Subsurface Science and Technology: American Energy and Mineral Dominance

Subcommittee on Energy will come to order. With that objection, the chair is authorized to declare recesses of the subcommittee at any time. Welcome to today's hearing entitled, Subsurface Science and Technology, American Energy and Mineral Dominance. I recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement. Well, good morning, you all. You can tell I'm from Texas. Uh, good morning, welcome to today's energy subcommittee hearing titled, Subsurface Science and Technology, American Energy and Mineral Dominance. The United States is blessed with an abundance of natural resources across our magnificent country. For over a century, our nation has generated a significant portion of power, of its power directly from subsurface resources such as coal, and natural gas. Technological breakthroughs in subsurface sciences have enabled us to access these resources in new and innovative ways, unlocking potential that was once thought, quite frankly, impossible. A great example of this is the geothermal energy sector. Previously, geothermal energy was limited to certain regions due to extremely specific conditions required for it to be a viable energy source, for a geothermal well to be successful, The required combination of shallow heat, permeable rock, and available water had to be present to extract heat from the earth and uh generate electricity. If any of these requirements were not met, a geothermal well would not generate power. As a result, the few capable areas of supporting geothermal electricity generation were tapped decades ago, which left the industry in a position where some believed that its full potential had already been reached. Thanks to innovation in the oil and gas sector, Geothermal is getting a new lease on life. Over the last few decades, oil and gas have been at the forefront of new drilling and extraction technologies and methods. These breakthroughs have helped address issues that traditional Geothermal energy had faced in the past. Next generation Geothermal systems are also well-suited to play a role in leveraging established technologies like hydraulic fracturing. and drilling deeper to access hotter rock, bringing baseload geothermal to new regions across the entire country. The timing for these enhanced geothermal systems to be commercialized could not be better. Energy demand is skyrocketing as we are not only on-shoring manufacturing, but also electrifying our lives and working to stay ahead of the Chinese Communist Party and the artificial intelligent race. Very important. disposition for a prosperous future, the Department of Energy underwent a reorganization in November of twenty twenty five. This reorganization resulted in the establishment of two key offices for today's hearing, the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office and the Office of Critical Mineral Minerals and Energy Innovation. With their creation, DOE made the subsurface and by extension geothermal energy and critical minerals a priority moving forward. These offices have already announced funding opportunities to accelerate the deployment of next generation geothermal energy while helping ensure a safe and secure su- supply chain for the good old U S of A. We have recently we have seen recently how geopolitical events can impact not only our economy but the global economy. This underscores the importance of strengthening domestic supply chains to meet both our energy and critical critical mineral needs. It also highlights the need to continue advancing cutting edge in- innovation. The discoveries made by oil and natural gas companies that led to hydraulic fracturing a lot of it from Galveston Texas area but the hydraulic fracturing boom have helped insulate the US from electricity price shocks thanks to our enormous natural gas production capacity. This has enabled us to support our allies with LNG shipments to Europe and Asia, not only during the current supply disruption but in previous ones as well. The ability to bring a new base load power source to market during an energy supply crunch is an enormous win for the American people. Paired with the DOE's ongoing efforts to reduce alliance reliance on critical critical minerals from foreign countries, that may not have always had our best interests in mind, this creates a powerful one-two punch for the subsurface community. I wanna thank all the witnesses for being here today and for your testimony, and I look forward to a very productive discussion with that. I yield back my time and I recognize the ranking member, Representative of North Carolina, for her opening statement. Thank you, ranking member. Ross, you're on.

