This week, Texas geothermal energy startup Sage Geosystems announced that it has received $12 million in growth equity from the corporate VC arm of Nabors Industries, the publicly listed maker of conventional on- and offshore oil drills and rigs, and Virya, the impact venture capital fund led by TED director Chris Anderson (whose other partners include biotech futurist Juan Enriquez). Sage will use the $12 million financing round ($10 million of which came from Nabors) toward further development of its geothermal technologies and the building of its first commercial power plant.
Sage has made its mark in the still-nascent U.S. geothermal energy industry by creating an integrated system that addresses the technology needs for both surface (plant) and subsurface (well), to harvest heat more efficiently at lower capital cost. Sage’s fundamental view is that there is no single, optimal geothermal design solution for all applications and subsurface environments, so they present multiple approaches and technologies based on recommendations generated by their proprietary modeling tool, GeoTwin.
In announcing the deal this week, Sage pointed to the company’s considerable synergies with Nabors, which in addition to its global scale has extensive expertise in drilling and well construction. All partners are invested in successfully commercializing clean, baseload geothermal energy on a global scale.
“Geothermal energy can be developed into an unlimited source of clean and renewable energy, which is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but also requires a relatively low amount of resource mining for its effective utilization,” Sage CEO Lev Ring said in a company announcement of the deal. “We believe the combination of Sage and Nabors will propel geothermal energy to the front of the transition to rapidly commercialize clean energy sources, economically and responsibly.”
“We are very excited to participate in the evolution of geothermal energy along with Sage,” said Nabors Chairman, CEO and President Anthony Petrello. “We believe Sage’s novel approach to harnessing geothermal energy has significant potential to be disruptive to energy markets worldwide.”
Sage is currently focusing on access to onshore geopressured formations in the Gulf of Mexico region to prove the commercial viability of its technologies and its approach to the harvesting of geothermal energy.
Nabors looking bullish on geothermal
This was the second major investment in geothermal technology for Nabors in recent days. The firm also announced an $11 million investment this week in GeoX Energy, an emerging growth geothermal company seeking to commercialize technologies to install supercritical geothermal power stations at scale in the U.S. and internationally. Funds will be put toward the cost of a 50 MWn supercritical geothermal pilot project that GeoX plans to complete by the end of 2022.
“We are very excited to invest in GeoX as part of Nabors’ new energy initiatives,” Nabors’ Petrello said. “We believe that GeoX’s leadership, with its extensive global energy experience, combined with its supercritical geothermal power station technologies, have the potential to provide an economic source of baseload renewable power for many generations to come.”
Defense applications
In March of this year, Sage announced that its partnership with the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology has been selected by the U.S. Air Force to conduct a feasibility study on the use of closed loop geothermal energy systems for the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston.
Sage’s technology has garnered attention as a military use case, due to its small physical footprint, grid independence, security, sustainability and non-reliance on global supply chains.
“This pilot has the potential to prove the economic viability of a new paradigm of geothermal power generation anywhere,” said Dr. Ken Wisian, Associate Director of UT Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology and a former Air Force Major General, upon announcing the project in March. ““This pilot has the potential to prove the economic viability of a new paradigm of geothermal power generation anywhere.”
