Why Big Tech is Building On-Site Gas Power Plants in Texas

Peter Brecht00:02

Welcome to Local Energy. My name is Peter Brecht. My co-host Wade is out at a drill site today. So our guest today is Julie Thompson at Halper Strategies. I am so excited for this conversation. Julie and I probably talked like, I don't know, 30, 40 days ago just in preparation for this. Had a solid conversation. I just was like blown away. So anyways, excited to introduce Julie, but Julie, what is new and exciting in your world?

Julie Thompson00:31

Gosh, think everything where energy, power, water, and data centers are colliding. So oil and gas and tech industry, everything's coming together. So it's a lot of fun.

Peter Brecht00:43

Yeah, it's, is fun watching all these worlds collide and at a rather fast pace right now. It's pretty impressive. And I think you're located in Texas and I've seen Texas kind of become this incredible episode. It has been the episode of energy, but now you're seeing data centers coming in and all this other stuff going on. But, before we get into any of those current details, I want to learn a little bit about your background and where you came from. Tell us a bit about that.

Julie Thompson01:13

Sure, so Oklahoma born and raised and

My background goes back to midstream oil and gas and really heavily on the produced water side. So everything from trucking, gathering, disposal, recycling, reuse. So that was years ago and we sold our assets back to the producer. And then that's when COVID hit, crude went negative and it was, what's next. So I joined a renewable energy developer down in Fort Worth, Texas. And that's what brought my family down here. And since then I have been doing origination. So power.

Purchase agreements, very similar to commercial agreements in a sense that we're signing up in oil and gas and midstream gathering. So doing that with hyperscalers, with corporates, signing up clean energy to meet sustainability goals, doing some &A and then, it's been all of the above. It includes capital raising and development capital needs and trying to align large scale infrastructure projects and meet timelines and deliveries. So it's been a lot of fun. There's a lot that's changed in the industry.

Been just in the last 12 months. And I would say that this industry where it's not just renewables, it's renewables, it's thermal generation, it's nuclear, it's geothermal, it's everything that we're all racing to meet the needs of load growth that's happening from data center scale up. That's where we're seeing the industry collide.

Peter Brecht02:36

In terms of low growth, what is there like a percent that they're putting on this? Like a year over year? Is it growing 200 % 300 % or is there, there's no number yet. Like we haven't measured it long enough.

Julie Thompson02:46

The numbers are large and I think certainly Virginia is one of the largest low growth areas in the world. It rivals Beijing. So that's one area. But then what we've seen probably in the last two to three years is data center scale up isn't happening in just these one, two, three, tier one markets within the U.S. So that's been Virginia, Dallas, California. And now it's really

Popping up everywhere. So you're seeing a lot of states like Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming. Data centers are needing a lot of power. There's a lot of scale up. You and I are beginning to start to use AI more more. I think I need a large load interconnection at my house just for how many tools I'm using just to manage my email. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of scale up happening. Think the numbers, they move around so much. But what I'll tell you is when you're on the ground,

Peter Brecht03:36

Yeah, yeah.

Julie Thompson03:46

There is a lot truly, truly happening. So it's not all just lip service. There is real growth happening.

Peter Brecht03:53

That's really good to hear. Yeah, the amount of AI, it feels like I've hired three or four people this year, even though it's just outsourcing it to Claude Cowork or Manus or another tool that I'm using. Even even our podcast production, right? We use a program called Riverside and it does a lot of the editing for me in AI, which I'm thankful for because I remember the old days where you had to scrub video and cut and click and it was just, but this is really cool. So now I get to talk to more people.

Which is kind of a, it's to me a better way to spend my time. But going back, so you have this background in the oil field and you've kind of turned a corner now and I know they're all related, right? But it's, is a different kind of directive. What skills translated from that or what knowledge is translated into those conversations with data centers or, similar clientele.

Julie Thompson04:27

Absolutely.

Julie Thompson04:49

Yeah, I mean certainly the

The overall commitment of delivering a service or delivering a product or energy, right, is still there. So there's firm service contracts that are in mainstream only gas and that's the same with power delivery. And we're definitely seeing this in data center scale up, especially in Texas where we're talking about if we can't get power from the grid in the next five years, we can bring on-site generation with gas that can help bridge. And we talk about that a lot in our industry. It's bridge to grid. It's how can we scale up?