OK. Good morning and thank you so much, Chairman Weber, for convening this hearing. And thank you to our expert witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today to talk about the current landscape of subsurface energy and critical materials research. It's been nearly three years since this subcommittee last held a hearing on this topic, and I have traveled with in a bipartisan way to Iceland to learn more about geothermal energy. I know it's more difficult here, but it's pretty impressive in Iceland. Um, it's still clear that the understanding of how we can safely and sustainably harness our natural resources is critical, to our ability to support a clean and resilient future. For decades, the Department of Energy and its national labs have administered essential research into the Earth's natural processes. The foundational work advanced by the department has long focused on the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground. However, this research is also important, as we've heard from the chairman, for addressing problems like mitigating environmental contamination and storing carbon underground. It is particularly important to our renewed focus on geothermal energy development, both conventional and next generation technologies. Geothermal energy is growing into an invaluable source of clean power to support our energy security this subsurface research plays an essential role in our ability to safely extract minerals for clean energy technologies and national security, as well as to create American-made, I'll say that again, cuz we agree on this, American-made alternatives that can serve the same purposes. In my home state of North Carolina, Duke University's Critical Minerals Hub and NC State Go pack. Um, NC State's minerals research lab are leading this kind of research from studying how we can extract critical minerals from unconventional resources to studying the environmental impacts of mining. This fundamental materials research paired with work on the electric grid and geopolitical analysis will help us create a sustainable and secure critical minerals supply chain here in the US. Lastly, I would be remiss not to highlight how important continued federal investment in this research is. Universities, national labs, and private sector innovators, like those represented by our witnesses today, rely upon a steady federal investment, and it is an investment stewarded by expert staff. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about the current research challenges they face across a range of subsurface sectors and how the federal government can make the biggest impact in supporting your work. So thank you and I yield back.

I thank the the ranking member and let the record show that she does agree with me. So at this time I'd like to recognize the Chairman of the Full Committee, Doctor Babin. uh, for five minutes.

Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it. Thanks for, uh, this good hearing today. I wanna thank our, uh, expert witnesses, looking very much forward to hearing what you all have to say. Uh, it's all our hearing today is on subsurface science and technology, and it comes at a very important moment. And while the United States is long-led in innovation, the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP, is using every tool at its disposal. uh to not only surpass us but also to set the course for future innovation and standards uh in subsurface science and technology. Excuse me. To maintain our lead, the US must continue to unleash the power of our subsurface from energy production to establishing a critical mineral supply chain and supporting c- uh cutting edge science. Energy production and critical minerals are increasingly intertwined. to design and operate next generation energy production, critical minerals will play a vital role while mining and processing those, uh, minerals will require increased energy production. Simply put,

Mm-hmm.

these sectors rely on each other and must move hand in hand to allow the United States to lead the world in innovation. Since his first term, President Trump has worked to address the CCP's monopoly over several rare earth elements and other critical minerals. In twenty seventeen, President Trump signed executive order uh one three eight one seven, the federal strategy to insuring secure and reliable uh supplies of critical minerals which designated thirty-five minerals as critical to the US. Furthermore, he signed five presidential determinations in twenty nineteen that declared reliance on foreign nations for rare earth elements to be a national security threat. which I agree with. In his second term, President Trump has continued to drive America to build a domestic supply chain for these minerals working with the private sector to provide the necessary tools for those companies not only to get off the ground but also to become successful businesses for decades to come. Cultivating and discovering new ways to access domestic credi- critical minerals including rare earths should be a bipartisan issue. If the US continues to rely solely on a single source, we can look at our neighbors, the uh the effects of the Chinese export restrictions to our neighbor uh Japan, to see the immense ramifications that could be awaiting us. This can be prevented by establishing a domestic critical minerals industry. Rare earths are essential to the United States defense industry, and a key reason that we feel the world's most advanced military. Losing access would put not only the American military, but also the American public in a very unsafe position. Thankfully, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation have been key allies in advancing innovation in critical minerals including rare earths. Through research supported by DOE and NSF, it was found that coal ash, something that we have plenty of from decades of burning coal, has the potential to be an economically viable source of these rare earth elements. And while it is essential to strengthen the critical mineral supply chain, to secure our economic future, we must also ensure that our power demands continue to be met. The news out of the enhanced geothermal space has been nothing short of remarkable and a reminder of what innovation in one area can lead to in another. Adding additional base load energy sources to our grid right now is critical, and enhanced geothermal seems well positioned to harness this resource and deliver it to our grid. Including geothermal and critical minerals in the titles of DOE offices shows how important these two priorities are to President Trump and to Secretary Wright. I look forward to discussing how these organizational changes have impacted the essential work across these sectors and what

Thank you, Doctor Bandman, and I'll now introduce our witnesses, our first witness today is Mister Carlos Araque, President and Chief Executive Officer of the, is it, QAESE, how do you, energy?

QAESE.

Quayes, OK. Good, thank you. Our second witness is Doctor Elizabeth Hawley, uh, a Professor in Mining Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Welcome. Our third witness is Doctor Thomas Lograsso, Director of the Critical Minerals Innovation Hub at Ames National Laboratory. We're glad you're here. And our, bringing up to rear, our final witness is Mister Joel Edriss, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals. Welcome. We're glad you're here. Uh, Mister Rocca, you're uh recognized for five minutes.

