ROCK STAR

WHAT IF THE REVOLUTIONARY TECHNIQUES DEVELOPED TO FRACK ROCKS FOR OIL COULD BE MODIFIED TO UNLOCK LIMITLESS CLEAN ENERGY FROM THE HEAT OF THE EARTH’S CRUST?

- CHRISTOPHER HELMAN

TIM LATIMER HAS RAISED MORE THAN $400 MILLION FROM THE LIKES OF BILL GATES, JEFF BEZOS AND MARK ZUCKERBERG TO MAKE HIS GREEN DREAM COME TRUE-BUT PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP MIGHT BE STANDING IN THE WAY.

TIM LATIMER has always liked digging. "When I was 7 years old I decided I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and just kept digging for a week," he recalls. “I had seen some TV show about a cool tunnel clubhouse, and I wanted to make my own." Later, as a teenager, he watched in 2008 as the Sandy Creek Energy Station-the last large coal-fired plant built in the United States-broke ground five miles from his home in tiny Riesel, Texas, and grew to tower over the flat rural landscape. "That became a very visual reminder. Energy is vital to our lives, but there's positives and negatives with that kind of development."

Those twin obsessions-digging deep and creating energy-have taken Latimer, still just 35 and an alumnus of the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, to the cusp of what could turn out to be either a breakthrough in the quest for zero-carbon-emitting energy or an expensive pipe dream.

As chief executive and co-founder of Houston-based Fervo Energy, he has raised more than $400 million for a plan to liberate practically unlimited geothermal energy (generated from the heat of Earth's core) from superhot rocks at least 8,000 feet underground by employing the same "fracking" techniques used to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock. Fervo's investors include Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, traditional oil-and-gas producers, Mark Zuckerberg and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate change-focused venture capital fund organized by Bill Gates and backed by a pack of fellow billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio and Reid Hoffman.