Data centers reliably with a 24-7 operation that you know some data centers or hyperscalers or loads can fluctuate pretty pretty large and I think we hear a lot about that on our side of the business but there are some loads that are just really really steady firm loads out there so there's a lot of different needs but it requires reliability and it requires commitments and these are large infrastructure projects whether you're building midstream pipelines or processing plants or

Or you're building energy power plants.

Peter Brecht05:55

Yeah, okay. Could you bring me up to speed on the definition of a hyperscaler? Like it sounds incredibly amazing, like it's a great word, but like what is a hyperscaler?

Julie Thompson06:05

Yeah.

One of my relationships and I were talking about this yesterday. The way I try to frame it to my general network and audience is hyperscalers are who you think of. So think of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Metta, right? Apple. Then I call there are Neo cloud providers, which, that's a core weave. That's someone who's providing GPU as a service. So really, really hot things right now. It's energy.

A service and software as a service. So SAS and EAS or EAAS and then GPU as a service too. So these are groups that are coming in and building the data centers, putting the racks and chips together. So hyperscalers, think my the easiest way to think about it is those are the large, big Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Yeah. And then you've got infrastructure providers like a prologist. May see QTS, Equinix. So there's some others that kind of

Peter Brecht06:58

Okay. All right, gotcha.

Julie Thompson07:07

Build and manage that data center building and then a tenant or a hyperscaler might come site inside that building and bring their load.

Peter Brecht07:15

Okay. So the amount of companies involved in this whole ecosystem is astronomical. I mean, it sounds like there are just players in every corner of it. And you're sort of in the middle tying things together in a sense. Is that the idea?

Julie Thompson07:23

Yes.

Julie Thompson07:33

Yeah, so most of my clients lately have been really about developing the project sites. Some go as far as taking a piece of land and they're making sure that title and survey and we can actually site a data center here from a geotechnical standpoint. So what kind of concrete are you going to pour? So there are developers from that side and then there are developers that come from the transmission side. So the grid interconnection, which would be high voltage interconnection providers. So they are getting the

Interconnection, getting a data center load ready to interconnect into the grid, finding and sure, negotiating that utility commitment, the grid power, and then siding a data center behind it. And, there's a lot of different groups even in, we hear a lot about Stargate out in Abilene.

You have OpenAI, Oracle, Lansium, called Lansium Clean Campus. And then there's Crusoe involved in that, right? And so a lot of different names and people involved in that, but you've got Lansium who is developing the high voltage equipment. So building a massive substation, doing the grid interconnect. And then you have Crusoe who might be building the infrastructure and Oracle inside that's lighting the racks.

Peter Brecht08:49

I'm gonna have to go back on the tape and listen to that like four times because there's so much to unpack But I think that's the fun part of talking It's like I'm just gonna let it record and I go back and take notes because it's like there's so much there Which is I think a lot of fun like you you're constantly having to learn but before we kind of dive into maybe some of the like kind of tying oil and gas into this I noticed behind you you have a man in the arena Poster and I don't know if you're in your office or your home, but I think that's an amazing thing to like just have

Julie Thompson08:53

Ha!

Julie Thompson09:00

Yeah.

Peter Brecht09:19

Tell us a little bit about that. I know you mentioned there was a bit of a backstory on it.

Julie Thompson09:23

Yeah, so when I actually got into oil and gas years ago, I was doing software as a service for oilfield service companies. And this is from one of those families that had an oilfield service company in Lindsay, Oklahoma. And they had been around for years and years and years and went through a failed transaction. So sold their business and ended up not getting the capital and the payment for that. So they essentially took their assets back, took on a lot of personally guaranteed debt because

Of their personal commitments to those producers to haul their water, to dispose of their water, and make sure that those wells were taken care of. They also had a well servicing business, but Terry Hacker was the owner and founder of that company, and him and his sons were running it at the time. And Terry, it took us three years, right? So we started out on this venture. Crude was $90 talking to public companies about acquiring the company. And then Crude went

To 20. So it was a really challenging time, but the family had an incredible opportunity ahead of them. There were JV opportunities that we ended up closing with Kane Anderson, that portfolio company to put midstream pipelines in the scoop. So it took a long time. There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but we ended up bringing some private equity in and the family ended up with a really great transaction. But Terry

Had a middle school education, but that man knew this business. He was tremendous. So Terry ended up passing away about a year after we sold the business, but that quote is who Terry is, right? Terry was in the arena, the blood, the sweat, the tears, and that man, he knew his business and he knew how to do good business. And he would tell me, not every business is good business, Julie.

