Good morning. Welcome to episode 129 of the Driller Newscast, a weekly update on the news and stories impacting drilling, construction, water, and geothermal industry. I'm your host, Brock Yordy. 

We're going to jump right into a feature this week with the co-founder of the Geothermal Drillers Association, Robert Meyer, also president of Thermex Geothermal. He's going to talk with the students that recently graduated from the pilot geothermal drilling tutorial in Boston, MA that was run by HEET in collaboration with IGSHPA and the Geothermal Drillers Association. 

These young men and women had significant questions, and Robert had some great advice and insight. As I was going back and reviewing this, I felt we got to talk about this industry. We need to hear Robert's words and continue to champion his thoughts and processes as we move forward. These students right now are actively looking for jobs as geothermal field technicians; field technicians are definitely not helpers because we are developing more than just helpers. So we're going to jump right into this. Thank you so much, Robert. It was wonderful the amount of time, knowledge, and advice you dropped. I hope you all enjoy as much as we did listening to Robert. 

Interview with Robert Meyer and the Pilot Geothermal Drilling Tutorial Cohort  

Brock Yordy

Geothermal is much bigger than just heating and cooling homes, right?

Robert Meyer 

The opportunities for the technologies used for heat collection and rejection in HVAC is boundless. There are so many. What I think about is when I was a kid, I was driving down the California coast with my dad, and we crested Pomona; if anybody knows where that is, its north of LA, and you can see the whole LA basin from Pomona. And the smog was horrible. The climate changes as you crest that hill and go into the LA basin. And why is that? It's not as much to do with exhaust and all of these things, but it's a heat island like so many metro areas are. And so the opportunities to take this heat and move it to other places in a more controlled way than just strict reflection and radiation back into the airspace, there are so many things that people are working on at so many different levels, and the opportunities within this space are boundless. 

And so what I find interesting is that most people in our industry, Brock, view geothermal as an industry with this lens that's this big, and they're not really seeing all of the things that are happening on the outside. All of the different ways that technology is being used to improve, even just the loops that we use. There's been no improvements in the loops that we use since 1972. There's been some different manufacturers and some changes in designs, loops and different thicknesses and all of that stuff, but nobody's really enhanced it -  it's still HDPE, tubing D nine or DR 11, HDPE tubing. Nothing really changed, but there are things that are changing there, and there are things that are changing with the grouts that are being used. Brock is working on a project right now with the US government on other grouts that are more effective. And so there's so many things that are happening that allow us the opportunity. The way I have described it to many people that I'm working with on this is re-envision or reimagine. 

I love it. I love when people say, “You can't do that. That can't be done”. Okay, deal! I'll show you. I love that. And I've done it time and time again in the environmental, clean water, and geotech spaces, and now I'm going to do it in geothermal.  

I was talking to Brock about a rig, what Tuesday? 

And I said, “Somebody told me I can't do this. And I said, ‘No, I can.’”  

They said, “That rig is limited to 300 feet”. 

And I said, “I could easily go to 900 feet, probably deeper.” 

I don't need to tell 'em how I'm going to do it, but I'll show 'em. And so I think there's so much opportunity to reimagine how we think about the built environment and the things that we can do with heat. And this isn't like a, I don't approach this from a strict environmentalism perspective - sustainability and renewability, at the end of the day, if it's not profitable, it's never going to work. Because the government cannot fund everything. And so what we need to do is find solutions that are profitable because once it becomes profitable to be sustainable, then everybody's on board. And there's a reason that sustainability has fallen into this category of a four-letter word: oh, that's just government, overreach, and all of this stuff. People don't see how it can be profitable. And they say it's just an expense, but the reality is that it's an investment. And so if we start really thinking about all of the different ways that it's an investment and all of the different returns, there's real business returns, but then there's also community returns. 

And then from the perspective of the building that you're sitting in right now if the owner can achieve not only a fiscal return on investment but then also a PR return on investment on top of it, they're like, “Yeah, let's go finance it. Let's go get it funded.” Sorry, but no person is like, “Oh, you're a landlord. That's awesome. I want to do that when I grow up”. That's not a thing that happens.  

So you start finding ways to save building owners money because there are already all these other things that are costing them money. And then you allow them to say, "You know what? Here's the community benefit, and here's what we're going to do to give back to the community." When you can make community benefits profitable, everybody wins.

Brock Yordy 

So we've went high level and we've zoomed way out. You said you started as a helper. I believe you had already met your wife at that point, so you didn't have to play up the sexiness of, I get to be a helper. But can you talk about lessons learned, roles and responsibilities? What can make you the best field technician to get to the point of being an assistant driller or driller or eventually owning a company like Thermex Geothermal? So I know we got a big track there, but just start with that. How did you end up in drilling and where you are today? 

