Zanskar Geothermal raises $115M to find hidden geothermal resources using AI-driven exploration

over to creditors,

which would be a $5 billion loss.

That is rough. Absolutely brutal. Uh we'll dig in here more next.

Anyway, um we have Joel Edwards from Zancar in the waiting room. Let's bring Joel in to the TVP and Ultradom. Joel, how are you doing?

What's going on?

Good. Hey guys,

welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. Great.

Thanks for hopping on and thanks for cleaning the camera. I appreciate that. Always want to look sharp on TVPN. Uh first time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Hey guys, Joel Edwards. I'm a geologist by training. I'm from Zansgar Geothermal.

We're a group that we wildat for new geothermal resources out west.

Yeah.

To make power.

Okay. What's the best

Actually, music to my ears.

What's the best

If I got one more AI agent I was No, I'm kidding.

Name every geothermal resource. Like what are we actually just concretize it for me like what are we talking about here? What is you striking gold look like?

Yeah. striking gold. In in your head, have you guys ever been to Yellowstone National Park? First national park? Yeah, I think so. Seen the old faith faith faithful geyser, any of those thermal features?

Okay.

These are the types of systems we're looking for

except for the systems we're looking for are hidden or blind.

Okay.

So, there's nothing at the surface. There's no geyser. There's no hot springs.

Okay.

Nothing. But there are massive geothermal resources.

Okay.

At depth that you can tap with a wellfield.

You can pull that heat out of the ground

and you can put it in a turbine and make electricity. Interesting. Yeah. Take me through the the the the geology 101. The Where's the heat coming from? Why is this underground? How do we get it out? Is it just there there are just like pockets of hot air? Hot water. Like I really dumb it down for me.

There are pockets of hot water underground. Okay.

Not hot air.

Yeah. Uh, and they're fairly discreet, fairly local, but when you find them, they're incredibly energy dense. So, think in your mind like volcanoes. Yeah. Right. That's a that's a manifestation of a geothermal system.

Okay.

Um, think hot springs and so forth. There are parts of the world of the crust where there's just a lot of heat.

Yeah. And um that gets manifest in these different thermal features and you can drill into these things and you can pull steam or hot brines out of the ground and then you put it into a power plant just like you know all thermal power plants nuclear

coal combined cycle gas. Yeah.

They all put heat into turbines. Turbine spins

spins a generator and you make electricity and so forth. Yeah.

Is that classic meme? We we discover a new way to generate power and we're going to use it to boil water and generate steam and spin a turbine so we get more electricity. And this is like we do every time we discover something new. We making

What does the what is what is the business actually going to look like? Is this a whale hunting where you're really trying to find a single site in the next 24 months and then you'll spend years.

Do you want to commercialize it or do you want to sell it off to another company at that point? Uh like how how full stack do you wind up going here? Yeah, we already own and operate a power plant, geothermal power plant in New Mexico. So, we sell electricity,

okay,

to an investor owned utility and then they service Albuquerque and Santa Fe and so forth.

Interesting.

So, the business is to find geothermal resources,

build a power plant and then sell the electricity to a customer.

Yeah.

So, this is part of that.

Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Is there uh is there this feels like uh eco-friendly? Is there push back to geothermal energy production generally? Uh like people are worried about earthquakes or something. I don't know. Like what? It feels like this is this is a step forward.

People are gonna find a way to find anything.

So what are they gonna hate about this?

Like are you in like are you renewable? Are you clean energy? Like what what category are you in do you think?

Yeah. Right now we are beloved by both sides of the political aisle. So you show up in

enjoy it while it lasts buddy.

Yeah. Exactly.

Somebody will find a way.

Triple glaze. We're we're one of the few like bipartisan things where you show up in DC and everybody loves you, shakes your hand. It's a really exciting moment. Cool.

There's there's attributes about geothermal that people love. It's base load. There's no emission profile. It's domestic, so all these resources are in the US.

You know, it uses US supply chains. It uses drillers. Everybody loves drillers. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people love drillers.

And so forth. So, it has a lot of those attributes that speak to both the left and the right. And then probably, you know, another attribute is the underdog attribute. Everybody loves a good underdog. Geothermal is an underdog. We're a niche small industry. We have a lot of the same setup that oil and gas had like 100 plus years ago where

it looks like there's a lot of resource out there. Looks like a ton of potential. It's still niche. Is it going to scale?

Yeah. Is this one of those things like rare earths are not actually that rare?

Hard to find. We don't like find the refining nearby. How rare how much geothermal energy is there? Like are we talking like tens of gigawatts potentially if we were to put in like AI data center parlayans?

Yeah. I I think tens of gigawatts is near-term super duper realistic based on the tools and the tech that we have

today. Yeah.