Peter Brecht11:19

That.

I love that story. And gosh, what a man too. Obviously just if that's a reflection of his character, that's amazing. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I very similar. So my dad, this is like not even close to the same storyline, but my dad probably sent me like three or four texts in my entire life. And the same thing, I screenshot them and I get them framed. You know what I mean? It's just like little pieces of my dad around the house and it kind of keeps you going in those moments are like, man, am I going to be able to pull this off? And it's like, well, we did

Julie Thompson11:21

Yeah, I got that for kids. Yeah.

Julie Thompson11:43

I don't know.

Peter Brecht11:50

Before we can do it again, right? And there's those moments. All right, so we'll pivot back over to some data center and oil and gas conversation. But so one thing that we had talked about in the pregame was this, data centers now building like on site gas plants, right? And we've seen that I think space or not SpaceX, but like Elon Musk has his he just bought, I think three or four sites out there and he's getting his I mean, that seems like it's becoming more

Julie Thompson11:52

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Brecht12:20

Commonplace. But curious like if there's anything on that that maybe the public's not thinking about or the why behind it because I think you know we don't we think power on power off right but they also I don't think they can draw like from the public consumption too right isn't there something there to like mitigate or not.

Julie Thompson12:39

Yeah, and whether you're talking about grid power or even drilling an oil and gas well or drilling a disposal well.

Peter Brecht12:45

Yeah.

Julie Thompson12:47

That's one thing that I like to remind is that there are regulatory policies in place. Just like every utility, every ISO grid, essentially, there is production reserve margin. So utilities have to procure a certain amount of capacity above what they think their peak load is. So they're not just allowing people to just come on and say, good luck. Hope it's not too hot to

Day. And what happens is, there's also, depending on how you negotiate those contracts, you may have to shed your load. So in a grid event where we have something that trips offline, the grid here in ERCOT, they can send out a flag that says we're shutting you down in emergency scenarios. But the reason why we're seeing, or a few reasons why we're seeing gas this online, or I'm sorry, on-site bridge to grid is we need

Reliable power. Right now, even in Texas where everything seems to be ample, it's the land of opportunity, there's still a shortage of power on the grid and it's going to take time. It's not to say that there's plenty of gas, there's a lot of energy that can be delivered and built, but it's the transmission. So you only have, a certain highway and you have to expand that highway for that power to be able to make it to all these different loads. And what these data centers

Need and I mean even what you and I need is we reliability. We need to ensure that when we're investing hundreds of billions of dollars into building this building that we don't have a failure when it comes to power.

Peter Brecht14:28

Yeah.

Yeah, we're in Southern California as where I live. Plane the rest of the time. But, here it's rarely do we have power outages. But when I lived more inland where it was a lot hotter, like it would get to 110 degrees right in the summertime and lived in this valley. It was just crazy hot. But the power if the power went out for like a day, it generally would turn like two days and you come home and it's just like it's a bummer. But or they have brownouts and it was just anyway. So but yeah, that reliability was was part of it. Now. Now we move kind

Closer to like a suburban area where happen as much. Don't know if it's because of heat, but I don't know. Maybe it's a different grid system altogether. With ERCOT, yeah, with ERCOT being like, I think ERCOT is the only like entity in Texas governing power, right? Is that, is that the case or okay. Okay.

Julie Thompson15:07

It's been a pleasure.

Julie Thompson15:17

Our product controls, it's kind of islanded from the rest of the US, if you will, yes.

Peter Brecht15:21

I there's like, I learned more about the grid probably three or four months ago. We had an author on Meredith Englund that had a book shorting the grid. So I had to like dive into the grid for the first time and like learned all about it. But with having Urquhart as the kind of the soul controlling entity, so to speak, I don't know if that's the right way, but does it make it easier to come up with ways to manage the power or is it like, is it, I don't know, maybe is it almost like they have two

Much power or like how would you phrase that I guess like what's the relationship like?

Julie Thompson15:54

Yeah.

