On any other day, David Rodriguez’s truck would have been helping extract oil, and as he sucked mud from a well beneath a towering drilling rig, any passersby might have assumed he was doing just that.
“Compared to oil and gas, it’s the same thing, man,” Rodriguez shouted over the motor.
But he was working to produce something entirely different. Rather than pulling oil out of the earth, the hole he was helping drill would be used to store clean, transient power from south Texas wind and solar farms.
Rodriguez, who was helping drill the hole for geothermal energy company Sage Geosystems, is one of a growing number of workers across Texas employing some of the same skills and technology used to extract fossil fuels for the production of renewable energy.
Those efforts come at the height of the largest oil and gas boom in American history, which centers on an expansive oil-producing region extending across western Texas and eastern New Mexico known as the Permian Basin and has been driven by the increasing use of novel technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
