We have walked on the Moon. We have sent a probe three billion miles past Pluto. But the deepest hole we have ever drilled reaches barely twelve kilometers down — a sliver of the way to the planet’s core.
It goes back to the time when Soviet scientists dug that hole, starting in 1970. It took nineteen years. Then the rock hit 180°C, hot enough to soften steel, and the hole squeezed shut around the drill. Today, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is a rusted cap welded over in the Arctic.
For decades, the rock beneath our feet stayed a forgotten frontier — too hot, too hard, too expensive to bother with. That is changing, largely because of one man: Tim Latimer, whom Fast Company just named its Visionary of the Year for turning the Earth’s own heat into a business.
Tim Latimer started out as a drilling engineer in oil and gas. Once, he noticed that the same tools used to frack shale could unlock heat trapped in rock almost anywhere on Earth, even in the rare spots like Iceland or parts of the American West, where volcanic activity brings heat close enough to the surface to reach cheaply.
In 2017, he cofounded Fervo Energy to prove it. Investors were skeptical — after all, geothermal had a reputation for being expensive, risky, and limited to a few lucky locations. Latimer won over Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which led an $11 million Series A in 2019. Fervo’s wells work like a pair of fracks. One drops two miles straight down, then turns and runs sideways through hot granite. Cold water goes down, heats up, and comes back through a second well as steam, which is enough to spin a turbine. The advantage over wind and solar is simple: geothermal runs day and night. It does not care if the sun sets or the wind dies.
Google now buys electricity from Fervo for its AI data centers. In 2023, Fervo supplied a Nevada data center with carbon-free power. It signed the largest geothermal deal in history with Southern California Edison, enough to serve 350,000 homes. Its first large-scale plant, Cape Station in Utah, begins feeding the grid this year and is expected to scale to 100 megawatts by 2027. Fervo went public in May, raising close to $1.9 billion. Geothermal still supplies less than 0.5% of America’s power. Iceland gets 30% of its power this way. Latimer is betting that the gap closes.
He is not alone down there
Geothermal is just one front. A wider race to make the underground useful again is underway, and it looks nothing like a single industry. Quaise Energy, spun out of MIT’s fusion lab, is chasing rock at temperatures above 400°C, so steel drills fail before they reach it. They skip drilling, vaporizing the rock with millimeter-wave energy, the same tool used to heat plasma inside fusion reactors. Last year, its beam cut clean through 100 meters of granite. It wants a working plant by 2028.
Some other companies to look up to:
- The Boring Company is fixing tunnels, not heat. Traditional tunneling machines cost hundreds of millions of dollars and get buried after a single job. Boring Co.’s machine, Prufrock, is reusable: it digs and lines a tunnel with concrete as it moves, for a fraction of the usual cost per mile. Its Vegas Loop already carries riders under the Las Vegas Convention Center. Dubai and Nashville are next.
- Terranova, out of Berkeley, is fighting sea-level rise from below. Instead of building sea walls, it injects a wood-chip slurry 40 to 60 feet under sinking coastal land, lifting the ground itself a couple of millimeters at a time. Cities like New York expect to spend over $100 billion on walls. Terranova is betting it can do the job for less.
- Deep Isolation and its sister company Deep Fission think the underground is also the right place for nuclear waste — and eventually reactors. Both drill boreholes miles deep and lower sealed canisters, or small reactors, into rock that serves as natural containment.
- Traysar, an Israeli company, is building for underground warfare. Its founders argue tunnels are now a fifth military domain, alongside land, sea, air, and space — a lesson drawn from tunnel networks in Gaza and Ukraine.
Why is the best time for it now
Two borrowed technologies explain all of this. Steerable drilling and high-pressure pumping, perfected during the shale boom of the 2010s, turned “find heat” and “dig a hole” from matters of luck into engineering problems. And the sensing software built for self-driving cars now lets machines steer through rocks they cannot see.
Latimer’s own story compresses that shift into one career: a driller who realized the tools built for oil could just as easily unlock heat. Fast Company’s award is not really about one company. It marks a moment when a handful of very different founders decided, all at once, that the ground beneath us is worth digging into again.
* Tetiana Rak is the Chief Operations Officer (COO) at We Are Innovation. A journalist and freedom activist with 8 years of experience, Tania has worked with renowned media outlets including CNN, TechCrunch, Fox News, HackerNoon, the BBC, and Radio Free Europe, among others. Her unwavering dedication to championing the ideas of technological advancements and global digital transformations has earned her a distinguished reputation in the field. Through her work, Tania promotes the ideas of liberty and individual rights as a cornerstone of any rights-respecting society. Strengthened by the experience of war in Ukraine, Tania’s beliefs also stand for promoting technological advancements as a transformative tool to advance liberty, giving people the opportunity to speak, act, and pursue happiness without unnecessary external restrictions.
Source: We Are Innovation