Mister Chairman, Ranking Member Ross, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Carlos Araque. I have the honor of serving as President and CEO of Quase Energy, a super hot geothermal power plant developer and technology innovator. At Quase, we are developing gigawatt scale super hot geothermal power plants that generate electricity from the Earth's deep heat using our transformative drilling technology. I founded Quase in twenty twenty eighteen while I was serving as General Director at MIT's venture capital fund. Since then, we advanced our technology at Oak Ridge National Lab through an ARPAI grant, sighted our lab and drilling test yard in Texas, and broke ground in Oregon on our first power plant. In short, our goal is to make super hot geothermal a primary source of base load electricity, worldwide, with America leading the way. The goal is within reach and already underway. Super hot geothermal is a transformational power source. and a once in a generation opportunity to enhance American energy dominance. It is clear that we need more power in more places faster. Global electricity demand is projected to triple by twenty fifty. Meeting this demand requires reliable, affordable, abundant power. Our nation can lead and continue to shape the geopolitical order for decades. America's path to energy dominance has always been beneath our feet. Gigawatt power plants, boil water to spin a turbine, and make electricity. We do the same thing. using the earth as our boiler. We get to hot rock, to rock hot enough everywhere to match and sur- surpass the speeds, scalability and economics of fossil energy itself. But until now, geothermal has been limited by geology. The deepest, hottest portions of this resource have been technically and economically out of reach using conventional drilling technologies. That's where we come in. Where drilling stops, quays begins. Our millimeter wave drilling technology is designed to access super hot rock at about eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit across the entire United States. It centers around the use of a gyrotron, a powerful microwave emitting device, born out of the fusion industry, capable of generating high-powered waves that turn rock into dust. Last summer, we drilled down four hundred feet into solid granite without ever touching the rock. And as we speak, we're headed to several several thousand more. This is not incremental improvement. It is a fundamental breakthrough to enable universal access to super-hot resources deep underground. This approach will allow our super-hot geothermal power plants to produce up to ten times more power per well than conventional geothermal systems, a level consistent with gas, coal power and nuclear power plants, but without the fuel dependencies. As a result, projects will be able to produce electricity at a levelized cost of energy, compared with other base load generation on a commercially viable and an accelerated timeline. More importantly, our technology makes super hot geothermal possible everywhere in the United States, not just the seven Western states where geothermal exists today. QUASE is building the world's first gigawatt scale super hot geothermal project right now, in central Oregon. It's called Project Obsidian and it becomes the blueprint for nation-one nationwide and global deployment of geothermal power plants to power cities, industry, and intelligence. With tax policy, investment, and reforms to permitting processes, Congress can help unlock super-hot geothermal's full potential faster than the capital markets will. On the funding side, we recommend four hundred and ten million in fiscal year twenty twenty seven for the Geothermal Office to accelerate utility scale demonstrations and deployment of gigawatt scale, super-hot geothermal systems. The Department of Energy predicts between ninety and three hundred gigawatts of geothermal power. possible by twenty fifty. By going harder and deeper, Quaes believes that the potential is far, far higher, adding to the terawatts. To realize that potential, we need a step change in our thinking about funding. Government investment at scale, billions not millions, can dramatically accelerate this potential. In closing, with the right policy framework and investment, super-hot geothermal can become a corner store of Amer- cornerstone of American energy security and economic competitiveness. QUASE is leading this transformation. Our technology is improving by orders of magnitude every year. Our first commercial project is already under construction. What our industry needs now is a strategic federal support to accelerate white-spray deployment, and ensure that America maintains its age, edge in the global race for abundant baseload power. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I welcome your questions.

Thank you, sir. Uh, Doctor Hawley, you are now recognized for five minutes.

