month window. So the real challenge for us is to get enough money so we can do enough things in parallel that we can, you know, create a massive gross pass on this thing, you know, without without having to do one at a time, do one and then finish that and do the other. We need to do everything in parallel, and that takes money. And that's that's the slowest thing. Supply chain and money. And and also, you know, just getting to commercial agreements. Commercial agreements involve negotiation. So if you're negotiating a power purchase agreement or something like that, it never happens like that's you know, in the first meeting. It's just back and forth, back and forth. And it's uh you gotta go through the negotiating dance, you know, and this it this works for everything. I remember when I always used to go down and buy my fake Rolex watches in Sinjin, it would take like an hour and a half negotiating back and forth to get the guy to come down to the right price. And what would drive me crazy if I went back the next day and had to buy another one, he'd make me spend another hour and a half negotiating down. Oh no, this one's different, it's much bigger. Look, you know. And business in general is no different than that watch seller. It just you gotta go through the dance. There's a lot of money at stake, they're big projects, it's a lot of moving parts, with a lot of different partners. Yeah, so I always found all that stuff harder than regulations. If the regulations are a problem, we got a global opportunity here. We'll just go somewhere else. Where we can build faster. I know, because everyone always, it's like anyone you ask, oh, the red tape, the red tape, but I don't if if you know, I always find bigger problems elsewhere.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:55

I'm I'm uh I'm I'm surprised to hear that. So it sounds like it's more of just a a business problem, you know, rather than a regulatory problem.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:03

And I suppose in the regulatory problem, it is a regulatory problem in some jurisdictions, but we've just purposely avoided those. Avoided those of those. Yeah. Yeah, we we got our original target list down to 14 countries, I think we're gonna focus on for a variety of factors. And one of them was are the regulations already in place.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:23

What are the top three countries?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:27

Top three countries? Well, uh the US is one of them, uh Germany, obviously, the Netherlands. And those those are those are probably the three with the most potential, the quickest. But you gotta realize even in a place like Germany, a lot of the mining regulations and the permitting you have to get done isn't done by Germany, it's done by the states. So you know it's no different than the United States or Canada. It's the local province or state that does all that. And there's a huge difference between, you know, one state and the other in Germany. Some places will take you get the paperwork done in weeks, and the other ones will be years. This depends how well off they are, how keen they are to attract inward investment, you know, whether they're trying to kick start an industry that's only existing in another state. There's there's a big difference even within Germany from state to state.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:25

Yeah, isn't Munich like uh Bavaria that's that's a really friendly place for JFM, all right?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:32

It's it's really pretty friendly and they have a lot of geothermal there, uh including a lot of dry geothermal wells. Um, but uh you know, because they have a lot of them, I think they they got a lot of permitting to do and a lot of workload, and you know, they're not gonna get too excited about yet another one. Whereas some of the other states that maybe don't have any geothermal or maybe you know have uh have less activity going on, they may be keen to to get things going. You know, so and that'll be reflected not just in the speed that they do the regular regulations or permitting, it'll also be in the terms they offer you and the size of the lease.

unknown 1:37:17

You know.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:18

If it's frontier area, they'll give you a nice big lease. I think one of our one of our leases in Germany is 750 square kilometers. That's a pretty big lease for a country like Germany. So, yeah, sorry. It's also I feel there's enough other people already complaining about the regulations. But you know, a lot of it is not just to do with regulations, some of the more difficult stuff is to do with uh navigating around all the various incentive schemes when you're dealing with the new technology. There's a whole bunch of, you know, I mean, we did our Everlite demonstration well. There was two provincial and two federal agencies that all contributed money to it. So you had to go through four different application processes, which are always pretty damn rigorous. And then you go down to the states and you got a whole, you know, swarm of other agencies as well. Yeah. Some from the Department of Energy, some from the state, you know, some they're all some from the Department of Defense. And and Europe's no no different. We've been spending two years applying for this EU innovation fund, which we should know about in September. So getting, you know, and that's a key component of cash, getting some of that non-dilutive equity is really important. Uh, because you don't want to do it all if it's a brand new technology. You don't want to do it all with expensive VC money. So these are all that's I think we spend more time on the grant side with governments than we do on the talking about particular regulations. The regulations we just get on and you know get on with it. Because, you know, a lot of those regulations you want to be seen as good corporate partners. You gotta make sure you got the local population and the surrounding towns and villages uh in your favor. It's because it can easily go wrong. So in Bavaria, where you know we took too long to clear a tiny little corner of woodland and found we were in the nesting period of the year, we had to put it off to the next year. We couldn't cut the trees, so we couldn't do the earthwork. So but that's it. You just gotta you're not gonna spend time trying to change regulations, you just live with them. If you don't like them, you move on.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:40

