Building the geothermal layer the industrial economy needs.
Founded in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2025. Bootstrapped. Working with industrial sites in the Basin and Range on what modular geothermal actually looks like at their scale.
The industrial sector cannot decarbonize on intermittent power.
Solar and wind are the cheapest generation sources at scale, but they leave industrial buyers exposed to the hours those sources cannot deliver. A mining operation running three shifts or a kiln that cannot be cold-started cannot absorb intermittency without expensive storage assumptions.
Geothermal is the only renewable with a flat, continuous output profile. The Basin and Range has thousands of shut-in wells drilled for oil and gas that never produced commercially but sit above formations with temperatures above 120C. We believe the infrastructure to turn those wells into industrial power assets already exists, and we are building the extraction and dispatch technology to use it.
Our design principle is that geothermal power for an industrial site should feel like a utility contract, not a capital project. The site gets clean baseload. The dispatch optimization happens on our side of the fence.
The people building this
Years spent in subsurface engineering and geothermal resource mapping across Utah Basin formations. Founded Critical Energy after identifying the gap between the Basin and Range's shut-in well inventory and the clean baseload needs of industrial load centers in the region.
Background in power systems software and real-time grid scheduling. Focused on distributed energy control systems and ISO market signal processing before co-founding Critical Energy. Leads the Dispatch Engine architecture and SCADA telemetry integration.
Research background in geothermal resource assessment, formation temperature modeling, and shut-in well evaluation across the Basin and Range. Leads subsurface characterization, wellbore selection, and formation temperature analysis for Critical Energy deployments.
Frequently asked questions
It narrows our focus to sites where we can move quickly. We are not operating a long project development pipeline. We identify a well with the right formation temperature, do the geophysical assessment, and move to extraction unit deployment. The economics need to work at the first site without complex financing structures.
We treat it as a behind-the-meter energy supply arrangement. The site partner gets clean baseload power at a contracted rate. We own the extraction and dispatch infrastructure and operate it. The site does not need to manage the wellbore, the ORC unit, or the dispatch optimization logic.
The extraction technology uses ORC systems that are commercially deployed at geothermal sites globally. The closed-loop wellbore approach is newer and has been validated at pilot scale. The dispatch platform is in active development and is not in production deployment yet. We are transparent about what is proven and what is being validated.
We are bootstrapped and focused on the first pilot deployment. We are not actively seeking investment at this stage. If your organization has site access in the Basin and Range or adjacent technical capabilities, we are more interested in project partnerships than capital at this point.
Industrial sites, well owners, and ORC operators, we want to hear from you.
The fastest path to the first deployment is a site with the right formation access and an industrial buyer ready to evaluate the model.
Contact the team