Sage Geosystems Raises $17MM in Funding for Geothermal Facility

Houston-based Sage Geosystems has raised $17 million in Series A funding, which will finance the company’s three-megawatt (MW) commercial geopressured geothermal facility (GGS) facility to be constructed in Texas.

The funding was led by Chesapeake Energy Corporation and joined by technology investor Arch Meredith, Helium-3 Ventures, with continued support from existing investors Virya, LLC, Nabors Industries Ltd., and Ignis Energy Inc., according to a recent news release from Sage Geosystems.

The commercial facility, called EarthStore, will use the company’s technology that harvests energy from pressurized water stored deep underground. The facility will be able to store energy for short and long duration periods and can be paired with intermittent renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, to provide baseload, dispatchable power, and inertia to the electric grid, Sage Geosystems said.

The facility will start construction in the second quarter and is targeted to be commissioned in the fourth quarter. Sage Geosystems said the exact location of the facility “will be announced soon”.

“The first close of our Series A funding and our commercial facility are significant milestones in our mission to make Geopressured Geothermal System (GGS) technologies a reality”, Sage Geosystems CEO Cindy Taff said. “The success of our GGS technologies is not only critical to Sage Geosystems becoming post-revenue, but it is an essential step in accelerating the development of this proprietary geothermal baseload approach. This progress would not be possible without the ongoing support from our existing investors, and we look forward to continuing this work with our new investors”.

In 2023, Sage Geosystems said it successfully demonstrated the EarthStore system in a full-scale commercial pilot project in Texas. The pilot produced 200 kilowatts for more than 18 hours and one MW for 30 minutes, generating electricity with Pelton turbines to run equipment on location. The system has a round-trip efficiency of 70-75 percent and water losses of less than two percent, the company said.

The results also showed that, based on levelized cost of storage, the technology can provide power at a cost that is lower than lithium-ion battery storage and traditional pumped storage hydro. It is competitive with natural gas peaker plants, “providing a cleaner option for providing ancillary services, black start services, and/or redistributing curtailed energy during peak demand periods”, the company noted.

“We have cracked the code to provide the perfect complement to renewable energy, yielding reliable alternative baseload in a manner that is cost competitive with lithium-ion batteries and natural gas peaker plants”, Taff said in an earlier statement. “The opportunities for our energy storage to provide power are significant – from remote mining operations to data centers to solving energy poverty in remote locations. We can interconnect with power grids or develop island/microgrids with a cleaner energy solution that is proven and ready to scale”.

Sage Geosystems was founded in 2020. According to the release, it is the first company to demonstrate the ability to deliver cost-effective and commercially viable new generation geothermal with its proprietary GGS design. The Sage Geosystems team has over 150 combined years in the oil and gas industry, with experience delivering major projects including deepwater, Arctic, and unconventional shales.

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