So finally, John, um, this is a question I was teasing to you throughout our last podcast, and it's the one to do with Daniel Jurgen, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning energy journalist. Um he wrote a book last year called The New Map. And yes, and in one of the final chapters titled The Changing Landscape, Disruptive Tech and the Energy Transition, he did not even mention geothermal once. Is this a really bad signal that someone whose job it is to know everything about energy didn't even consider geothermal enough to give it a mention?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:17

Yeah, no, that's that's an interesting one because you know there's nothing. It's bad if someone badmouths you and says you're not gonna succeed, but it's even worse if you're ignored. But I I in this case that doesn't really bother me because you know, honestly, the uh the more expert the more expertise people had in oil and gas and geothermal, the less likely they were to get onto our bandwagon. Which to me says one thing. It says what we're talking about is truly it's simple, but it's still truly revolutionary in a certain way. And if it wasn't revolutionary, all these guys wouldn't object to it. Because it, you know, Daniel Jurgen, I mean, the equivalent of Daniel Jurgen in uh Calgary is a guy named Peter Titakin. He's written several several similar books with his own style, and he's a good friend of mine. And when I started this out, he didn't even want to meet with me. You know, and it took several years. I mean, he eventually invested in it and you know gets it now. But there was this too much, any m anyone who's an expert in oil and gas or geothermal, they've got too much previous experience that has already taught them, taught them that it's impossible. It goes against so many things that they believe. So for me, it doesn't really bother me. In fact, it's confirmation that we're on to something amazing. And it's easy for us when we're in the middle of it to start taking it for granted. Oh, it's a simple thing. We're just building a radiator underground. How complex can that be? But then we run into other people. I mean, we were just talking to a bunch of you know investment banks, some of the leading ones in the world, about leading our next financing around. And some of them also didn't get certain aspects of you had to go back over it. No, no, it's not that's not what we're doing. We're doing this. And they go, oh. So you because there's just too many false trails. Like we said before, it was like it was like uh Galileo. It was the professional astronomers that um you know objected to him, and they had good reasons for it, but they were ultimately wrong. So, yeah, it doesn't bother me about Daniel. He'll eventually get it.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:37

And and on the precipice of any great innovation or just development, it that's why there's so much value captured by the early movers, because everyone else discounted it completely. And in fact, in that same book, uh Jogin's first chapter documents the Shale Revolution in America. Which no one goes to it either. Yeah, and and and he starts it off by saying everyone dismissed this guy as being a fool, as being a dreamer, and he was never gonna make it. And I forget his name and his company, but he's the guy that innovated to um. Yeah, no, that's that's cool. And look at the amount of value that he generated from that. So um that's tremendously exciting as someone who is interested in JFN. Well, I can only imagine how exciting it is for someone who is at the top of one of the most uh likely companies to benefit from this uh you know transition.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:35

So we certainly're certainly all excited about it. We sort of have to pinch ourselves every once in a while. But you know, along these same lines, we always said, you know, for the first couple of years of our company's existence, we had the ultimate barrier to entry. Everyone else thought we were crazy. Didn't have to worry about anyone following us. Now we gotta worry a bit more, but sure, sure. We've got other we've got other barriers to entry now that are a little longer lasting.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:02

What are they? What are they? Well, primary well, just to start with, it's all our patent portfolio. That if you wanted to try to build an Everloop without infringing any of those patents, it'd be damn expensive and probably wouldn't work. Okay. And there's a whole variety of those uh that we have and are working on. But as well, you know, there's lots of other, like anything else, there's a bunch of, you know, to implement that technology, there's a bunch of tools and services and expertise related to it and other assets. Like these seven kilometers of insulated drill pipe we just we just constructed. No one else is gonna have one of those, so they want to drill an Everloop, they gotta first figure out how to build the insulated drill pipe, because they can't use our guys, they're all under exclusive license. They'd be breaching a patent and they'd have to put out millions of dollars in the the pipe themselves, even if they can find someone to build it. Why why why would they do that? Or why would they try to build one that doesn't use our rock pipe and so they have to case the multilaterals? Doubles the price right there. Why would they do it without using our shock cooling? You know, where they're gonna have a super expensive well and they won't be able to construct a radiator down there, etc. etc. And right down to things like, you know, if we see land or a license area that's super appropriate for ourselves, we snap it up. It's cheap. You know, so that's that's the traditional oil and gas way. That's the only way oil companies have any competitive advantage. They don't have it, they all have the same technology. Theirs is this a land grab around, you know, a little more information. But uh, so we got the whole world in that position. So there's a whole bunch of different elements, but mainly we make it proprietary by having patenting every aspect of the uh the system we can. So every problem we have creates a new solution, which creates some IP. And you know, when we do the IP with everyone else, we're very generous, we let them have the IP for the rest of the world. As I said before, we just want it exclusively for our field of use, which doesn't even exist yet. We still have to prove it up. So we're very reasonable.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:20

