Turning fossil fuel core competencies to better use

People who work in threatened or declining industries, be it buggy whips or fossil fuels, can often find it difficult to imagine how to transform. Employees tend to keep their heads down, feeling subconsciously or consciously guilty about what they do for a living. I’ve had employees in timber and natural gas companies tell me they don’t tell their friends where they work. Imagine the psychic energy drain this poses to the employees and the innovation missed opportunities for the company!

Companies in this situation need to have open conversations about what their core competencies are and how they could be redeployed in better ways. When I led a training at a gas company to open this conversation, we started by talking about other industries first. It’s easier to reinvent someone else’s workplace. When we started talking about their own industry, suddenly the energy in the room swelled. Ideas started bubbling up, shorter term ones and visions for the long term future. Suddenly it was okay to talk about this and they could see how they could be part of the solution.

This transformation may have been similar to how ex-employees of the oil and gas industry joined forces to create Sage Geosystems. They’re applying their core competency of drilling deep holes to create three different ways to harness geothermal energy anywhere.

To date, industrial scale geothermal sites have been in rare places like Iceland: places with volcanic heat and wet rock that can create steam. Sage envisions three ways to do this where those conditions aren’t present: using abandoned wells, drilling a series of wells close together, or linking it to renewable energy as a battery.

Be aware that geothermal is not entirely benign. There may still be undisclosed chemicals used in drilling and fracking. And methane often seeps out. Certainly it’s a lot less than oil and gas production, but it’s there.