Texas

Fervo Energy develops next-generation enhanced geothermal technology to provide reliable, 24/7 energy. The startup graduated from Berkeley Lab’s science entrepreneur fellowship program, Cyclotron Road, in 2020. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, the energy supplier operates three field sites across the country and signed a 15-year power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison to power 350,000 homes. Construction of its Cape Station, Utah, site is expected to create more than 6,000 jobs.

U.S. oilfields produce significant amounts of high-salinity water that is difficult to treat with traditional reverse osmosis (RO) technology. A research project in Reeves County, TX, aims to test a new method of using commercial RO membranes and infrastructure through a counterflow arrangement of RO to enable filtering of high-salinity water. The project is a part of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), led by Berkeley Lab, in partnership with Houston-based Aris Water (now Western Midstream, lead), New Mexico State University, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Garver, and OLISoft, Inc.

Lithium is a critical mineral powering many electronic devices, but its supply is unstable, typically sourced from open mining pits outside the U.S. A team from Berkeley Lab aims to study the accumulation and extraction of lithium from the Smackover Formation, the nation’s leading lithium brine resource. Spanning from Texas to the Florida panhandle, this region has the potential to act as a more economically sustainable and secure source of lithium.