Chairman Weber, Ranking Member Ross, and Mener- members of the Energy Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to share my perspective. I am Elizabeth Hawley, Professor in Mining Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Today I want to highlight two main points. First, the need for a systematic and proactive national critical mineral strategy, which will guide investment in science, technology and implementation. Second, the need for interdisciplinary science and technology collaboration across government, academia and the private sector. On the first point, national critical mineral strategy, half the periodic table is critical. There's no text s- solution, no single text solution for a list so diverse. For example, the germanium we need annually for semiconductors is the volume of a few washing machines. For copper we need more in the next twenty-five years than humans have mined throughout history. What are the ways these heterogeneous problems can be solved? For each of the sixty critical minerals we have six supply pathways, each with distinct science and technology challenges. Imports, recycling, new mine development, recovery of by-product minerals during active mining, reprocessing of already accumulated mine waste, and demand reduction through substitution and efficiency. Determining the right blend of the six supply options for each critical mineral, is a solvable optimization problem. That is one of my research areas. Our interdisciplinary approach brings together science, engineering, and social science to determine the supply pathways for each mineral, so that R and D investment can be wisely directed. Without this strategic and proactive approach, federal investment in critical minerals is a game of whack-a-mole, reacting to Chinese export controls. My team's data not only point to which supply pathways make most sense for each mineral, but also which individual sites can quickly move the needle. Did you know that the US could produce all the germanium we need from pilot scale by-product recovery at one mine? Across the periodic table, my team can identify the supply pathways and sites where investment can have the biggest impact. Moving to my other main point, interdisciplinary, inter-organizational science and technology collaboration, I wanna touch on three areas. The first is exploration efficiency. Our research shows that geological endowment is rarely the obstacle. For example, the US has enough undeveloped cobalt, nickel, lithium, manganese, and graphite to meet projected energy demand. However, exploration efficiency must be improved. Copper deposits are on average explored by two to five companies before a discovery is made. Canada is improving exploration effic- efficiency by requiring private sector data sharing. Government data like Earth MRI are fundamental, but the private sector does the boots-on-the-ground exploration. Even with AI, investor confidence will still rely on exploration drilling as the truth machine. Where government, academia, and the private sector need to collaborate to de-risk mining and processing, is advanced sensing technology between the exploration drill holes. Next, resource availability. Even where there are known deposits, many domestic resources, remain unavailable due to technical, economic, and social constraints. My research is funded by various federal agencies, including DOE, but the National Science Foundation is the only agency that brings scientists, engineers, and social scientists together to solve systems-level problems, like domestic mineral supply. Finally, I want to explain geometalurgy, which is the science to rapidly unlock by-product and mine waste critical minerals. If the US recovered just fifteen percent of by-product element that we currently throw away during mining, we could secure the supply of about forty elements, solving more than half of the critical minerals list. But since the defunding of the Bureau of Mines, the federal government has lost its expertise in geo-metallergy, which is the integration of geology, geochemistry, mineralogy, mining engineering, mineral processing, metallurgy and data science. The US mining schools have been keeping this flame alive. At Colorado School of Mines, we're excited about the relocation of the USGS energy and minerals program to our campus. We're also asked to help support the national labs to enhance their expertise in critical minerals. In fields like Geometallurgy, WE, Academia, Colorado School of Mines, provides the missing link between interior and energy. I'm often asked about workforce, and I have to point out the most acute problem is the expertise available to train that workforce. We are only a handful of mining faculty in the country, and sustained investment to ensure the vibrancy of our research programs is the only way to grow our ranks. Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Doctor Logratso, you are now recognized for five minutes.

