What big oil is hiding from you with Cindy Taff and Stephanie Honchell Smith

[00:00:04] Every time you fill up your gas tank, you're paying two prices. The one on the screen and the one nobody talks about. Measured in parts per million, in degrees, in coastlines and communities that didn't get a vote. It's the cost of oil, the monetary costs, and the environmental ones. Right now, fossil fuel leases are being expanded and climate commitments are being walked back.

[00:00:32] And in the process, these costs are still treated as inevitable, as unfortunate, but necessary to fuel our modern life. But quietly underground, literally, a different kind of energy revolution is gaining speed. And the truth is that we've known about this for decades, and the oil industry has probably known for even longer than that.

[00:00:57] Today, we're talking about what big oil built, what it buried, and what this discovery means for our future. This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. Today, we're going underground. Literally. We're digging into the energy crisis hiding in plain sight through the story of a former oil executive who switched sides

[00:01:25] and the decades-long playbook big oil used to keep us in the dark. We have two pieces of content today, a TED Talk and a TED Ed lesson that belong together. And I promise, by the time we're done, you'll see exactly why. Our TED Talk today comes from Cindy Taft, CEO of Sage Geosystems. Cindy Taft spent 35 years at Shell Oil. She was vice president of unconventional wells.

[00:01:54] She managed a budget of over a billion dollars and oversaw drilling projects in five countries. She was, by every measure, one of the most powerful women in oil and gas. And then she walked away. Not to retire, not to consult. She left to start a company called Sage Geosystems that provides renewable energy powered by geothermal technology.

[00:02:23] Here's what you need to understand before you hear her talk. Deep beneath the Earth's surface sits 50,000 times more energy than all the world's fossil fuel reserves combined. 50,000 times. That's not a rounding error. That's a civilization level resource.

[00:02:45] And unlike solar, which goes dark at night or wind, which stills when the air does, geothermal is always on. No other forecast required. It's what's called baseload power. Reliable, continuous and clean. The tech industry is already paying attention. Meta has a term sheet with Sage Geosystems for 150 megawatts of geothermal power. Google is signing deals.

[00:03:14] The Rhodium Group projects geothermal could meet up to 64% of data center energy demand growth by the early 2030s. And when OpenAI's Sam Altman told the Senate last year that the cost of AI will converge to the cost of energy, he wasn't being dramatic. He was being precise. So this isn't just a climate story. It's a tech story. An infrastructure story. A who gets to build the future story.

[00:03:44] The twist? The technology Cindy Taft is using to access that deep earth heat is the same controversial technique that made oil and gas companies powerful in the first place. She's asking a tough but important question. Can we take what the fossil fuel industry built and use it to undo the damage it caused? Okay, so if you can't tell already, I'm from Texas.

[00:04:17] And I also spent my career in the oil and gas industry. So do you hate me yet? Let's hope not. So I went into oil and gas because energy is life. And I wanted to be able to provide people with lights, air conditioning, heat, and of course, the ability to watch funny cat videos on their phone. But energy also evolves.

[00:04:45] So humans used to burn wood for heat and light. We then transitioned to whale oil and to coal and then to oil and gas. But we're now using renewables like solar and wind. And it's this exciting evolution to clean renewable energy that inspired me to leave Shell and start my own geothermal company with my partners.

[00:05:13] And so we're now using that mud on your boots know-how from the oil and gas industry to drill for heat instead of for hydrocarbons. So most people don't know this, but there's a lot of heat deep in the earth. And the deeper you drill, the hotter it gets. And it's this heat, this energy. It's always on. It's clean.

[00:05:37] And it actually holds 50,000 times more energy than all of the oil and gas reserves on the planet. So why am I still talking about oil and gas? It's because we're going to take the technologies that the oil and gas have developed over the last 100 years at a cost of trillions of dollars, and we're going to start drilling for heat instead of hydrocarbons.

[00:06:07] So let's talk a little bit about drilling just to give you guys a basis on it. Oil used to be found in puddles on the ground. So people figured out that they could use it to run machineries, cars, airplanes, and the demand skyrocketed. The oil line on the ground ran out because people were using it. So we started to dig. So we dug deeper and deeper.

[00:06:32] And despite what you may have heard or think about, you know, roughnecks and oil field work is actually quite complex and technical. The industry was able to advance the technologies even more to unlock oil that was previously out of reach and at a cost the world could afford.

[00:06:52] And so using amazing innovation, the industry learned how to basically turn the bit sideways in the subsurface, be able to drill horizontally within the layers that actually carried the oil and gas. The industry also learned how to frack the rock to release oil that would have otherwise been stuck in there.

[00:07:19] And so I know not everybody's a fan of fracking, but it really did bring in an error of lower cost energy. And I'll tell you in a minute why fracking is important for geothermal energy.