Very, very reasonable. And as one of the primary early movers in what could potentially be a hugely disruptive innovation, I mean you're capturing value at 100, 10, 100, 500x discounts, you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:39

Well, we're hoping it's 100x. Certainly our BC funders hope that. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:44

That's what they want, but don't always get question that I try to ask as many guests as possible. What is a country that you're particularly bullish on?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:54

A country I'm particularly bullish on. Well, I'm always, you know, a bit of a Canadian nationalist. Yeah. Be honest, I've lived around the world and uh, you know, given the demographic crisis a lot of places are going through, you know, places like Japan or places like China where I lived for 13 years, I think places like Canada are one of the few countries that can actually actually absorb immigrants, can actually still, you know, have an open door to all the best of the best. And it's still not too crowded, and it seems to be good at assimilation. Whereas other places they just, you know, it's like mixing rocks in your porridge. You there's no mixing, or maybe that it's too volatile, you got too many guns, maybe, like some other places we know. Or you have places like China that even if they were open, where would you get 300 million immigrants, which is what you'd need to, you know, balance the population decline. So when you when you look at it that way, can't Canada's got a pretty good spot. And also it's bloody freezing, and we got global warming. Added bonus. But uh, but but yeah, but I I I gotta say, you know, I I always find good reasons to love wherever I lived. I mean, I loved living in China for 13 years, a lot of people would find that hard. There was lots of really cool, optimistic things at that time. And, you know, I've loved living in Europe, even so each of the countries has its own difficulties. Lived in the Netherlands, lived in France, lived in the UK, done business and a whole bunch of other ones. Uh Europe Europe's a pretty cool, pretty cool place. And uh so lot lots of places I can live, but uh I'll give the little plug to Canada, because Canadians never build up their own country enough. Where'd you live in the Netherlands? A place called uh Enskede, which is I think the fifth largest city in the Netherlands, right next to the German border. And I did spent a couple of summers uh working there in a university called the University of Twenty. The joke was where where's the University of Twenty? Well, it's between 19 and 21. No, but uh but no, that was that was a cool, cool summer job, and I I I like the Netherlands. It's it's a pretty steady calm place, I find. Yeah, it's a terrific place. And and even better, it's easy to bicycle because there's no hills.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:33

Exactly. I uh I lived in Amsterdam for uh about three years before Stockton. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:39

Okay. So I mean, that's like living in London, you know, it's different than the rest of the country. Amsterdam's its own unique creation. And I didn't really notice know that until you know I lived in the center of London, then I lived way out in Sussex, fifty miles out of town, and realized man, it's like two different universes. There would they didn't mix that much, except for the odd commuter like myself who would zip back and forth. You were either in the village or or the city. I remember we had an old couple next to us, Nora Doris and Norman, and they were always amazed that I, you know, went into the city every workday. And they're going, I said, Well, when did you guys do at Lasco? They said, Oh, I think it was the coronation. I said, That's in 1953. You haven't been back since oh no, it's too noisy. Yeah, it's this. But you get that. It's hard to re realize. There's that other reality out there.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:37

Um, to add the the triple bonus for Canada, if global warming continues at uh the rate that it's going, you open up this entire Arctic coastline, which will be which will make you a trade hub.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:52

Um forget about that, just think of the beaches. We already the little known fact is Canada has by far the world's longest coastline. Imagine how great it would be if it wasn't frozen. I mean to know that. Yeah, well when you think about it, where else is anywhere near as close? Could be Russia, but Russia doesn't really face three ECs. No, it's it's you think it's pretty normal, but then let's think of the Canadian Arctic, think of all the islands. Think of Hudson's Bay, you know, it's got a very you know circuitous coastline, which really adds. I mean, Canada's bigger than Australia already in surface area, but then when you look at the way it's the complicated coastline, it's probably double what Australia's is. I don't know that, I'm just guessing, but it's definitely bigger. And I know that fact, because my grandfather used to uh run the Maritime Command, which is all the coast guards and lighthouses and all the icebreakers, all the paraphernalia. Up the top there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:59

