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Sponsored content by SLB
The energy technology company is merging real-world expertise with AI know-how to make energy exploration and production faster and more efficient.
What a century of operating complex systems taught SLB about the AI era
Each company approaches AI in similar ways, using it to process large datasets, evaluate scenarios, and identify patterns that humans might miss. “We’re not turning control over to some AI unit,” Towell says. “There’s going to be reactor operators responsible for these reactors.”
AI, Raman argues, finally frees the industry from choosing between speed and accuracy, or scale and complexity. “This industry has the most to gain,” she says. “There’s so much complexity to consider, but that is what SLB is built for.”
Each company benefits from the quick work of government agencies to meet their demand. Taff says that Texas Railroad Commission permits for geothermal wells can come through “in a matter of weeks,” and recent legislation has clarified who owns the heat underground. U.S. operators drill roughly 25,000 to 30,000 oil and gas wells a year. Redirect about 5% of that capacity, she says, and the country could add roughly 5 gigawatts of geothermal power within five years, “with rigs and crews that already exist, many of them in Texas.”
First-of-a-kind projects rarely run on schedule. But Texas has always been willing to go first and write the playbook. “The resource is right beneath our feet,” Taff says. Texas has spent a century learning how to reach it.
SPEED OR ACCURACY: NO LONGER A CHOICE
That model-reality gap is familiar ground for SLB, the global technology company that has spent a century making high-stakes calls about places no one can observe directly. Plenty of software companies can model what’s underground. Far fewer have to drill into it and live with the results. SLB does both, helping engineers build the simulations that tell customers where and how to drill. Then its crews drill the wells and keep them producing.
“We live in both worlds,” says Aparna Raman, SLB’s chief strategy officer, “the world of digital and data and AI, as well as the physical world.”
Since models don’t often mirror the real world, a company that has seen where models break down in the field knows how to build software that holds up there.
SHRINKING THE MODEL-REALITY GAP
— Aparna Raman, chief strategy officer, SLB
“This industry has the most to gain [from AI]. There’s so much complexity to consider, but that is what SLB is built for.”
For more than a century, Texas has been synonymous with energy: The Spindletop and Permian Basin oil fields. A Houston skyline built on crude. And while crude put Texas on the map, the state’s next energy chapter is being written by people who learned their trade in the oil patch and are now expanding in innovative ways. Folks whose hard-won knowledge of what lies miles underground are now pulling heat from deep rock to make geothermal power, pairing a century of subsurface expertise with AI to make smarter calls in the field, and building advanced nuclear reactors on a West Texas college campus. Texas isn’t trading one energy identity for another. It’s proving that the skills behind the last boom are the ones that will fuel the next.
Start with the electrical grid. On July 22, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas set an all-time demand record of roughly 91 gigawatts and rode it out without emergency measures. As the sun went down that evening, batteries pushed a record of nearly 12 gigawatts of power onto the grid. Texas now rivals California for the number of solar-powered batteries used as a power source, and this spring solar outproduced coal. Meanwhile, the Permian oil field is forecast to produce an average of 6.8 million barrels of oil a day this year, helping to push U.S. crude output to a record. Texas doesn’t treat energy as one versus another—it treats it as a portfolio.
The connective tissue is the field itself. Cindy Taff spent 36 years at Shell, most recently leading its global unconventional wells business, before becoming CEO of Houston-based Sage Geosystems. This spring, Sage began selling electricity into the Texas grid from a 3-megawatt next-generation geothermal facility in Christine, south of San Antonio, built alongside a coal plant that has served South Texas for decades. “We use the same drilling rigs, service companies, equipment, and supply chains that the oil and gas industry spent decades developing,” Taff says. More than 120 days in, the plant has held water losses under 10%, a problem that has long dogged hot-rock geothermal.
Running a real plant, she says, taught Sage what no simulation could. “Models tell you what should happen. Operating a facility on the grid tells you what actually happens.”
11-06-26
The state that built the oil age is putting its subsurface
know-how to work on geothermal heat, advanced nuclear, and AI-guided field decisions
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Powering into
the next energy era
Head west to Abilene, better known for rodeos than reactor physics, and the same instinct is at work in nuclear. Rusty Towell, a physicist at Abilene Christian University, leads development of a molten-salt research reactor on campus with Natura Resources. In 2024, it became the first liquid-fueled advanced reactor to win a Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction permit and is scheduled for a 2032 commercial debut. “What other companies have taken billions and decades to accomplish, we’ve done with tens of millions and in years,” Towell says.
Natura’s founder, West Texas oilman Doug Robinson, has joked that he’s “recycling oil and gas profits in advanced nuclear.” Towell says it’s only partly a joke. The Texas Legislature has committed $120 million to Natura and created a $350 million fund for advanced reactors. On the Gulf Coast, X-energy and Dow are planning reactors at Dow’s Seadrift chemical complex, backed by up to $2.15 billion in federal funding. “They understand the value of energy,” Towell says of the state’s leaders, “and they also understand the future is not the past.”
the nuclear option
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