Chairman Weber and Ranking Member Ross, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to speak on the role of the Critical Materials Innovation Hub in strengthening the nation's scientific leadership. energy security, and supply chain resilience for critical materials. I am Tom LaGrasso, Director of the Department of Energy's Critical Materials Innovation Hub, or CMI. I'm a senior leader at the Ames National Laboratory on the campus of Iowa State University with a mission to deliver critical material solutions to the nation. CMI is a national consortium of nine of the DOE's national laboratories, twenty universities, and sixteen US industry partners working together to strengthen America's supply chains for materials critical to energy technologies, advanced manufacturing, and national security. CMI was established in twenty thirteen in response to growing vulnerabilities in global supply chains, particularly for the rare earth elements and other specialty materials that are highly concentrated overseas. In twenty twenty three, DOE renewed CMI for a third five year phase, recognizing the hub's maturity and its demonstrated ability to move science from discovery toward deployment. Our mission is straightforward, but ambitious. To accelerate innovation that enables secure, resilient, and diversified domestic supply chains for critical materials. We pursue this through early stage research across four integrated pillars. diversifying supply, developing substitutes, unlocking secondary sources, and through recycling and enabling cross-research, modeling, techno-economic analysis, and supply chain analysis. What makes CMI unique is its coordinated collaborative eq- ecosystem. Long-term support allows fundamental science, applied engineering, and manufacturability to advance together. rather than in isolation. To illustrate the impact of this approach, I'd like to briefly highlight three innovations. First, I wish to tell you about lanmodulin-based rare earth separations. Lanmodulin is a protein that has an affinity for rare earth elements. This technology began as basic biological research into microbes that naturally bind rare earth elements. With sustained DOE support, CMI advanced that early discovery into engineered protein systems capable of separating individual rare earths, like neodymium and dysprosium, in a single step at purities exceeding ninety-eight percent. That level of performance meets industrial requirements while dramatically reducing chemical use. The technology is now licensed to ultra-resources technologies, which is deploying it for domestic commercial scale separations on a variety of different feedstocks. My second example developed at the Ames laboratory is acid-free, rare earth metal production, known as remasts. Traditional metal production relies on hydrofluoric acid, creating major safety and permitting challenges. CMI researchers developed a com- developed a completely hydrofluoric-free alternative that produces high purity rare earth metals at lower temperatures, lower energy intensity, is suitable for the production of permanent magnets. In just a few years, this technology progressed from laboratory research to kilogram scale demonstrations, and is now licensed by a US company, Principal Mineral, enabling safer domestic metal production. Finally, um, the third and most commercially developed technology is acid-free recycling for end-of-life permanent magnets. Dysprosium is scarce, and not present in extractable quantities in US mines, and it's vulnerable to disruptions as we have seen. The technology is licensed to critical materials recycling, which now operates a pilot facility in Iowa. Partnerships with companies as Western Digital and Microsoft are validating this process using real industrial sc- scrap at scale. Taken together, these outcomes translate into measurable national impact, since Its inception, CMI has generated more than two hundred and twenty-five intervention disclosures, seventy-two US patents, forty-five license technologies, and have trained over four hundred students and post-doc researchers who now contribute to industry, government, and national laboratories. Furthermore, CMI has attracted more than a hundred and sixty million of public and private investments to move technologies into practice. In closing, I wish to thank you again for this opportunity.

Thank you, sir. Mister Edwards looks like you're batting clean up. You're next.

Thank you, sir. Chairman Weber, Ranking Member Ross, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Joel Edwards, and I am a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals, proudly headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Zanskar is an American energy technology company built to discover our country's hidden geothermal resources, and transform them into base load clean power. We build new artificial intelligence tools that map the Earth's subsurface with a level of precision that just a decade ago was considered impossible. We combine cutting edge geoscience and artificial intelligence in ways that let us discover geothermal systems that have been hidden deep underground. Then we build on them. We convert those subsurface resources into affordable, clean, reliable, and secure electricity. With these tools, Zanskar will deliver gigawatts of power to American homes and and businesses over the next decade, creating jobs and economic growth as we continue our historic geothermal exploration and development campaign. I'm grateful for this committee's leadership in convening this hearing. I'm a geologist by training, and geology is a discovery science. We piece together the properties and processes of the subsurface from rocks. And that lets us find things that have always been there, but that nobody has seen. The idea that we can use data and human ingenuity to map the unmapped and find new resources is an American instinct, and it is a core ideal of Zanskar. And it has led us to the most important insight I can offer this committee, which is the subsurface of the United States holds one of the last great unexplored American frontiers. including massive and untapped geothermal potential. What we discover there will anchor American prosperity today and long into the future. Over our country's two hundred and fifty years, we have mapped America's mountain ranges and river basins, surveyed coastlines and seafloors, and put satellites into orbit. Just last week, Americans flew around the moon for the first time in over fifty years. But the thermal properties of the rocks beneath our feet are in most places unknown. We have barely begun to characterize them. Zanskar was built to explore and build out that geothermal frontier. We are doing it by pairing our team's extraordinary engineers and scientists with the most significant field data collection and drilling campaigns for American geothermal in history. Day after day, Zanskar's crews fan out across the West, testing our models' predictions and prospecting for anomalous heat in areas no one has surveyed before. We think of ourselves as modern wildcatters. And many of our field geologists are fresh out of school, developing a craft that will define their careers as they push the American geothermal frontier forward. This iterative process has produced what we believe is the world's best platform for geothermal discovery, and most importantly, that discovery platform is working. As one example, in May of twenty twenty four, Zanskar acquired a geothermal power plant in southwestern New Mexico called Lightning Dock. Lightning Dock had been underperforming for years. And it was at risk of being retired, a closure that would have cost its entire workforce their jobs. Within a year, using our discovery platform, we identified a deeper, hotter reservoir zone. We drilled into that zone, restored the power plant to its full capacity, and began delivering additional power to the grid. Lightning Docks workers now have stable long-term jobs in the geothermal sector, and that new production well has been operating for over a year now, and is one of the most p- productive pumped geothermal wells in the country. Through these finds and many more, we are showing that the American age of geothermal is just getting started. There are many more examples to come. I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you and to describe that frontier, what Zanskar has found, what we believe is still out there, and how the administration, Congress, and the private sector can work together to build this enduring path to limitless American energy dominance. We appreciate the broad bipartisan support And thank you for inviting us. Happy to answer questions.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate all of the testimony of the witnesses. I now recognize myself for five minutes of questions. I'm gonna come back to you, Mister Edwards. And by the way, when did, when did, uh, your company start? How long has it been in existence?