Well, you say that um Canada needs to pump its own tires a bit, but I'll have you know that after about 80 responses, uh Canada is actually the most uh mentioned country to that question.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:12

Okay. Well, you know what? It's probably non-Canadians saying that.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:16

No, it's not, that's true. It's Americans mostly that say it, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:20

Well, I know even in when I used to work in uh England, I'd always get that. People go, like, why are you here? I want to go to Canada, why are you here? Yeah.

unknown 1:52:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:30

You can imagine how much I get that. Yeah, I'm sure. Why aren't you in Australia? Yeah, you know, uh doesn't matter where you're from, you can be from Buddha's utopia. In fact, Buddha was from Utopia. He wanted to see what the rest of the world looked like. So finally, John. Yeah. A question that is my favorite. If you could witness a conversation between any two people of history that are alive, no language barrier, so if you were listening to a podcast, who would you listen to?

SPEAKER_00 1:53:06

I was listening to a podcast. So any two people. Man. That's a tough one. But you know, the fact is a a lot of a lot of uh you know, famous, it's a lot of my heroes, which would be some famous scientists and all that, they're not really great conversationalists, so I wouldn't really vote for them. I would say go for you know, some religious figures. I'm not religious, I'm a complete atheist, but I'd still love to see a debate between, let's say, Buddha and Jesus Christ. I mean that would be You'd either be either be totally underwhelming or you'd say, yeah, these guys really do have it together. But my uh something something like that would be interesting, or perhaps some politicians. Like uh if I had to do politicians, it'd be uh, let's say, Lincoln or and Churchill. Two amazing orators who really had a way with words. See how they debate the facts of the day. I'm sure that would be fascinating. So what does everyone else say?

SPEAKER_02 1:54:26

Uh probably uh Jesus, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, yeah, that's it. Jesus, Pontius Pilate. Yeah, Jesus is the most common. And um I like what you said about you'd want to listen to a conversationalist, someone who would actually be able to offer a decent chat. I'm not sure if there's much evidence that um the religious figures would necessarily Buddha might not actually say anything, he may just sit there contemplating the universe and navel gazing. Yeah, change comes from within Jesus. That would be the end of the conversation. So um but even but even that even that would be interesting. Oh, for sure. I mean, obviously, you know, you get uh you get to essentially hear these mythical characters speak, then for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:14

I mean the other thing I found interesting is you know, having visited Moscow and Beijing at the right time, you know, I have seen Lenin. I have seen Mao Zitang. You know, he's in a little refrigerator, but I still see him. It's sort of weird to actually see the real guy after all these years.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:34

Although they say Lenin's mostly plastic. He got a little moldy when they moved him east of the Urals to uh avoid the Nazis.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:42

But anyways. Is he he's still on display though, right? What is it, St. Petersburg? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:47

I haven't been back there since 2003 in Moscow, so I don't I don't know if he's I haven't heard if he's still on display. But he's very very small.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:59

Um but yeah, the the great thing about that question is that um it uh there is no cons consistency in it, actually. Um it is a reflection of the person's unique interests. Lincoln Churchill hasn't been mentioned, for example. Um that would be a great chat. Um you know, maybe one of the early oil barons might be you might get interesting insight from him. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:27

Right. Yeah. Just someone from a different time would be the most revealing. Yeah, it'd be the equivalent of time travel just to get their impressions of the modern era it'd be boring.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:42

Yeah. The the answer that stuck with me the most was um two characters that I've both forgotten who they were, but it was essentially the the leader of the minds, and then a uh Spanish monk. Uh maybe. Uh and then a Spanish um monk who uh reflected years after the conquistadors took over Latin America um on the ethics and morale of it, and uh for them to have a conversation to discuss the the good and the bad. Uh I mean those sort of things would be unreal.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:17

And one of the best books ever is The Conquest in New Spain by Bernal Diaz, who was a guy who was just a regular soldier in Cortes' army. And you know, you read that story, it's better than any Quest fictional story you can imagine. Just the fact they arrived there, Mexico City itself was this town a half million people, bigger than anything else in Europe at the time, with pyramids having human sacrifice and mountains of gold and causeways connecting them to the shore. I mean, that was that must have been mind-blowing. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:56