I think the easiest way to think about it is you have what's called a regulated market and a deregulated market. So if I, if we were in Georgia, right, there's one invest like vertically integrated utility that owns the generation and they own the transmission. And if there are other developers that build generation, they only sell that power to the utility. Then you and I buy our power from the utility and not directly from that particular generator here in Urquhart.

Is it's deregulated from a wholesale generation side, it doesn't have to be utility-owned generation. You and I can go develop a project and generate power at a high level, right? You're going to have the grid requirements and things that you have to do. But there's also deregulation on the retail side. So there are groups and companies that are market participants that meet the certain requirements required and they can buy and they can sell power. So that's why there's a lot of

Power transactions that are happening. Here, where I live here in Fort Worth, or outside of Fort Worth, there are areas of Texas where they are utility governed and it may be a co-op that you have to buy your power. Like my neighbors actually are in a co-op. I'm not. So I have the right to choose. I can get online. I could say, I think I'm going to buy my power from Constellation and sign up a contract. So from the deregulated angle, that makes a lot of flexibility in how we can develop projects. It's been a place where you could.

Build quickly, get through interconnection quickly, be able to generate and get online. The problem is now is that the transmission needs to be upgraded in order to serve all of this load that's coming online. Texas offers, and there are other markets that do, but there are structures for on-site generation. You can have a solar project or a gas project that's owned by a different entity than say the hyperscalar load. And there's a structure that you put in place

Julie Thompson17:55

So that that generator is not providing retail electric service to you. But those kind of structures exist here, which make it lot easier to come in, build load, build a data center, and also say, we need to get power. We want to build something today and be able to generate power until we can get served by the grid.

Peter Brecht18:15

And as you're originating and closing those power purchase agreements, what are some of the challenges or maybe what has been, what are some of the challenges and maybe what's been consistent across the board?

Julie Thompson18:30

Challenges are really when you think about project development and

Building and developing a large energy project to meet a specific load at the right time requires a lot of coordination. It requires a lot of alignment and timing, right? So you have to go all the way back to large equipment procurement. When can we get reciprocating engines here? When is the data center going to have their building here? They have large procurement. So it is lining up a really massive supply chain and being able to build those two assets at the same time.

As well as making sure that, because what the hyperscaler and the data center really wants is they want to be connected to the grid. That is the ultimate reliability, right? And so lining that up, ensuring that the grid will eventually at some point have power to serve that load. And then maybe they can use this on site. Gas generation is backup generation, which is lower emission burning than diesel. So that's another reason why they're bringing some of that on. But it is really the challenge of lining up.

The two massive infrastructure projects and bringing those together at the same time.

Peter Brecht19:42

Yeah, okay. Has anything been, I don't know, what's the most consistent thing? It the inconsistent, is it just the challenge of it? Is that the most consistent part of it? Or is there, things are like, okay, I'm not thinking about that as much because we're pretty much used to how it's working. Or maybe AI is taking some of the thought process off, I don't know, I'm curious. What's been easy?

Julie Thompson20:05

Think what's consistent is there's not a cookie cutter yet, right? It's going to be different. And it depends on the companies involved, right? There's sustainability strategies, which I know that you've wanted to talk a little bit about that too. Yeah, and I mean, and that's a planning in and of itself. But I would say right now the consistency is that there's a need for scale and there are entities, industries,

Peter Brecht20:11

Yeah, all right.

Peter Brecht20:21

We're gonna get into that next, yes.

Julie Thompson20:36

Organizations that are able to move quickly. And that's what I think has been the most fun thing to see about really oil and gas and energy, renewable energy and data centers kind of come together is we know how oil and gas can move. Oil and gas knows how to get something done by Monday, right? And that's been fun to see how their energy and their ability to move and deliver has really brought some, think that's why we're seeing a lot of this stuff happening and happening quickly is because of

Peter Brecht20:53

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Julie Thompson21:06

That industry is well established and it's been fun to see that. So I'd say consistency on their side from a delivery standpoint has been a lot of fun to watch.

Peter Brecht21:15

100%.

I don't know, but the way that the oil and gas industry works and moves, just personally, I love the people. That's always been the highlight to me. And part of the reason, even starting this podcast was how can I talk to more people that are in oil and gas? As if I don't get enough of it in my daily life, right? And then Landman comes out and now my entertainment's even oil and gas related. It's a whole thing. So anyways, moving on to some sustainability items here. Talking about

Julie Thompson21:25

Yeah.

