Digging deep for super hot geothermal

Latitude Media covering the new. The energy transition. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. If you are going to use water to extract heat from the subsurface, That is the ideal temperature, 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that, diminishing returns. Anything below that, you're leaving too much opportunity on the table. Coming up, a slightly deep dive into extremely deep geothermal.

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So the promise is pretty simple. Geothermal anywhere. Just to unpack that a bit, there is, for good reason, a lot of excitement about geothermal power right now. The list of clean baseload power generation sources is sadly pretty short. And as far as proven technologies go, sorry, wave power, is really just hydro, nuclear, and geothermal. And each of those three, in my mind, has a core limitation. For hydro, the best resource is mostly tapped in at least much of the West.

For nuclear, it's a question of cost and time to market. And for geothermal, it's the geological boundary. You need a lot of heat close to the surface for traditional geothermal. For enhanced geothermal systems, EGS, those rules are relaxed a bit, but realistically we're still talking about a swath of the West in the United States, for example. But go deep enough and there's enough heat everywhere, literally. So the questions are, can you drill deep enough and more importantly, hot enough?

Can you extract that heat and will it be cheap? Carlos Araque thinks the answer will be yes, yes, yes. He's the CEO of Quase, which is a startup going after super hot geothermal. Let's hear his vision. Carlos, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. All right. So I wanna start by having you describe to me how traditional geothermal, like traditional hydrothermal geothermal works, so that we can contrast that to

The type of thing that you're going after, which is super deep, super hot. So if I'm if I'm doing like a traditional hydrothermal, geothermal system. Um, the types of things that, you know, we were building in the 70s and 80s and are building some of now again today. How deep am I drilling and how hot is the rock that I'm looking for? For traditional hydrothermal, um, not not very deep at all. You're going maybe a mile at most.

And and you're getting as hot as what the water that's down there gets you. It's usually sub boiling. It's hard to get to boiling temperatures. You're talking about two hundred degrees Fahrenheit and less. The hydrothermal requires that water to be in there. So that's a key characteristic we're going to be talking about today. The modern geothermal doesn't require that. You'll bring your own water.

Okay, but so we're getting we're getting temperatures in the low hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit and depths in the mid thousands of feet, basically, is the is kind of like where we've traditionally developed geothermal. Yeah, that is correct. Those are very near surface systems. They're even shallower than what oil and gas would require.

Okay. And so the whole point of this is that like that those systems exist. And that's why we have geothermal power today. And we can probably develop a lot more geothermal power if we could just find where those systems exist more, but they are geographically limited. You do need that heat to be pretty close to the surface, and you need some additional characteristics like permeability as well. And that's what has kept

geothermal limited geographically to specific areas kind of all over the world. Let's contrast that then. So when you think about the type of thing you're interested in, what type of depth and temperature should I be thinking about?

So so the right way to think about this is to think about temperature. Temperature is the target. We pick Roughly eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit for a very clear reason. It's physics. If you are going to use water to extract heat from the subsurface, that is the ideal temperature.

800 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that, diminishing returns. Anything below that, you're leaving too much opportunity on the table. So we're going after that temperature. That is the target. And the question then is how deep is that? Well it depends where you are. In some places not very deep at all. You can go maybe three miles.

Which is consistent with oil and gas drilling depths and you're there. But in other places you have to go three, maybe four times as deep as that to get to those temperatures. So that's the range. Always looking for 800 Fahrenheit, and you'll find it anywhere between three miles to 12 miles deep, depending on where you are in the world. Okay, so and you just mentioned the right comparison here. So in traditional geothermal, we're going nowhere near that deep. In oil and gas,

You can go to the kind of lower end of those depths. So talk to me about like how deep do we drill for oil and gas right now? And um if you think about that as compared to the shallower version, the places where you get 800 degrees Fahrenheit. at three mile depth or something like that. Um, how does that compare to what we do in oil and gas? Yeah, so oil and gas systems are not depth limited, they are temperature limited. You will find

uh people drilling with mechanical drilling systems all the way down to eight miles, nine miles, pushing really out there, but not hot, right? So the the gap is not depth. The gap is Heat is how hot you can drill. And that's where you will start seeing fundamental differences. If I try to answer this irrespective of irrespective of temperature, I would tell you that oil and gas systems can already drill to a vast majority of that.

that this um that that we're talking about here miles and miles, three, four, five, six, seven, eight miles under the air. But when you at the temperature, which is really the target we're going for, then you see a massive gap. To put it bluntly, oil and gas mostly happens at two to three miles deep. It's rare to find it below that because it's it starts to get too hot.

