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The “35x35” electrification pledge and an AI pledge are on the table.
The odds of BAAJA passing likely grew a few degrees worse.
On an NRC acceptance, Deb Haaland’s rejection, and Texas’ win over Chinese solar
Plus, one big opportunity for climate change.
Endurance Energy hoped its generator would run for a full year, but the team isn’t afraid of the “error” in “trial and error.”
About 300 miles off the Oregon coast, a mile beneath the ocean’s surface, a startup just drilled the world’s first subsea geothermal well. And for a grand total of exactly 8.7 seconds, its prototype power plant generated about 2 kilowatts of net power. It wasn’t quite the result the Seattle-based Endurance Energy was hoping for — the company’s goal was to run its 100-kilowatt generator for a full year. But it’s not nothing.
“We really proved with this mission that a geothermal well could be drilled and completed on the seafloor, and doing that within 21 months of the company existing I think is really a testament to our pace of progress,” Endurance CEO Andrew Redd told me.
A former SpaceX engineer — as so many climate tech founders seem to be — Redd appears quite comfortable with the rapid trial-and-error cycles that hard tech startups often demand. Or as he stated in the company’s press release, which provides a refreshingly frank account of what this first test did and didn’t accomplish, “We follow the adage ‘make it exist, then make it good.’”
Investors seem to be buying it. In June, the startup raised a $54 million Series A, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund — Endurance’s second funding round in less than two years of existence. Still, the team certainly has their work cut out for them. The ocean is a notoriously difficult operating environment: Saltwater is corrosive and offshore infrastructure is difficult and expensive to build, maintain, and repair.
Indeed, Endurance spent the first 11 days of its three-week stint at sea debugging its drill, which the team had never operated underwater before. But with a vessel chartered and a locked-in deployment date, the company couldn’t afford to wait for everything to work out perfectly. “We were still working on that generator hours before it got on the seafloor,” Redd told me. He’s used to that sort of thing, though, comparing it to making final tweaks to rockets already sitting on the launchpad. “That’s kind of the name of the game,” he said.
The trial took place at Axial Seamount, an active underwater volcano and the only place in the world with a cluster of hydrothermal vents connected to shore by fiber optic cable, which allows the Endurance team to monitor and control its system in real time from Seattle. While this was the company’s fifth deep-sea mission, it was the team’s first attempt to actually drill their own well.
After lowering their drill about a mile below the surface, the team bored two holes and turned the second into a well about 2 inches wide, lining it with pipe and sealing it with cement. But after losing so much time to debugging, the team only managed to drill about 52 feet deep — far short of its original 200-foot target.
Water then flowed up the well at about 260 degrees Celsius (around 500 degrees Fahrenheit), but the narrow borehole proved too restrictive to deliver enough heat for the generator to operate. So the team pivoted, connecting the generator directly to a naturally flowing, hotter hydrothermal vent instead. The generator then ran for a total of 29 seconds, producing about 2 kilowatts of net power for 8.7 seconds. That represents the total electricity the turbine generated, minus the 7 to 8 kilowatts needed to run its supporting components, such as the refrigerant pump and other onboard equipment.
Then a software glitch triggered the onboard battery safety system, which shut down the plant. When the team tried to restart the system, the power cable feeding the refrigerant pump failed, leaving the pump unable to restart. That was the end of the road. The mission wrapped up after three weeks at sea, a far shorter run than the team had hoped.
“The success criteria would be if we had left with the generator still on the seafloor; that would have been an example of sustained net power, and we didn’t get there,” Redd told me. Instead, the team brought the system back to Endurance’s Seattle headquarters, where it’s fixing the software as well as refurbishing and upgrading the hardware — which includes changing how it builds and tests subsea cables — to prepare for another mission sometime this winter. This time, the goal will be to generate sustained power from a much deeper well.
The team will need to demonstrate progress soon to keep its next major milestone on track: a planned 2-megawatt deployment off the coast of Tonga by the end of 2027. The project aims to supply electricity directly to the Tongan grid, which today is heavily dependent on expensive, imported diesel. Redd expects subsea geothermal to be cost-competitive with that fuel in this first pilot.
Getting there, however, is a formidable engineering challenge. While it’s long been a subject of academic curiosity, no one prior to Endurance had ever drilled an offshore geothermal well before, meaning the team can’t simply transplant existing land-based technology to the seafloor. “Every component that you would use terrestrially now needs to be either modified or built completely from scratch,” Redd explained. “And so you multiply that across every component required to make these kinds of infrastructure projects happen, and it’s a lot of work.”
No kidding. But if Endurance can pull it off, Redd sees this resource as “the perfect energy source for the future.” A conference paper presented by the geoscience company Viridien last year estimates that offshore geothermal resources worldwide could yield about 6 terawatts of recoverable electric power — nearly twice the world’s current continuous electricity output.
“We can access terawatts of power. There’s no fuel. We can site next to extremely large cities around the Pacific. We have no surface presence,” Redd said, ticking off the advantages. Plus, the three necessary ingredients for a high-quality geothermal well — permeable rock, high heat, and water — are widely accessible offshore, he added. Eventually, he expects subsea geothermal to undercut natural gas in Endurance’s target markets: electricity grids, industrial facilities, and data centers across the Pacific Islands, the U.S. West Coast, and Northeast Asia, all of which sit along the undersea volcanic zone known as the “Ring of Fire.”
The way Redd sees it, advances in subsea technology pioneered by the offshore wind, oil, and gas industries have cleared much of the technological path to making underwater geothermal a viable clean energy resource. In his view, what’s been missing is simply the ambition to chase the opportunity in the private market. SpaceX, he said, really proved what’s possible for a scrappy startup to achieve.