Peter Brecht21:47

24-7 carbon-free energy matching. It's a big term, but could you re-explain it to me so I could remember what we talked about?

Julie Thompson21:58

Yeah, for sure. So there are really two major hyperscalers, Google and Microsoft, that have come out with very ambitious goals. And that is they want their load from all of their operations, so every data center.

Every hour to be matched with carbon-free energy. So when they're right now at 926 in Texas, they want their data center load to be matched with carbon-free energy on the same physical grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365.

Peter Brecht22:32

Same grid. So like you can't go, we can't go produce wind energy over here in another state and then count that is what you're saying. It has to be the same grid. Okay. Is that okay? It just doesn't, is that achievable or maybe it's already done? I don't really know, but where are we at in that process for them?

Julie Thompson22:39

All

Julie Thompson22:49

What's shocking is how much progress they actually have made. And when you think about it, renewables are intermittent. So wind and solar are at the mercy of the sun shining and the wind blowing, right? But there are other technologies and that's where you've got storage, you have battery storage, you have long duration energy storage projects that can capture a lot of that. So when corporates set out to be carbon free and wanted to be, 100 % renewable,

They were doing that with power purchase agreements across, global step 50,000 feet up. If you're bringing more clean energy on, you're displacing more fossil fuel generation like coal, right? Somewhere on a grid. And that was a great first step. And they're taking it a step further and saying, we really want to impact the grid that we are being served by. So that means we need to procure resources that are on the same grid and can be physically delivered to our load or data center. And what they're doing is,

They're using not even just renewables and storage too, but there's nuclear, is a clean energy, geothermal. Some of these and even gas paired with carbon capture can meet a carbon free energy resource. Definitely too. So it's going to take all of that to provide 24 seven. And we are talking not just a megawatt hour. We're talking a watt hour of energy that they are matching. So it gets very granular. And so they've made very,

Ambitious goals and advances towards that. There are market constraints in each market. It's different in the Pacific Northwest than it is in Arizona, than it is in Texas. Certainly from a permitting standpoint or even a resource availability. But it's been really exciting. It's very, very impressive to see how far they have achieved that, right?

Peter Brecht24:42

Yeah.

The conversation around, because I've seen some headlines read a little bit about it, tax credits, like I know, carbon sequestration, like they have the 45Q tax credits, and I know that applies to other industries, broadly, but is, does that affect like the slowdown of those credits affect the change? Or is it like, look, it's not so much, it's not the credits, we're doing it for the credits to begin with, because I know there were some companies that set out and said, okay, we're going to use this to offset, or is this just like, hey, we're going to do it because we actually see

The economics of it making sense either way.

Julie Thompson25:16

So.

Renewables are a low cost source of energy, right? And for investment tax credits, production tax credits, really what these hyperscalers are looking to do is they want the renewable energy credit. So they're wanting to say, for every megawatt hour of power that I consume, I want to match that with a megawatt hour of renewable energy. So the RECs are what they're looking to use. And when you're the carbon, 45

Peter Brecht25:43

Okay, got it.

Julie Thompson25:47

That gets a little nuanced, but really, you we are seeing that it's going to take a lot of different resources. It's going to take diversification, but more importantly, you're seeing it from the big, big four, right? Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta have all made commitments. You're seeing geothermal commitments. You're seeing carbon sequestration, carbon capture, and those are really important. It takes big dollars to invest in these technologies in order to get them to a point where they can be deployed and

And those costs can come down, right? So I mean, hats off to them because it takes, that's what we need. We need investment into technologies because developers aren't going to spend big, big R &D dollars and much less development dollars coming into a state if there's not a procurement pathway, if there's not a commercial reason, right?

Peter Brecht26:38

I mean the inflow of money into just the investment right now. I feel like it's almost, it's endless. I don't think, it kind of feels like you can't go wrong. I'm at that phase where I'm like, people are just putting money into it because the amount of growth that's needed is insane. So I don't know, I'm just watching that space pretty closely. It's impressive. So it's a good place to be.

Julie Thompson27:01

It

Peter Brecht27:04

Curious and There's like there's a technology called Geo tests I don't know if you're familiar heard of it But there's a gentleman out here in California Mike Umbrough Mike if you're listening to this I need to have you on the podcast But I don't know if you've ever heard of that technology before but essentially, know They're storing like it's sort of geothermal, but it's not and Mike would be all over me and tell me it's not But they're storing power underground getting that heat from the Sun. Have you heard about that out in Texas yet or no?