[00:07:35] So the oil and gas industry, with all of this turning and steering underground, was able to drill deeper, drill hotter, and actually drill with some pinpoint precision. So for example, imagine hitting a target the size of a pizza at a depth of five miles under the ground into the earth, and being able to do this over and over again.

[00:08:04] The technology is pretty amazing. And so we are now going to use that technology for geothermal, but we're not going to have to learn over those hundred years so we can apply it straight away. So you guys may ask, why do we even need geothermal? Because let's admit, wind and solar have done a great job greening the grid. Well, geothermal can do what wind and solar can't.

[00:08:32] And that is provide power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of what the weather is. You can also use geothermal as a giant battery to store extra energy from wind and solar, and to make those intermittent power resources baseload. Because we can then use that extra energy during the day when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing.

[00:08:58] And so where is the real prize for geothermal? So I think a lot of us know about Iceland or the geysers in California, where they've done a great job of exploiting the shallow pools of hot water that's just below the surface. The challenge with those areas is that it's kind of a unique unicorn geology.

[00:09:24] So the real prize in geothermal is in rock that's deep, hot. And so you're going to have to drill deeper. So we call this next generation geothermal. And that's where we're going. And we're going there by drilling deeper, hotter, and horizontal. And I would say that there are several companies that are racing toward this future. Ours is one of them. I'm proud to say that we are not just talking about it.

[00:09:52] We're actually in the field, drilling wells, building systems, and proving that geothermal technology can work in unassuming places like Texas. Who had ever heard of geothermal in Texas? It's there. Okay, I said I'd come back to the F word, fracking. And why is it important to geothermal? So in this deep, hot rock, there's not a lot of cracks for water to flow through.

[00:10:20] And the way we get geothermal to work is to flow water through fracks to absorb the heat. And then we use that water to carry the heat to the surface. And when you get that heat to the surface, you can use it to drive turbines, to power electricity, or you can use the heat directly. The reason why we use fracturing is we can create those cracks in the rock

[00:10:48] or those pathways through which the water can flow through. So what we do during fracking operations is we are creating cracks in the rock or we're widening cracks that are already there. And we're using it with a liquid that is mainly water. We do add crushed rock called barite in the water to make it more dense. The thing I want to note is that we're pumping at lower pressures and lower rates than the oil and gas industry.

[00:11:15] And we're actually wanting to avoid natural occurring faults. And this allows us to make our risk of earthquakes low. We're not talking about technology that's decades in the future. This is footage from our energy storage facility, which is actually built at a coal plant. This coal plant is delivering people electricity 24 hours a day,

[00:11:43] and they are making the bold move to solar. And it was without our energy storage facility, they're not able to make that move because solar alone cannot replace that power 24 hours a day. And then soon we're going to be powering a meta data center with our next generation geothermal technologies. Imagine again Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and of course funny cat videos

[00:12:12] being powered by the Earth's heat. So how big can this get and how fast? If we're able to take next generation geothermal, get the cost comparable to other power sources, we're going to be able to use the geologists, the drillers, the service companies, the engineers from the oil and gas industry, who are currently drilling 70,000 wells a year for oil and gas, and instead have them drill for heat.

[00:12:41] So the result, by 2050, we can deliver almost 80% of the electricity demand that the world needs and over 100% of the heat for all homes, all businesses on the planet.

[00:13:04] So energy solved, climate change solved, that better future that our kids deserve. I'm hoping this leaves you guys energized. There's people like me that are already working toward this end. And the thing I want to leave you with is that energy is everywhere beneath our feet. We just need to tap into it. Thank you. That was Cindy Taft at TED Countdown 2025.

[00:13:35] Cindy Taft's vision is bold and the science backs it up. But if geothermal has always had this kind of potential, if the technology already existed, if the heat beneath our feet was always there, you have to ask yourself, why are we already living in that world? Why has it taken this long? I want to stay with that question for a moment, because the answer is not a mystery.

[00:14:03] It's a documented, deliberately constructed reality. And this TED-Ed lesson lays it out with the receipts. Historian and educator Stephanie Honchel Smith describes how the oil industry continued to push fossil fuels despite being aware of the effects on the planet. In 2015, Inside Climate News conducted an investigation

[00:14:30] and found that the oil industry knew. They knew about the dangers of burning fossil fuels as far back as the 1970s. Scientists inside companies like ExxonMobil accurately predicted rising global temperatures due to carbon emissions. But instead of warning the public, instead of pivoting toward clean energy, the industry did something else entirely. They launched a decade-long campaign to discredit climate science,

[00:14:59] funding think tanks, undermining international agreements, and sowing just enough doubt to protect their bottom line for another generation. This is the context that makes Cindy Taft's defection from big oil so significant. It also makes the urgency of what she's building so clear. We lost decades. And those decades have a cost. So let's go even deeper with this TED-Ed lesson

[00:15:29] and dig into what the oil industry doesn't want you to know. In summer 1997, a full-page ad appeared in the New York Times. The message from the Global Climate Coalition issued a dire economic warning about the U.S. embracing the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But beneath the veneer of smiling children was something much more insidious.