So exciting. Yeah.

Um obviously there's people talking hundreds of gigawatts, terowatts. We'll see what happens, right? as as things as industries scale, nonlinear, unpredictable things happen, right?

Cost and technology and all these things change. So, it's hard to predict what's going to happen 10 years from now. But

basically, there's two things that drive scale for resources. It's the number of resources out there in existence. Yeah.

And then it's your ability to extract the resource and that's really technology dependent.

So, geothermal we're we're Zanscar really focuses on finding more geothermal hotspots. We have a thesis that there's a lot more out there. We've already found a bunch of sites. We've announced a few of them. There's more to come. And then there's other groups that have focused on how do you get more out of these systems? And those are in the unconventional bucket. It's like it's like the oil and gas play in the Perian in West Texas. Y

right. They came in with unconventional well fields. They drill horizontal wells. They stimulate. They get more hydrocarbons out of the rock.

Yep.

That process is happening in geothermal right now as well.

Okay.

So you have the exploration piece, finding more and then getting more out of it.

Yeah. Double clicking on the expir exploration piece. Um, uh, it sounds like AI can be used to do more computational discovery, actually interpret data, but what's the gold standard for actually obtaining the data? Like what like what sensor are you using to detect uh the potential of a geothermal uh, you know, uh, discovery

system? What's the secret

sensor? We the the trick in geothermal is that there's not a single type of geological data that tells you if a system is in existence other than just drilling a well into the thing and measure.

There's nothing you can do just like radar or like pulse something through the ground and find it that way.

Unfortunately, no. I wish it was that easy.

You got in oil and gas exploration, they use seismic reflection imaging and that was kind of their

silver bullet tool set to find a lot of these reservoirs. Yeah,

in geothermal we use a mix of data sets to try to find these hidden systems.

Interesting.

And that's where that's where like AI tools really flex because they can they can handle the hyperdimensionality problem really well

better better than humans.

So we basically build the sandbox in which the models learn how to find systems

and the building the sandbox piece is the really hard piece. You have to put the right data in there. You have to put the right learning

objective rates and so forth.

That's that's the piece that we live in. We build the sandboxes for the models.

Interesting. Uh la last question for me.

I feel like you guys are bending towards uh the the you know the meme template like the world like the world if it ran on geothermal energy and it's like this like flying car everything's green.

Uh hypothetically uh friend of the show Mark Beni off he's out in Hawaii. He's big on AI. Could we put a cap on a volcano and capture all the energy out of a volcano and use that to power Salesforce AI?

Sure, why not? A cap. What does What does the cap look like? Is

I don't know. I'm just imagining I'm imagining a physical something to trap the heat that comes off of the volcano. Maybe you want to drill into the volcano and extract the lava that way. But has anyone actually at least theor theorized about capturing energy from volcanoes? They seem very powerful. They're they're pretty powerful. We have a lot of active operational geothermal wellfields on volcanoes today. Really?

So the main island of Hawaii has a geothermal wellfield. They've drilled into the side of that volcano and they make electricity out of it.

That's crazy.

So I guess if that's the cap but but they are extracting energy from the volcano. That's a remarkable

That's right.

Wow.

Yeah. So there's a lot of geothermal operations power plants in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, where a lot of these big volcanic systems live. In the US, we have some volcanic systems generating power in California.

Yeah.

And then most of the rest of the systems are generating from from cracks or fracture zones. Sure.

In the crust.

Sure.

Yeah.

That's very exciting. Uh did did you raise money?

We raised some money. Yeah, we we've got some cash.

I want to ring the gong for you. It's exciting. The gong is The gong is coming. I knew the gong was coming.

Yes.

Uh we we raised 115 million a few months ago and just

congratulations. Thank you.

Wait. $40 million. What

credit facility?

It's a It's a credit facility. Yeah.

Massive.

It's all good.

I'm really glad you're doing this.

Yeah. This is amazing.

I'm really glad you're doing this. You know that people talk about AI bottlenecks in AI, right? you know, uh, talent chips, you know, uh, energy, uh, and there there's

and there's sort of like this cycle in technology live streaming right now. And right now there's sort of like a talent bottleneck, but, uh, and an equipment bottleneck, but, uh, you know, if if we keep doubling from here, there will be a an energy bottleneck in in technology live streaming. So, I'm glad you're I'm glad you're doing this work.

Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Have you ever been on a drill rig? Uh, I have

You guys have not lived yet. I mean, this is the American experience is to be on a drill rig.

I know. I know. Tell us tell us when you're in Southern California.

We would would love to go live from a from the rig.

Yeah.

So, anyways,

thanks for talk to you later.