Julie Thompson27:33

I haven't. I haven't. That was interesting. What?

Peter Brecht27:34

All right. Okay, cool. Well, we'll have Mike on and then maybe we'll all get an education on that. But it's a pretty interesting thing. I know he's been working pretty hard on this for a couple of years, I think. Either way. When a... Yeah.

Julie Thompson27:45

Yeah. California is doing some procurements of different, they're one of the states in the U S that are actually requiring utilities to procure long duration energy storage, which is a different cost, right? And there's a diversity of technologies that can do that. So that's what we need. We need diverse resources to meet reliably.

Peter Brecht27:57

Okay.

Peter Brecht28:04

Yep, 100%. And then we had all like, I think three or four battery storage plants went up in flames this summer. And it's been a good time. One of them was actually like three miles away from my house. So we had to leave for a while. It was an interesting time. It's just the chemicals and it's not not healthy for you, supposedly. But yes.

Julie Thompson28:25

Yeah, but there are other technologies that are not this so yeah, it's.

Peter Brecht28:28

100 % no, I'm all about, getting more options on there. So which is great, but before we kind of start to close up, I want to talk about another term that we talked about, which was this sort of net water positive. And I know that there's a lot going on with produced water and that's a whole nother subject. So we don't have to go too deep into this, but can we talk about net water positive and what was meant by that potentially?

Julie Thompson28:55

Yeah, sure. Net water positive is really you, for companies that are consuming water and that can, it's not just a data center, Anheuser-Busch, agriculture, that's, they are wanting to put back.

The same amount of water that they consume. So just as though we're looking at energy, I want to offset any, one megawatt of brown energy with a megawatt of our green energy. That's the same thing that they're they want to do is they want to be net water positive. Meaning if we are consuming this much, we are returning this much or preserving that much too. So they're looking at consumption versus the savings or what they're putting back.

So a lot of that, you look at Nevada and Lake Mead, Lake Mead continues to go down and even the communities around there, they're pulling out water to meet the needs of Las Vegas and surrounding communities too, right? And so then they're treating that water and cleaning it up and there has to be a circularity component, right? So that's what companies are looking to do is not just be a consumer, but be a contributor.

Peter Brecht30:11

And data centers too are using, like there's a cooling system, right? They use water for cooling and all that too. Do you have any intel on that? And if not, it's totally fine. I'm curious as they kind of lead into each other.

Julie Thompson30:20

Yeah.

Yeah, I am not the expert on data center cooling, however, there are multiple types. There's air-cooled, there's evaporative cooling, and then they're even getting into immersing chips into liquid to help cool. So essentially it's about keeping those computers cool, just as when you go into big offices, open the closet and it's super hot and they're in the server room. Yeah, that's what they're trying to cool. But yeah, there are some methods and we're seeing data centers, especially

Peter Brecht30:27

Yeah.

Peter Brecht30:39

I've seen that, yeah.

Peter Brecht30:46

Yep, yep.

Julie Thompson30:52

In more dry and arid markets where water is very, very hard to find and it's very challenging. They're looking at closed loop systems so that you mitigate that water loss and it's kind of a one-time bill or they may be using glycol or different types of things that are going through those systems to try to keep from using so much water.

Peter Brecht31:02

Okay. Yeah.

Peter Brecht31:15

Got it.

Perfect. Well, we won't dig too much more on that. But as far as kind of moving into our final piece here with like career and a lot of our audience, people listening to this, at least this is what YouTube tells me is high school college age students with, that are like looking at the oil and gas industry potentially and wanting to learn about more pieces of this. But as you can tell by talking with you, this is a very diverse, you can go into almost any, any direction.

Its own ecosystem. What advice would you have for somebody that's maybe, graduating high school or, maybe has a degree and they're like, man, I want to go do something in oil and gas. What's the best way to prepare for that? Or do you just sort of have to go start trying things out? Would be your one piece of advice for them?

Julie Thompson32:05

I think you have to get in and get started somewhere, right? And that's been challenging too. It's been a really tough job market for some because a lot of companies, they're growing and moving so fast. We only want people with experience because we don't have time to train. So that makes it really challenging. But I would say you will be surprised at...