[00:15:57] A multi-million dollar campaign propped up by questionable data and backed by some of the world's most powerful companies. The Global Climate Coalition was itself a front for the oil industry, established to sow doubt and confusion about climate action. But the real story starts decades earlier. In the 1970s, oil companies employed some of the world's top atmospheric scientists as they needed to understand

[00:16:26] weather-related risks to their equipment and to assess the environmental impact of new projects. By the late 1970s, these scientists, along with their counterparts in academia, had concluded that burning fossil fuels created a build-up of atmospheric carbon, which would impact the climate by trapping heat and increasing surface temperatures. They warned that an increase of even a few degrees could be catastrophic

[00:16:54] and accurately predicted events such as rapid Arctic warming and the melting of Antarctic ice sheets. Throughout the 1980s, oil industry reps met repeatedly to discuss these dangers, acknowledging the risk that their product posed to the future of humanity. However, instead of warning the public or using this knowledge to pivot towards renewable energy sources,

[00:17:22] they doubled down on oil. But in the late 1980s, scientists sounded the alarm about climate change, raising public awareness and leading to calls for government action. In response, the oil industry launched what would become a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar PR campaign to discredit the very science they helped pioneer. They utilized the same PR firms that had previously helped

[00:17:52] the tobacco industry mislead the public about the harms of smoking. Oil companies directly lobbied government officials and covertly funded dozens of organizations like the Global Climate Coalition, whose objective was to obscure the scientific consensus on climate change and humanity's role in creating it. They attacked credible scientists and bankrolled advertisements

[00:18:21] disguised as op-eds, which falsely exaggerated the degree and significance of uncertainty in climate models and used that uncertainty as an excuse to dismiss the science entirely. These advertorials grabbed readers' attention with titles like Lies They Tell Our Children and Unsettled Science. The industry also capitalized

[00:18:49] on lingering Cold War anxieties that equated government regulation with socialism. Thus, at the very moment the world was poised to act, oil companies shifted the conversation away from the actual science and turned it into a debate about protecting freedom. By doing so, they took a non-partisan, uncontentious topic and transformed it into a hot-button

[00:19:18] political issue. After George W. Bush became president in 2001, oil lobbyists successfully pushed his administration to replace officials who agreed with mainstream science with ones who opposed environmental regulations. When Bush pushed the US out of the Kyoto Protocol, his administration credited the Global Climate Coalition with influencing his decision.

[00:19:47] But the oil industry's PR campaigns didn't end with their Kyoto victory. They've continued to shape the climate conversation, pushing propaganda and co-opting climate language. British Petroleum, for example, popularized the phrase carbon footprint, an idea which in practice effectively shifts climate responsibility from the industry to the consumer.

[00:20:16] To this day, the industry massively over-emphasizes their investment in green energies such as biofuels, which represent just 1% of their budgets, and they employ legions of lobbyists who attend UN climate meetings and work to water down the language of IPCC climate assessment reports. In this, they're allied with oil-producing countries, which also have

[00:20:45] a vested interest in continued fossil fuel use. While the oil companies now acknowledge that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change, they deny having misled the public, arguing that their messaging always reflected the scientific consensus, but an extensive paper trail shows otherwise. While oil companies' profits reach all-time highs, climate change costs the public billions of dollars

[00:21:15] each year. Extreme weather events and decreasing air quality kill millions of people annually. Meanwhile, the culture of doubt the oil industry created remains widespread, polarizing the issue and delaying meaningful action. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can still reclaim the conversation and change course, embracing renewable energies

[00:21:44] and sustainable practices to protect both our planet and our future. That was Stephanie Honchel Smith in a TED-Ed lesson that is equal parts educational and infuriating. And I think that's why these two pieces belong together. On one side, you have a woman who built a career inside the machine and left to build something better. On the other, you have the legacy

[00:22:14] she walked away from. A machine that spent decades and billions of dollars to make sure something better never had a chance. But here's what I want you to hold on to. We are at an inflection point unlike any we've seen before. AI is hungry for power. Data centers are scaling at a pace the grid wasn't built to handle. The planet is warming in ways that were predicted even if it wasn't

[00:22:43] shared with the rest of us. What Cindy Taft is doing is proof that the expertise, the infrastructure, and the political will to change direction already exists. The oil industry built the tools that could help save us from itself. The question is whether we'll move fast enough to use them. And knowing what we know now about what's been hidden from us, that's not a reason to give up. That's a reason to demand more.

[00:23:14] That's our show. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. Thanks for thinking alongside us. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Constanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Belarreso, Maria Ladias, Tanzika Sangmanivan, and Roxanne Heilash. If you're enjoying

[00:23:43] the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.