Uh and here we're talking about that being the beginning of the geothermal frontier we're unlocking. So so the end of one is the beginning of the other one. Geographically, you know, if you're going eight or nine miles deep or something like that, you kind of, I think, tell me, you get that amount you get that heat, that eight hundred degrees or something in that range, kinda everywhere.

But um, but it'd be better to start where it's not quite that deep. So where geographically do you tend to get it? I mean, I'm sure this is different all over the world, but talk to me about like What are the geologies and maybe within the US, where can you find 800 degrees at like three miles?

Yeah, it's usually the ring of fire. So anywhere in the Pacific um side of the country, um and all of the Pacific of of South America as well. So the ring of fire wrapping from America to North America to Alaska. to Japan, to Indonesia, to Philippines, all the way down to New Zealand, that's a typical place where you'll find those. And that's billions of people. So it's not a small market by any means.

Um you can also find it in the in the Atlantic ridge. So Iceland, for example, you don't need to go anywhere close to those steps to get to those temperatures. Kenya. Um in short in short, everywhere where you have geothermal today. is very likely one of those places where you'll find the eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Uh at three miles, closer to three miles than closer to twelve miles.

I guess we should maybe be explicit about why getting to eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit is beneficial. Can you just do a quick comparison to like how much power you could extract from a well? at if it is an eight eight hundred degree well versus a two hundred degree well. Yeah, we're talking about ten times the power. So the Icelandics were the first ones to talk about this at length.

Um, it has to do with physics. It has to do with the thermophysical properties of water, basically higher densities, lower viscosities, it has to do with the thermodynamic conversion efficiencies between the heat and electricity. So at the end of the day, the same well bore, let's call it eight inch in diameter, very typical size, uh, it will transfer maybe one to ten megawatts electric equivalent if it's flowing at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

And we'll transfer 10 times that um if it's flowing at 800 degrees Fahrenheit. So um in Fahrenheit terms, two times the temperature, three, four times the temperature, but ten times the power. So that's the calculus we're trying to unlock.

Um and if you go hotter than that, it actually doesn't help you. So if you go to a thousand Fahrenheit, two thousand Fahrenheit, it actually works against yourself. Um eight hundred really is the goldilog zone for that supercritical property of water. But you're talking about a ten.

So the trade is basically you're gonna spend more to drill a well, unquestionably. You're going deeper and as we're gonna talk about, you need different materials and a different kind of system if you're gonna go really, really deep because of the because to dealing with the temperature exactly. So

Apples to apples, you're gonna have a more expensive well, but you're gonna get 10x more power out of that well. And so you could aff your budget is basically, you know, to a first order, 10x higher drilling costs that you can afford in order for that to be a worthwhile trade.

You also get the benefit of this different geography, right? Like there's places where you can get eight hundred degrees at uh five miles, but you're not going to be able to do traditional hydrothermal anyway, just because you don't have enough heat near the surface.

So that's kind of the interesting trade here. I guess the other thing we should talk about though is permeability, right? Like if you're doing traditional geothermal exploration, you're trying to find a place that does have heat near the surface and also has sufficient permeability. Is that how does that look at these greater depths? Yeah, so in general permeability decreases as you go deeper. You have more lithostatic pressures and um

uh that that's going to work against you. However, the the crust of the earth is critically fractured. This has been shown. So what that means is that there's already an inherent fracture crust at large. And when you start putting cold fluids in an injector well the density of those colder fluids versus the lower density of the pore pressure fluids will actually open that up. Um I did uh very early in my days in quays and coming from oil and gas, I did a little bit of a literature search on

something called lost circulation events in oil and gas. It basically means you're losing your drilling mud. Um, and you see it in the literature when you exceed a certain depth temperature threshold when you're going into the

a little bit too deep, a little bit too hot well boars in oil and gas, you have those circulation events. In other words, you fracture, you activate the permeability in the rock that's already there. So We believe that in the geothermal we're going for this hotter, deeper kind, activating that permeability, it's going to be favored by physics, by differential density of fluids.