That's a great uh great recommendation.

unknown 1:57:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:00

Okay. I I liked it.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:03

I really best seller. Yeah. That might be. There's a great YouTube channel called Voices of the Past, and they um read out passages from first uh person journal entries throughout history. There was a great one that looked at Mexico City, and maybe it's from that book, but it was amazing. It couldn't be because it sproted.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:23

I remember because he got tired of all the uh Cortez's propaganda.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:28

Yeah, back in the good old days when you could you could get away with your propaganda a lot more uh cleanly. Yeah, absolutely. Um but look, John, I uh can't thank you enough for now giving me uh I don't know, what is it, like two hours of your time. And um that was fun. Thank you, and I think Ever is a tremendously exciting company, so uh keen to see how that goes too. So thank you very much uh for ping on the podcast, John, again. Very uh very generous with your time. Maybe you uh could tell through the audio recording if you saw on um YouTube about halfway through, both of our outfits changed completely. This was actually recorded over two separate uh podcasts because while we initially scheduled an hour the first time, uh we got almost to the end of our time and I hadn't asked him anything about geothermal. It was just all China. So he was uh very generous to come back and um offer that second half as well. And hopefully that was uh yeah, enjoyable to you guys. Um I really like talking to John. He had this uh he had this Canadian sensibility to him, and I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it feels like uh like I'm talking to an Australian almost. I think the Canadians and Australians have a very, very similar culture. But name a more exciting company than ever. It's absolutely unbelievable uh what they're doing, and all the the talk in the middle about the co-evolution that John um mentioned. I actually did some more research on it, and it was um something that's been spoken about uh batching innovation, things like um oxygen being discovered at the same time, uh, things like the E equals M C squared occasion, a theory of relativity actually being um discovered very similar times, flight being discovered at very similar times. Um John was right with evolution that it was actually Wallace uh who both um invented that theory at the same time. Uh calculus was invented at the same time. Uh it's such a fascinating such a fascinating little little uh insight to have. And imagine if Ever is actually um producing breakthrough after breakthrough, engineering breakthrough after engineering breakthrough, what that actually what the implications of that might be for Ever as specifically as a company in the coming geothermal revolution, if you want to call it that. Uh but I thought that was really exciting. Uh I thought that was really interesting. Um overall, I mean the the chat was uh very thrilling for me. I um am loving this uh education on geothermal energy that I am undergoing right now. And if you hadn't heard of it before, well, hopefully now it's on your radar and something that you can think about a little bit more as well. Finally, my ambition uh for this podcast, uh those who have been listening for a while have probably heard me make this plea a few times, but in case this is the first time you're ever listening, uh first that your debut show, welcome. Thank you so much for deciding to uh part with some of your time and and listen to this podcast. What my hope is with this podcast is to corner the market for eclectic curiosities wherever it is you're looking in from. Because it should be clear to you that not there is no consistent theme throughout this podcast. Basically, whatever the episode is, is just a reflection, a combination of a reflection of my interests and the other person be willing to come on and talk about uh our overlapping interests. So clearly, here, geothermal is of huge interest to me, as was um John's extensive experience working in China. But you'll have seen as well, the last episode was uh checking in with my friend in eastern Ukraine and how things are going for him. Um next episode is going to be with uh Stephen Hicks rounding off a three-part series on the life and philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche. The episode after that will be with Ben Burgess talking about the life of Christopher Hitchens. But then if you just go back far enough, there's an episode on Olaf Palmer, the Swedish assa uh the Swedish Prime Minister assassination, um, all the way through to economic development, you know, kleptocracy, Jim Henry's been on four or five times now. Basically, it the show was a reflection of my own interests, and I hope that in those interests, hopefully if some of them um overlap with yours. Because whilst every episode might not be uh interesting to you, we can assume that we have some interests in common since this episode is um since you've come here for this episode. So that's my ambition for the podcast. It's to corner the market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is you're listening in from. But the thing is, is podcasts have very low discoverability. So I would ask you and urge you to please leave a nice, healthy review. So if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, wipe up, give it five stars and write something nice. If you're listening on Spotify, swipe up, give it five stars. And if you're listening anywhere else that has a review function, please be generous and leave nice, long, healthy, juicy reviews. And that's all from me. Thank you again to John, and thank you again to you, my dear listener. And that's all. Ciao.