About six years.

About six years, good. In my previous career, I actually owned an air conditioning heating company, worked in the HVAC industry, uh, on the Gal- on the Gulf Coast of Texas where humidity is really high. I kinda share some, yup, our parallels with geothermal, um, going way back. One challenge that I did encounter was dealing with the high humidity in Texas, and the strain it can place on systems. So, how does Zanscor, as a conventional geothermal company, manage wells in a really high humidity condition that may indeed impact your production? How do you deal with that?

Yeah, this is a super fun and sort of nerdy question that's - that's really fun to think through. Thank you, Chairman Weber, for the question. Um, geothermal power plants are thermal power plants. So what that means is we take heat out of the ground and we shove that heat into a turbine. And that turbine spins and it converts some of that heat into electricity. But the heat that it does not convert into electricity becomes waste heat. And we have to reject that heat to the atmosphere. And we do that using, um, condensers. So, uh, a chiller system, we have about half of a chiller system at a geothermal power plant. We have evaporators and we have condensers. And so, yes, in short, the answer to your question is, if you crank up the humidity, it reduces our condenser's ability to reject heat. But the counterfactual is that if there is high humidity, there is probably water in - in the area. And so, you would switch from using dry cooled condensers to wet cooled condensers. So the majority of geothermal power plants today are operating out west in the arid environment. And in that, in those boundary conditions, we typically use air-cooled condensers because those work better in dry air conditions. Uh, one of the things that I think Zanskar does really well is we think from first principles and we're willing to try things. And the heat rejection problem at geothermal power plants, I think your intuition as an HVAC expert, you probably understand heat transfer better than I do as a geoscientist. But your intuition is right, that we have to reject heat as fast as we put heat into the facility. And so it is a, it's a major capital cost for our facilities, and it's a major operational cost because it dictates how much power we make. So, yes, we are, this is, heat rejection is an area of act- active research and development.

Well, thank you for that. That was interesting to me. Mister Rocca, I'm gonna come to you now, uh, with your millimeter wave drilling technology, uh, adaptable to existing oil and gas rigs. What kind of day-to-day impact do you think that's gonna have on the operators in the field?

Thank you for the question. So, we are making everything we do compatible and consistent with oil and gas uh operations. What we expect will happen is that they continue to do what they do. They just do it over a broader geographical region. Um, and they have to grow. You know, geothermal resource, the way we're tapping it, implies a net growth of energy potential resource. So we expect the the industry to continue to grow and actually start to diversify into geothermal at the same scale.

Do you have a process where uh you're teaching these operators or these drillers, as we call them out in the field, where they actually come over to y'all, that's a Texas word, y'all, and uh they come over to y'all and y'all teach them your trade, so to speak? Do you have that process in place?

We we do, and we played out that process for the first time at full scale last year in Houston. Uh, so we are working with Neighbors Industries, one of the largest drilling companies,

Mm-hmm.

um, for all, for inland drilling operations. And what we did is we brought our technology into their drilling rigs. We do not make drilling rigs. We simply made the technology to enhance those drilling rigs. And we worked with their operators to actually do exactly that. We drilled with that drilling rig right then and there. Um, and we created a, um, a seamless transition between the two ways of drilling, with the same drilling rig, same equipment, same people.