“It is quite new at industrial scale for a small company with a bunch of fairly young people to go after something like this,” he told me. “Before SpaceX went to launch a rocket as a private company, no one thought you could get to orbit as a private company. And so that has really seeded this ambition.”
On The Nuclear Company, Venture Global’s power dreams, and super pollutants
Current conditions: A cold front is sweeping into the Northeast, potentially bringing snow to higher elevations in New York and New England • Early snow is blanketing parts of the Mountain West, with as much as 16 inches in Great Falls, Montana • Temperatures in Jakarta are nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Indonesia battles the world’s worst air with haze brought on by forest fires.
Smoke billows from a Gazprom refinery outside Moscow following a drone attack. AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s controversial and potentially illegal deal to unilaterally lift U.S. sanctions on Russia to allow Moscow to export millions of tons of diesel to the global market was meant to curb the surging price of the fuel, which has added as much as $1,000 per week to commercial truckers’ costs in the U.S. in recent months. But the agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin could backfire as Ukraine responds by breaking with Washington and once again targeting the Kremlin’s oil refineries. In an interview Thursday with the Financial Times, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the ban on attacking refineries “is out” after U.S. intelligence pulled back from sharing information with Kyiv and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, on which the Ukrainian military has depended for drone attacks, weakened amid a wave of Russian attacks. “We’re done,” Zelenskyy said.
When Jair Bolsonaro took power in 2019, Brazil’s right-wing firebrand former president vowed to industrialize the Amazon, clearing the way for ranchers, loggers, and miners to exploit the vast jungle’s resources. Later that year, fires consumed broad chunks of the Amazon. Now Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s son, is the frontrunner in the October 25 runoff election against left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro’s supporters post semi-facetious, AI-generated videos depicting a hulking, muscly Flávio riding on the back of a velociraptor, flamethrowering the rainforest to make way for rows of McDonald’s. Right on cue, the Amazon is once again on fire. Droughts brought on by El Niño have “left the Amazon rainforest primed to burn, and scientists say the region has entered the early stages of what they think will be a long and severe fire season,” according to an analysis by NASA. Already, satellite images show a sharp increase in fire and smoke in the central and Eastern Amazon. Brazil now has the worst wildfire-wrought air quality in the world after Indonesia.
Last month, Holtec Nuclear — the company behind the nation’s first restart of an atomic power station and a frontrunner to build some of our first small modular reactors — canceled its plans to debut itself on the stock market with an initial public offering. The reason? Every nuclear company that went public in recent months has seen its stock price plummet. On Thursday, Axios reported that The Nuclear Company, the developer that brought together the team that helped build the country’s first Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle to build more large-scale plants, had backed away from its own IPO plans. (Listen to my colleague Robinson Meyer’s interview with The Nuclear Company’s chief executive here.)
The detail highlights how the market has cooled to nuclear startups since next-generation SMR developer Oklo went public and made billions of dollars as retail investors sought to bet on a nuclear comeback. And yet The Nuclear Company only raised its first Series A funding round last year. Its fate has always seemed tied to Westinghouse, which is eyeing its own IPO. While The Nuclear Company will almost certainly need to go public at some point, given the capital intensity of its projects, it hadn’t yet filed a confidential S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Without that, it’s unlikely The Nuclear Company would be IPOing by next year anyway.
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Venture Global has inked a deal with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes Energy Services to build up to 16 new 720-megawatt power island units and transformers as America’s No. 2 liquified natural gas company builds out a behind-the meter industrial power network. The deal, per a press release, provides “a pathway to make up to 10 gigawatts of new compute capacity available over time” at sites owned by Venture Global. The company already boasts 4.5 gigawatts of what it calls “island mode modular, gas-fired generation.” In a statement, Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel said the company will maintain “one of the world’s largest private industrial electric grids.”
The move comes as the U.S. added a record 89 gigawatts of clean power capacity in the second half of this year, with momentum building for another new high next year, according to the latest market outlook from BloombergNEF. The consultancy projected that solar will reach 48.9 gigawatts in 2026, with 430 gigawatts of utility-scale solar forecast to come online through 2036. That, surprisingly, is down nearly 8% from BNEF’s previous estimate at the start of the year. More surprising is the energy source that is on the rise: Onshore wind additions could peak at 9.2 gigawatts in 2028, with 99.7 gigawatts forecast through 2036 — and that’s 15% above BNEF’s past forecast. Energy storage is on track to add 383 gigawatts through 2036, a 35% bump from BNEF’s past estimate. Nuclear, meanwhile, is expected to pick up again after a decade of stagnation, with 13.7 gigawatts on track to come online through 2036.
Back in 2024, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo covered Google’s first-of-a-kind deals to lock in carbon removal. Two years later, she was lamenting the “sorry state” of the industry amid a broader pullback from the cutting-edge technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Things may be picking back up again. On Thursday, the tech giant backed an $11.7 million deal with the carbon marketplace Frontier to pay to remove 20,932 tons of carbon from the atmosphere using the startup 44.01’s mineralization technology, which converts carbon into solid rock within three years. “44.01’s technology dissolves captured CO2 that is injected deep beneath the Earth’s surface. There, it reacts to form solid carbonate minerals within a few years,” Randy Spock, Google’s head of carbon removal, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Those minerals stay put for millennia with no risk of reversal.”
In May, the Trump administration eased U.S. restrictions on so-called super pollutants, the class of refrigerants that rapidly spur on global warming. On Thursday, a coalition of climate philanthropies announced over $36 million in new funding to support a push to expand energy-efficient, sustainable cooling. “As demand for cooling grows, so do potential emissions,” Christie Ulman, president of Sequoia Climate Foundation, said in a press release. “Targeted philanthropic funding can be a catalytic force in unlocking broader investments in sustainable cooling and fast-acting super pollutant solutions that shield vulnerable communities and advance climate goals.”