Uh but this is an EGS system. We're not talking about having permeability in there. It's if it's there, it's there, it's close. how we're talking about activating that permeability through fluid flow. But this is a drastically different process than what you would see in fracturing for oil and gas that requires very high pressure surface pumping for very long time.

So if I can try to repeat that to make sure I understand it, expectation is in the the places you're going to be drilling, there will be low permeability. So you will need to fracture.

We don't currently frack at those depths because we don't drill to those depths really in oil and gas. But you believe that because of the fundamental physical, It will actually be easier to frack, essentially, because you're gonna, you're basically gonna inject drilling buds and those are gonna open up a fracture network just because of how the rock works. And do we have like do we do we have have has anyone done that at that depth ever?

So we don't access these depths at these temperatures, right? Any any hole that's deep in the world is not hot. So this effect doesn't quite manifest. Like cola in Russia. uh the KTB in Germany, they're they're cold. They're they're barely they're half the temperature that we need it to be. So the answer is no, nobody's ever done it. The closest we've done to that is in the lab.

EPFL has been publishing uh very interesting work, the Japanese as well, showing these effects. But but that's correct. The physics tells you, and the lab experiments tell you that the the density of the colder fluid play a disproportionate role in fracture initiation and propagation at these temperature depth combinations.

Now the first project, the one we're doing in Oregon, will be the beginning of showing those effects. Uh I think we're gonna be the first people in the world that actually show and start pointing the way to uh that following from lab results. Yeah.

So I guess if you think about it at the high level Uh, there's an obvious reason to do this, right? You you if you can successfully drill to these depths and these temperatures, the resources enormous and ubiquitous depending on how deep you get. Um

And so it's super attractive. Why hasn't it been done? There are a bunch of technical challenges. So if we think about the the kind of big technical challenges, I think I'm I'm pick I'm picking up two right now. And I want you to tell me if there are others that I'm not thinking of. One is How do you drill this, right? As you pointed out, the oil and gas drilling systems that we've developed are not designed to go to these temperatures, even if they are designed to go to these depths.

And then two is what we're talking about right now, which is okay, now you have to kind of I don't wanna overstate it, but like invent a new form of fracking, essentially, that you can do at These great depths and these great temperatures, and then ensure that that delivers sufficient permeability and that your decline curve is. acceptable and so on. Um do I have those two technical risks right at the high level? And then are the other major challenges that I'm not thinking of? Yeah.

Those two encapsulate the core of what are the gates that you need to go through to prove that this can be done at scale. The drilling by far outweighs The fracturing. The fracturing does happen in nature. We see this in nature every time a hydrothermal vent or a mine forms. This is the process by which it does. So there's evidence in the geological record that the fracturing part has precedent. There's no evidence whatsoever.

In the geological record, of course, that you can actually drill these things mechanically from the surface. That's a unique thing. So I would I would say that if you can access these temperatures regardless of depth, You've initiated a journey for human creativity and industry to actually conquer that um that frontier, that geological frontier. And as you correctly pointed out, I think the pride.

that we gain by doing so is enormous. It's unlike any other energy source out there. It dwarfs everything else combined. So that's right. Um there's a lot of engineering between here and there, but engineering is not physics or fundamental science. Are things that can can get unlocked

one step at a time, starting with those shallower systems and progressing sequentially to the deeper systems. We're not going to develop a deep system on day one because that's unnecessarily hard. We're going to develop the shallow systems on day one and progress from there. Are you tired of overpaying for big name PR firms but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and dex?

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Apart from just the drilling, I guess this is part of the drilling challenge, but um all the equipment and the materials that we put downhole, all the stuff that is built for the oil and gas industry, like how much of that's up? The casing, the Wir line logging, equipment, like all these things that we built up over years, decades.

in oil and gas, how much of that has to be replaced when you're getting to those kinds of temperatures? Is it a wholesale replacement of the full system or is it just a small set of things that are not tolerant to that kind of heat? I think they are they are incremental evolution. So so the big gaps have already been solved for these shallower systems. You know, I and I think that's important. If we talk about shallower Super hot rock systems versus deep super hot rock systems.