Looks like you're broadening the industry quite frankly, making it bigger and better.

Yeah, I'd like to think it's at least an X.

Yeah.

It's a much bigger resource.

Okay, I know this is a question for all, I only have about forty seconds. A common theme in today's testimony is how much we still do not know about the subsurface. How can we as members of Congress address this? Doctor Hawley, I'm gonna come to you first. Try to be brief.

Research. The research programs in our universities are what draw the best faculty and the best graduate students which build the undergraduate program.

OK.

My undergraduate classes are full because students are excited about that.

Michelle LaGrasso.

I think an opportunity lies in utilizing artificial intelligence. There's tremendous data sets out there on the subsurface. I think that they um can be tapped to look at a broader set of outcomes, like mineral occurrence, eh et cetera.

OK. Thank you for keeping it short. I'm out of time, so I am going to stop and yield back my time to the all of her time for at least five minutes to the ranking number.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Um, a sustainable and secure domestic critical mineral supply chain has become increasingly vital for our energy and national security. And there's been strong bipartisan, bicameral support in Congress for the federal government to play a role in addressing this challenge. Doctor Lograsso, you mentioned in your testimony that long-term coordinated federal investment is required to develop alternative sources as well as to develop new materials with fewer or no critical minerals and to develop new methods to process critical minerals with enhanced efficiency can you please expand upon this statement and share what research gaps still exist in our efforts to secure our supply chain critical minerals and their alternatives.

Thank you for that question. Um, the sustained um funding that CMI in particular has enjoyed um has allowed the the hub to build a a wonderful balance between competency in terms of scientific expertise as well as being able to address the changing challenges of uh the various stages of the supply chain. And without that sustained funding, well, scientists will - will disperse, right?

Mm-hmm.

And the teams will disperse. And I think that's the part that's really is important, is the teams that form around a - a given technology um, carries that technology, they become the champion and they work it from the basic discovery phases all the way through to deployment. Um and so sustained funding has been a blessing for for our teams. They've been able to develop technologies. They've been able to um work across our pillars so that they can take that technology and make sure that it can be transitioned into the manufacturing environment. Um I apologize, there was a second part to your question.

Well, we were also talking about the alternatives. But I think that that's OK because I I'm halfway through my time and I wanna ask some more questions.

Oh, yeah.

So you did a good job. Um, Doctor Hawley, I saw you nodding your head, so if you uh you're the next question if you wanna add a little bit to what Doctor Lagrosse said, that's fine. But I wanted to pick up on something that you were talking about in terms of workforce. Cuz that issue came up three years ago, and we talked about how we are we really need to develop this next generation. So in your testimony you mentioned that institutions like the Colorado School of Mines have kept the US Geo-medal meta meta you can say it the your your expertise alive after dissolution of the US Bureau of Mines in nineteen ninety six. And that was a real threat when it was um when it was dissolved. Can you elaborate on ways in which the federal government could play a greater role in training the next generation of interdisciplinary subsurface experts that can help support our critical materials supply chains and also feel free to use your minute and a half to um talk about the other question.

Thank you for the opportunity. I wanna go back to my discussion of by-products and mine waste and also for new mining, differently from geothermal where you have to understand that there is rock and fluid, in order to get critical minerals you have to understand the chemistry inside individual minerals. And that particular expertise requires all of these interdisciplinary fields. That is really the gap between the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy. We have been working in this area, pulling together little threads of funding from various projects here and there. There is no sustained long-term funding for this, which is the field that can unlock all of these resources, and knock off half the critical minerals list. So we would like to see long-term center-type funding to the mining schools, of course, on behalf of School of Mines, I say to my mining school, but really bridging between interior and energy, because it's that three-way partnership that can absolutely solve these problems. Do what you did for CMI for academia and we won't have a workforce problem.

OK. Well, and I think that that might also benefit North Carolina State University and Duke University, which my colleague represents. So thank you so much, and I yield back.

Yielding back, the chair now recognizes the chairman of the entire Science, Space and Technology committee, Doctor Babin, for as much time as he wants.

Thank you. I'll be here about twenty-five minutes, so. I'll give her five minutes. I want to thank the uh witnesses again. It's very interesting. Uh, Doctor Hawley, in your testimony you mentioned that more systematic prioritization would allow better targeting of these federal investments. Uh, could you please expand on this?

