Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, November 29th. Today on Forbes, fracking hot rocks could

revolutionize clean energy if Trump doesn't get in the way. Tim Latimer has always liked

digging. He recalls, quote, when I was seven years old, I decided I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and just kept digging for a week.

I had seen some TV show about a cool tunnel clubhouse, and I wanted to make my own.

Later, as a teenager, he watched in 2008 as the Sandy Creek Energy Station, the last large coal-fired plant built in the United States,

broke ground five miles from his home in tiny Riesel, Texas, and grew to tower over the flat

rural landscape. He says, quote, that became a very visual reminder. Energy is vital to our

lives, but there's positives and negatives with that kind of development.

Those twin obsessions, digging deep and creating energy, have taken Latimer, still just 35 years old,

and an alumnus of the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, to the cusp of what could turn out to be either

a breakthrough in the quest for zero-carbon

emitting energy or an expensive pipe dream. As chief executive and co-founder of Houston-based

Fervo Energy, Latimer has raised more than $400 million for a plan to liberate practically

unlimited geothermal energy, generated from the heat of Earth's core,

from super-hot rocks at least 8,000 feet underground by employing the same fracking techniques

used to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock. Fervo's investors include Mitsubishi

heavy industries, traditional oil and gas producers, Mark Zuckerberg,

and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate change-focused venture capital fund, organized by Bill Gates,

and backed by a pack of fellow billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg,

Ray Dalio, and Reed Hoffman. Over the next three years, Fervo plans to use a 166-foot-tall drilling rig to punch a total

of 80 boreholes, aka Wells, in the Escalante Desert, near Milford, Utah.

Each of these holes, Fervo has already drilled 20, is about 10 inches in diameter and goes down

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