Shallower, you mean the like three mile? That's the depth. Yeah, the three mile, four mile, maybe even five mile. Uh and we call those tier one. We've created our own language around that just to differentiate that. The deep ones are the twelve miles, the eleven months. Those are th those are drastically different problems and engineering challenges. So talking about the shallow ones.

It's incremental improvements. There's a lot of precedence already in oil and gas. There's something in oil and gas stock called SACD, steam assisted gravity drainage, which injects steam. steam at temperatures up to six hundred degrees Fahrenheit to to mobilize very heavy oils and produce them. So there's a whole array of techniques, materials, tools that have been developed for that market in oil and gas. that provide evolutionary pathways for doing the super hard rock geothermal.

Cements, you need cements that cure at higher temperatures. There's providers that provide that. You need to rely on non-elastomeric solutions, so no rubber in that hole because everything's gonna flow. Those already exist. And steels are quite resistant even at these temperatures. You know, we make power plants that operate at much higher temperatures. So so these these issues do not intimidate or prevent us from doing these things. Now, as you start going into deeper systems,

then other gaps open up. But that's why you need to create an industrial momentum and a market for the providers of the world to innovate in that space. With electronics it's usually your hard imitation. Electronics don't survive to much higher temperatures than two hundred degrees Celsius or four hundred Fahrenheit. but you can circulate muds or liquids through the system to keep them cold while they do their job. So again, a lot of things that you can do to make these things actionable.

doable today for the shallow systems, not for the deep.

Even at what you're calling the shallow systems, I guess one question I have, one one challenge I imagine that you face as a startup going after this. is that Iteration. is very expensive, right? Like a single well is going to be tens of millions it would to get to that depth is going to be tens of millions of dollars. That's sort of normal if you're in oil and gas and you're doing offshore or whatever. You know, you could spend fifty million dollars on a single well.

Um, that's part of your capital budget, but it's obviously tricky as a as a startup. So I presume your solution to that is. a combination of we're just gonna need a lot of money, but also do as much learning as you can before you have to drill all the way down to a three or four mile depth. How much can you learn and prove without going to that depth versus how much you're just gonna have to drill that deep to get there.

The these things are already drilled, right? So the place we picked for our first project already has holes drilled to the right temperature depth combinations. So that is the key. The key is your first project, your first attempt. cannot represent technical gaps because you're gonna run out of money and you're not gonna be able to raise the tens of millions of dollars that you need. So we've already done that. We've picked a location with enough precedent.

And we've picked a team with enough uh understanding of that location to convince enough taker of power that we can build under those conditions. So we're already getting into market. uh in that location with a real take or pay PPA, uh, because we know that we can point to all of the solutions with precedent. What how has it I mean, who who drilled the previous well to that temperature depth combination and why?

In that particular location, neighbors, neighbors is our drilling partner, right? So another reason why we're working with them. Uh this this temperature Depth, so this shallow super hot rock well Are have precedent. Um going all the way back to the 70s, humans have actually pushed tools to these extremes successfully. What nobody has ever done is to actually build a full commercial grade.

enhanced geothermal system out of them. So we're basically picking precedent from everywhere to build the first commercial EGS system that's super hot rock. Now that wouldn't work in a deeper system, but that works in a shallow system. To make it work in a deeper system, you need to close those gaps. And that's where our drilling technology and many of the things we're doing in the background come into play. But you start, you get into your first commercial success.

with as much precedent as possible so that you can actually navigate those 10 million to$100 million gaps that it's going to take you to do so. So but wait, so um neighbors in this case, which is you know the company doing the drilling, they drilled i in this place in Oregon where you guys are starting. They drilled a well to this depth and temperature combination in the in the interest of doing geothermal and but did never never completed a power plant with it because

Presumably it didn't work in some way or another. Like what what stopped them? Yeah, so back then whoever was in charge of the development and it wasn't neighbors. Neighbors is a drilling provider. So the developer back then And and going back to the eighties and nineties at this particular location in Oregon, they were looking for hydrothermal systems. So they didn't find them and therefore they didn't proceed.