Thank you for the question. This is one of my favorite subjects. So I talked about these six supply pathways,

Good.

imports, recycling, new mines, by-product, mine waste, and demand reduction. If you take those six and you look across the periodic table, think of those as your six basic ingredients. So you're gonna make one element, say you're gonna make germanium, right, that's like making bread, so you use a different blend of your six basic ingredients than if you're going to make something else like copper or find something else like copper, right? So we need different ratios of these different supply strategies for each critical mineral. Going through the entire periodic table or at least half of it for the critical minerals list is a really doable exercise. My team is part way through doing that. We would love more support to be able to do that. But then we know where we can move the needle the most quickly. We don't have to be reactive to Chinese export controls. We can be proactive, thinking in advance about where the science and technology need to go over the next ten years.

Thank you so very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate that. Now, and one additional, uh, are there additional avenues or considerations, uh, that the federal government should take into account when issuing awards, uh, in the critical minerals industry? Doctor Hawley.

I assume you're going in the science direction for that, because I can't speak to um I would say the broader politics. Uh, yes, I think we need to be really thoughtful about bringing in all of the information that we have, not only about markets but also geopolitics, also the environment. Community opposition is a big reducer of the net present value of a mining project. And mining companies are very risk averse. So we have to think about where the industry can go, where the private sector can go, and be really strategic in funding things that will be doable for that three-way partnership government private sector and and industry.

Okay. Thank you. And now, Mister Edwards, uh, in your written testimony you had mentioned the geothermal information gap uh that the United States faces and what steps would help address this and what can Congress do uh, to facilitate better informed decision making, uh, for producers like yourself.

Yeah, thanks for the question, representative. Uh, two, two axes along which to think of this problem. Um, out west, particularly where, um, we have the richest geothermal resources, a lot of that west is not covered in high-resolution, high-quality data. So there's big data gaps out west, just there's physical areas where we don't have information on the rocks, let alone the thermal properties. And then we, um, at depth is the other axis, so you have the horizontal and then you have the depth component. And generally speaking, we don't have a lot of information on the crust below, you know, shallow depths, because that's where the majority of our data are coming from. And so, opportunities for the DOE, uh, I think are to focus on, there's an opportunity to fund big regional scale baseline data collection surveys at high resolution over broad areas that benefit and lift all boats, not just geothermal but you know, critical mineral exploration, the same data sets that can inform those explorers and form our explorers when we're looking for these geothermal resources. And then just generally the c- the continued funding and support of these institutions that are driving a lot of the sort of front-tier tech.

Thank you very much. And lastly, uh, Mister Rocky, uh, in your written testimony you had mentioned that there were no signs of wear and tear on the drilling machinery. Uh, this appears to be a very significant improvement over current drilling technology. which degrades over time and can even break underground, slowing down production. Is it possible for this type of technology to be used in shallower geologic formations such as those found in oil and natural gas fields?

Most certainly yes. So the this is a drilling technology at heart. It proposes to do things and it can do things in fundamentally different ways. The conventional mechanical drilling, it's complimentary, it's an extension of capability, not a replacement of capability. We get asked that question, it's on a case-by-case basis, but the value proposition is largest when we're trying to go deeper, harder, harder, rock more where the drill bits basically break.

Right, got you. Uh, I'm just about out of time, Mister Lagrasso. I appreciate you being here though, but if you have any uh thing that you'd like to add to that real quickly.

I'll just um maybe amplify Elizabeth's comments about a multidisciplinary approach that the um solutions to critical material supply chains doesn't lie with one discipline, but rather the integration across multiple disciplines.

Yes, sir. Thank you so very much. Appreciate it. And uh yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Uh, the chair now recognizes Junette from North Carolina for at least five minutes.

Thank you and thank you to our witnesses and the ranking member and yourself for holding today's hearing. A great example of the strong relationship between academic institutions and the federal government is how it relates to the research that we're discussing uh with this conversation about critical menu minerals, and our hub at Duke University, which is in my district, where researchers are working to find downstream opportunities within the current critical mineral system that will help policymakers make important decisions on how to secure domestic supply chains. So, Doctor Hawley, can you speak on the importance of the relationship between academia and the federal government and how we can continue to foster it?