Profiles in clean energy: Former Shell VP helps create a new way of making clean electricity

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When Cindy Taff was a vice president at oil and gas giant Shell in Houston, Brianna, a middle schooler, would sometimes babysit her while she worked from home.

“Why are you still in the oil and gas business?” Her daughter asked more than once. “Is there a future in it? Why don’t you move on to something clean?”

The words weighed heavily on Al-Taf.

“As a parent, you want to give direction, so was I giving her the right direction?” I remembered.

At Shell, Taff was responsible for drilling wells and bringing them into production. I’ve worked on oil and natural gas, which is called unconventional in the industry, because oil or natural gas is hard to get out of the ground — it doesn’t flow naturally like in the movies. It is a term often used for shales. Taff was somewhat unorthodox for the industry as well. Her co-workers used to tease her for driving an efficient hybrid car.

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They’ll say, “You’re not helping oil and gas prices by driving a Prius.”

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Editor’s Note: This is part of an occasional series of personal stories about the energy transition — the shift away from the fossil fuel-based world that largely causes climate change.

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Taff wanted Shell to pursue energy that comes from the Earth’s natural heat – geothermal energy. Its team looked into the matter, but Shell never gave the green light to any of these projects, saying it would take too much time to recover the investment.

When Brianna went to college, she was also passionate about energy, but she wanted to work in renewables. After her sophomore year, in the summer of 2020, she landed an internship at a geothermal company, a company that Taff’s former colleagues had just launched at Shell-Sage Geosystems in Houston.

Now Taff was looking over her daughter’s shoulder and asking questions as she worked from home during the pandemic.

Sage executives were talking to Brianna as well. “We could use your mother here,” they said. “Can you get her to come work for us?” I recently remembered Brianna.

That’s how Cindy Taff left her 36-year career at Shell to become chief operating officer at Sage.

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“I didn’t understand why Shell wouldn’t go for it,” she said of applying the company’s drilling expertise to heat energy. “Then I had this amazing opportunity to move on from oil and gas and work with these people who I have the utmost respect for. And I also wanted to make my daughter proud, honestly.”

Brianna Bird, now 24, is a process engineer and spokesperson for the company. She’s glad her mother, now a CEO, left oil and gas.

“Of course I’m biased, she’s my mom, but I don’t think Sage would be where she is without her,” she said.

The United States is a world leader in geothermal electricity, but this type of electricity still accounts for less than half a percent of the country’s total large-scale power generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2023, most of the geothermal electricity came from California, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico, where there are reservoirs of steam, or very hot water, near the surface.

The Energy Department estimates that next-generation geothermal projects, like what Sage is doing, could provide about 90 gigawatts by 2050, enough to power 65 million or more homes. It depends on private investment, and on companies like Sage bringing this kind of energy to areas that were until now thought impossible.

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How it works

Sage has two main technologies: the first produces electricity from heat. The company drills wells and crushes hot and dry rocks. Electric pumps then push water into those cracks, heating them, and the hot water is discharged to the surface where it spins a turbine.

But a funny thing happened during testing in Starr County, Texas. In late 2021, the team realized that much of their technology could also be used for energy storage.

If that works, it could be a big problem. Currently, for large-scale energy storage, the United States is adding batteries, mostly lithium-ion, to solar and wind projects, so they can charge them and send electricity back to the electric grid when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t shining. Do not blow. These batteries typically provide a maximum power supply of four hours.

Sage envisions some of its technology being put into solar and wind farms as well. When electricity demand is low, they will use additional energy from a solar or wind farm to run electric pumps, pump water into underground fissures, and leave it there until electricity demand increases — storing the energy underground for hours and days. Or even weeks.

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It’s a new way to use the technology, said Silvio Levisco, lead author of a report examining the future of geothermal energy in Texas. Livescu knows Taff and has followed the company’s progress.

“It’s the right moment for companies like Sage that have a purpose, a mission and the technology to show that geothermal is indeed the energy source we need to address climate change,” said Levescu, who co-founded a different geothermal startup in Austin. , Texas.

These days, Taff is often at the forefront, speaking with politicians and policymakers about the potential of geothermal energy. She attended the UN COP28 climate talks last year to share her vision for this type of energy.

Sage has raised $30 million so far and is growing.

It is building a small geothermal storage system (3 MW) at San Miguel Electric Cooperative, Inc., south of San Antonio this year. It works with US military installations in Texas that see geothermal energy as a way to safely power their bases. Sage recently announced partnerships for heating communities in Bucharest, Romania; Clean geothermal electricity for META data centers, energy storage and geothermal projects in California.

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The company is doing final testing of its own turbine to convert heat into electricity more efficiently.

Because of her background in oil and gas, Taff said she knew geothermal energy would not be widely adopted unless the cost came down. The motto at Sage is: It’ll be clean and cheap. She is excited to work in a field that she feels is poised to play a major role in cleaning up and stabilizing the electrical grid.

“I never looked back,” she said. “I love what I do and I think it will be transformative.”

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