You may take a step within a company or maybe it wasn't the exact company that you were thinking that you were trying to get. You'll be surprised at where you will go with that. There are so many players in the space doing really, really creative things. Even from a technology perspective, one of the companies that had worked for before, they were a long duration energy storage provider and they would compress air on the surface and store that air underground in hard rock caverns, right? Drilling, mining, all coming together.

Peter Brecht32:55

Okay, yeah.

Julie Thompson32:58

In energy storage.

Right? So they were mining on hard rock cavern. They were, putting filling it with water, pushing air underground, using compressors and turbines, which are oil and gas type of equipment. So when I say that people have transferable skills from one industry to another, technology has transferable attributes to right. We're not these turbines that were being used in oil and gas. Now they're being used for energy storage. They're being used in other applications. So I think the biggest piece

Is I always write down even the small wins, right? You contributed to a project, you contributed to a financing, you contributed to even studying or being in the room with these engineers who might be drilling a well, they might be drilling a disposal well or even optimizing an H-Pump, right? Those are transferable skills and that's opportunity. So write it down, be able to talk about it. And that's what I think that as early in my career, I didn't write down enough.

Now even today, I actually, I called one of our old insurance providers and I said, do you remember when we achieved this one thing with an underwriter for an insurance company? I forgot about that. You're doing big things and you're in the room and there's so much to achieve. We're seeing data centers that are not only just going to be a data center, there might be a greenhouse associated with it. There's going to be a water project associated with

Peter Brecht34:29

Right.

Julie Thompson34:31

It. Workforce housing, it goes on. And just so it's not just data centers and energy to build a data center. You have to have people to do that. You have to have resources. In Abilene, they were feeding, I think, 4,000 people in a tent on Thanksgiving. It takes a lot of people to do this from electrical, concrete. The science behind concrete is actually intriguing, right?

Peter Brecht34:40

Right.

Peter Brecht34:56

Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah, it's really cool.

Julie Thompson34:58

It really is. It is so fun. So that's what I say. Get in the room. Try new things. Take it as it comes in front of you and write it down. Write it down. Tell the stories.

Peter Brecht35:10

Love that.

I love that. Those are all, I think things, just again, writing things down. I was even, after we spoke, was like, I sat here for like an hour trying, and I was, because when I was on a walk while we talking, I was like, I wish I could have recorded or came back down and I just started writing down everything I could remember, right? But I wish I could have written it down in the moment or had something there, because that really does. Your insurance carrier should remember everything, though.

Underwriters don't usually forget stuff so yeah yeah yeah yeah

Julie Thompson35:42

It was just in a different space, and it was never lightning protection. Real plagues versus fiberglass. But just, some of what to me were monumental wins. It's funny how in conversations I'm having today with large hyperscalers, we're talking about, the things that can be done, especially with collaboration. So.

Peter Brecht35:53

Right.

Peter Brecht36:03

Yeah, last, very last question, kind of a fun one, but who's going to win the AI race? Do think it's going to be Claude, Gemini, or OpenAI? If you had to pick one, I'm going do it.

Julie Thompson36:13

Gosh, here's where I stand. What is the definition of AI race?

Peter Brecht36:19

I guess it'd be users, right? Because I look at it and I think there's more users on ChatGPT. My wife uses it and my dad does. But then I'm like, but real, I don't know, the real people, the hardcore people are talking about Claude more, right? And all that. So I guess it's tough to define winner. And it really, probably is gonna take everybody to figure it out because I know everyone's learning from each other, right? So it's a good way to put it.

Julie Thompson36:42

Yes, and I pay for I think three or four of them and I pay the premium packages because they're a little bit different, you know.

Peter Brecht36:47

I know they are. They are. I use Claude for a lot of our like website work and then Gemini is kind of our, built our rag system on the back of that. So it's like, it's been a fun process as we've been learning through things, but Julie, I am just so thankful for your time and just your attention to detail and just being willing to share so much with us. So give us a hand off. Where can people find you and look you up?

Julie Thompson37:17

Yeah, easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. So Julie Thompson, helper strategies. And if it's not on LinkedIn, you can find me in the field, Texas, neighboring states, working in energy and data centers. So.

Peter Brecht37:29

Yeah.

Peter Brecht37:33

Love it. Well, thank you for your time. Until next week, thank you guys for listening to Local Energy.

Julie Thompson37:39

Thank you.