By shifting from hydrothermal to EGS, you open up the pathway now. So again Thank you. they wanted, they they abandoned it, but your your hope is that you'll be able to open up that permeability. Correct. And and just like that location, I can point to more than fifty wells drilled in the world by people looking for super hot hydrothermal systems.

That are going to be in the three to four mile range and are going to be in the six hundred to eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Some of them are actually getting very close to a thousand Fahrenheit. So again, precedent all over the place. It's the only way for a startup to grab those precedents, learn from them, pull the right people, and build a first commercial project, get itself into business and keep expanding from there.

Well it's interesting because you'd before described among the two key technical challenges, drilling to that depth and temperature and and fracking essentially. Different version of fracking, but nonetheless. Um You described the harder challenge as the drilling one, but it actually sounds like in these shallow super hot systems.

The drilling is not the problem. That has been proven. People have done it fifty times, as you said. And that means the remaining technical challenge is getting the fracture network built. That is correct. For those for those shallow locations, absolutely right.

So you're one step away from commercial success and we're actually well underway in overcoming that commercial, that technical challenge to get that commercial success. You're right.

Can you walk me through n you know, I realize there's a long term version of the economics here where you can get remarkably cheap power in theory. Again, like The bulk of your cost, or maybe what is it, fifty percent of your cost in a traditional hydrothermal system is just the drilling cost, something like that, because you have all this above ground infrastructure too.

Um, but you're cutting that cost effectively by by ten X at least relative to the denominator of power produced. That's right. Um So what does it look like in your context? With the new materials you need, with the type of drilling that you're doing and the speed of that drilling with the fracture network you're gonna have to open up. Yeah. Walk me through how to think about the unit economics.

Yeah, so so you're correct. So normally in in regular geothermal, you think of the unit economics as 50-50, very roughly speaking. It's about 50% drilling cost, 50% power plant surface cost. Uh with the super hard rock kind, that changes uh significantly because Um Your your LCOE, talking about LCOE, you're not working on the cost side of the equation. You're working on the revenue side of the equation preferentially. By accessing hotter temperatures,

access and getting more power output per well or per power plant, you're actually working on the revenue side of the equation to lower the SCOE. So for us, the drilling cost will be uh in the twenty to thirty percent of the L C O E, the higher outputs will be a big part of bringing those L COEs down. And we see a hundred dollars per megawatt hour

at the meter, no matter where you are in the world. Now that includes the shallow and the deep systems. If you look s specifically at the shallow systems, you're talking about sub fifty dollars per megawatt hour. Um because you they're not quite as expensive to build. You you're not drilling as much, you're not putting as much piping in the ground. They're shallower.

Uh but yet they still produce just as much energy as an oil and gas well. So the energy output between the deep and the shallow ones doesn't change. the costs do change, but the LCOs will range in the$50 to$100 per mega hour hour. So that's what we're talking about. To me, it's important to match the output of oil and gas to entice oil and gas to participate at scale. If you don't do that, it's always going to be a compromise.

Drilling speed is a big portion of drilling cost for anything where there's drilling really, including geothermal. And you're going deeper. So I would presume that your to you drilling speed actually ends up being among the or the most important metric probably What do we know? You're you're introducing a novel sort of drilling process, millimeter wave drilling, which you can explain what that is. Um, what do we know about speed and how do you compare that to what we typically see?

Yeah, so so the the important thing with speed is the total average speed. So it's like the tortoise and the her. Now a lot of people overemphasize instantaneous speed, like oh, we can drill a hundred meters per hour instantaneously. But that matters less than your consistency. Ah, so non productive time in drilling is what starts to take over your drilling economics.

um you start spending a lot of time not drilling, but replacing the drill bit and running the pipe in and out the hole. So for us, we're not really trying to have Um ungodly drilling speeds inta instantaneously. We're trying to have a very low non-productive time independent of temperature and depth. What do we talk about? We talk about three to five meters per hour, all things considered. What does that translate to? It means you can get to ten kilometers at six miles.

um within a hundred days. You're in the money there. To give you a sense, the Chinese recently did uh an 11 kilometer haul. And I'm switching units because they it's been reporting those units. So about eight miles deep. The first ten kilometers took a year to drill, and the last one kilometer took another year to drill. So

There is a massive exponential in there and that's what we're going after. We don't care about the instantaneous speed. We care about the non productive time and the consistent speed. Uh we wanna get down there regardless of depth in weeks, not years. And we don't need to get there in days because that's a small part of the economic output. Really, the power output per well is what drives LCOEs at that point.

