Climate tech is in a place where it needs all the help it can get. Fortunately, there’s a lot of untapped expertise in the oil and gas sector.
Case in point: Silviu Livescu spent decades in the oil and gas industry working for Baker Hughes and ExxonMobil. He’s won several awards from the Society of Petroleum Engineers and has dozens of patents to help coax more oil out of the ground.
Then in 2021, he became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and taught the school’s first geothermal engineering class. He even helped author a report on the topic. Now he has a company that takes his expertise in drilling deep into Earth’s crust and translates it into sustainable geothermal heating and cooling for commercial and industrial buildings.
Big buildings almost always have big carbon footprints, and getting the carbon out of their heating and cooling systems is especially challenging. Many buildings use natural gas to keep them warm in cold months, and some even use fossil fuel for cooling in the summer, too. It’s possible to swap boilers with air-source heat pumps, but it isn’t always practical, particularly if the building is taller than it is wide and rooftop space is tight.
That’s why Livescu and his company, Bedrock Energy, are looking down instead of up.
Ground-source heat pumps, also known as geothermal heat pumps, could help decarbonize heating and cooling for large buildings around the country. Such systems circulate water or another working fluid in and out of the ground, where Earth’s tendency to maintain stable temperatures then helps heat or cool the building above.
Geothermal isn’t a new technology by any means, but Bedrock is hoping that its team’s oil and gas bonafides can help it break into markets that had previously overlooked the technology. This week, the company said it has raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Wireframe Ventures, with participation from Overture Climate VC, Long Journey Ventures, Cantos, Toba Capital, First Star Ventures, Divergent Capital and Climate Capital.
Most ground-source heat pumps rely on refrigerant loops that snake horizontally several feet below the surface or a few bores that stretch a few hundred feet down. For single-family homes or campuses that have a lot of open space, those approaches make sense. But for skyscrapers or industrial buildings, there may not be enough land for horizontal loops or the large number of vertical bores that would be required.
Bedrock Energy hopes to fill the gap by drilling boreholes 1,000 to 2,000 feet down, about three to five times deeper than usual, boosting each bore’s heating and cooling capacity. Down there, Earth’s temperature hovers at a consistent 75°F to 85°F. That’s plenty warm to extract heat during winter months and cool enough to dump it during the summer.
Finding the right balance, though, can be tricky. Size it too small and the system won’t be effective in the winter or the summer; it’ll suffer from what experts call “thermal degradation,” where the soil or rock can’t absorb any more heat or gets too cool to warm the refrigerant.
Bedrock hopes to solve the sizing problem by gathering data as it drills every bore, mapping the subsurface in greater detail. That data is then fed into a model that predicts the borehole’s geothermal performance and helps engineers determine how many will be needed for a given site. As the team refines the models, it envisions them running in real time, guiding drilling as it’s happening.
“The model is telling us for a particular location, what is the optimal depth and where you can minimize the number of holes but maximize your efficiency for the building’s needs,” Joselyn Lai, Bedrock’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch+. “The Earth gets hotter as you go deeper. You don’t want to just maximize depth all the time because most buildings have a mix of heating and cooling needs.” Most bores will be around 1,200 to 1,600 feet deep, she added.
For drilling rigs, Bedrock Energy is working with some suppliers from the oil and gas industry, but it’s also developing its own devices to save on costs. Oil and gas rigs, Lai said, can cost several millions of dollars and require more space than the company would like.
With the combination of software and a custom rig, Bedrock Energy hopes to cut geothermal costs significantly. “We are targeting cost reductions of 30 to 50% for the drilling in the first year, which is often the most expensive part of constructing a geothermal heating and cooling system,” Lai said. “In the long-term, we want to keep pushing that cost down through increasingly autonomous drilling operations and field operations.”
Autonomous drilling rigs would reduce the number of personnel needed on the site to one or two from three or four, Lai said. At the same time, the forecasted cost reductions should expand the number of geothermal projects available, boosting employment overall. The company hopes it’ll be an attractive pitch to oilfield workers, who often spend months at a time on remote locations far from home.
With the seed funding, Lai said Bedrock is working to complete a pilot project in Texas, hire more staff, and refine its models. It’s also working to line up additional pilots in other parts of the country for next year. “We are doing a variety of projects right now to showcase our value proposition across geographies and building types,” Lai said.
Bedrock Energy’s timing couldn’t be better. The Inflation Reduction Act comes with tax credits that can cover 30% to 60% of the cost of a geothermal project, and they run through 2032. That should give the company solid runway to bring costs down and make it competitive with air-source heat pumps — if it does things right, it could also give natural gas a run for its money.
For large building owners, especially those in New York City who have been given a deadline of 2050 to decarbonize, geothermal might be the answer, and Bedrock Energy will be in a solid position to deliver it.