All right, just to I guess drive us home here, um, what should we expect in the coming years? You know, you're among the pretty small number of companies who are going after super hot rock geothermal. What are the milestones that we should be looking out for? What are the indications that this is going to become? Ultimately, there will be a commercial project generating power and selling it to the grid. That's the end state.

Or maybe that maybe that's the end state part one, because somebody will do that in what you call shallow systems. And then it's going to take a while for somebody else to do it at 10 mile depth or something like that. But you know, in the lead up to like their being the first world's first super hot. Right. geothermal power plant, what are the milestones we should watch out for? Yeah, the flow test. The flow test is the moment of truth.

is the equivalent of uh heating oil and the oil gushing out. So the float test is the ability to drill down Uh two wells usually connect them through a fracture network and produce steam at a given temperature and pressure and flow rate. That if you can see that, if you can point to that and you can say, look, it's durable, it's it hasn't lost temperature, it hasn't lost flow rate, the rest is relatively straightforward. You build a power plant on the surface to convert that steam.

to to electricity. So the flow test is the thing we all should be watching for. I wanna and I and I wanna see flow tests that are super hot. And they can be subcritical or supercritical. It doesn't really matter, but hovering in the 400 degrees Celsius. um or a hundred Fahrenheit. Uh and I wanna see them uh in a variety of depths.

in the three milers, in the four milers, in the five milers, and that's the roadmap. For us in particular, the project in Oregon gets that flow test by the end of this year. By the end of 2026, Quase has a commercial grade injector producer per EGS system producing 25 to 30 megawatt equivalent electric output from a flow test. That is like three mile depth plus one. At a three mile debt, plus or minus, correct.

Uh from there in 2028, so two years later, we'll do another version of that that is not at three miles, but a little bit deeper and above the 400 degrees Celsius or so. We're basically walking up the temperatures at that site. To unlock those output, those multiples in output. So in 28, we'll have the first ever super critical. The first one is subcritical, flow test.

And and then you continue from there. Now, Quaze has a parallel path on technology development. The drill itself is doing its own thing, running ahead of the project. uh requirements and by twenty seven we drill five kilometers, so three miles at five hundred degrees Celsius or more in that location.

uh and by twenty eight we do twice that ten kilometers or six miles at five hundred degrees Celsius or more at at at another location. So what the drill is doing is establishing that the rock can be accessed and that's the technology development roadmap. What the project is doing is showing the project economics and line of sight to this L to those LCOAs when you do the hotter version of GL term.

Uh maybe you're gonna do both, but if you if you succeed in a a flow test uh end of twenty six or whenever it happens at three mile depth and just a little under four hundred degrees C, um Or four hundred degrees F, sorry. Uh that's probably I mean, depending on your drilling cost, I suppose, that's probably good enough to to be a commercial system. Why then make the next step, go to four mile depth, you know, walk your way up the temperature gradient? Why not produce incel power?

At three miles. We will. We will just we don't call it Topco. So Quase Topco is not the company that does that. Well, it becomes a project code that's capitalized with project level financing, with debt vehicles, with vendors. So you spin out those projects and they become their own thing. But that's no longer the mission of the Topco. The Topco enables those playbooks.

for the project codes to actually execute and scale them. But yeah, that's exactly what happens. The minute you do this, many people, many players will want to do that. Um, and that is what we call success. It means people will go for this harder version of EGS that are actionable, doable, they'll see the economics and scale them through the um increasing lower cost of capital and larger supply chains. So yes, that's what happens.

All right, Carlos. This was a lot of fun. I think I've I've I I I've made it the entire conversation without using let's go deeper as a metaphor. So I'm pretty proud of myself, to be honest. Um, but that was just as deep as I wanted to go. So thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Chair. Carlos Araque is the CEO and co-founder of Quase Energy.

This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia dot com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Max Savage Levinson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquon. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shell Khan, and this is Catalyst.