Robert Meyer 

Number one is that I've had periods in my life of saying yes and saying no. And I think an important part, entering any industry, is a willingness to say yes. A willingness to take a little bit of risk, a willingness to venture into the unknown a little bit, and allow yourself to be in a situation that you've not been in before because you know that at the end of the day, you're going to learn something. So I think that there has to be a willingness to say yes, not blindly, right? Blindly saying yes puts us in dangerous situations, but being in a position to say, “Yeah, I'll try that. I'll go over there and I'll help those people out and I'll see what I can learn”. And then along the way, while you're there, ask questions. I think that I annoyed a lot of people when I started because I was asking questions that were deemed to be stupid. I was told, “That's a dumb question”. And I said, “that's great. I still don't know the answer. Help me.” 

And I think that I annoyed some people along the way and I just, okay, well, from my perspective, if I don't ask the dumb questions, I'm never going to learn. So I don't really care if they think it's dumb. And ultimately, those people found their way out because they weren't a good fit for the industry. THEY weren't a good fit for the company. And that provided me opportunities. And along the way, because I was persistent about asking my questions, I didn't have to start from ground zero to figure out how to take over their position. 

I think another thing is identifying if you're in a healthy company, and by healthy company, I don't mean financially healthy. I mean, is this a place where I can grow? Is this a place where somebody is going to want to teach me or am I merely here to hold a shovel? If I'm just here to hold a shovel, that's not a place I want to be because that's not me. I have grander visions for my life than just being a laborer for the rest of it. That's not to say that if you find a good company and you, you're a laborer and you're a laborer for 30 years, more power to you, whatever works for you and your family. I’m not speaking poorly about that, but is there an opportunity if I want to ask questions and grow? 

And then the other thing is being willing to be honest with yourself. And when I say that at various points in our careers, we get topped out or we get stagnant. And it's not necessarily because the company is bad or because the people you're working with are bad. It's just there are certain capacity constraints that any company and any team have. And some of them are driven by time. Some of them are driven by money, some of them are driven by opportunity. It doesn't matter. Sometimes we just need to take a step back and be like, “Okay, now I know where I want to go. Is that really possible here?” -Regardless of what anyone will tell you, because people hate change. So most of the time if I go to my boss and I say, “Here's what I want to do”, they're going to say a lot of different things to try to craft this plan to align with what I want to do, but I have to be willing to be honest with myself. And is that actually possible at this company in this position? Or is somebody making promises that they just honestly can't keep and they really want to keep me because they don't want to have to backfill my position.  

If I leave, it's okay. It's okay to be honest with ourselves because at the end of the day, the only person who is the most worried about us and our career is right here. It's the person sitting in that chair that is the only one who is going to be number one, worried about your career. That's the only one that's going to be number one, worried about your life and your potential. It's you. Now, I love everybody that I work with and I want to set everybody up for success, but I'm not going to get into everybody's head and drive their bus for them. They got to drive their own bus. Tell me what you need from me to get to where you want to go. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to drive your own bus. 

And so really just the willingness to be honest with myself about where I want to go, what I want do, who I want to surround myself with so that I can achieve what I want to achieve for myself and for my family.

Brock Yordy 

What are your roles and responsibilities and what are the expectations as a boss of that employee for that first month?

Robert Meyer 

I don't like to hire helpers. I want to hire people that want to do more. I want to hire somebody that wants to learn how to run a rig. I want to hire somebody that sees the vision, shares my vision. And so for that reason, there's only drillers and assistant drillers at Talon. There's no technicians. There's no laborers. There's no helpers. 

All right, I'm ready for questions. 

Jesse

Hi, my name's Jesse. I just have a quick question. What's the most difficult aspect of becoming a driller?  

Robert Meyer

Being a driller is a mental game. I can teach anybody to pull levers. Common question that I have for people that apply and interview as drillers is, “Are you a driller or are you a lever puller?”

A driller will get highly offended by that question. So I know immediately where they fall within that. I got a response from a guy and he said, “Right now I'm a lever puller”. And I was like, that's a new one - that is a new answer. But that's vulnerability to say, “I know how to run the rig, but I do not feel qualified to call myself a driller”. So that was a degree of vulnerability and self-awareness and that that was the first time that happened, and that's a person I want to work with!  

But the biggest challenge is there's some weird stuff that happens down hole. There's just some weird stuff! It's easy to say, I did something wrong that has led to this outcome, and maybe you did, maybe you didn't, but it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, the problem is what it is right now. Not whatever decision happened 10 or 15 minutes ago to lead us to here. And so we need to toss all of that stuff away and work on what is in front of us assessing the facts that are in front of us and making a decision. And so to answer your question about the hardest aspect, the hardest aspect is getting out of your own way to identify what the facts are, process of elimination of what could be occurring, narrow it down to a couple of things and start running tests. When I think about drilling problems, it's very similar to when we go back to elementary science class and we're first learning about the scientific method - develop a hypothesis, and then you start testing this hypothesis to reach a conclusion. You do the same thing in drilling all the time. 

There was an example just last week on a site in New Mexico, I had a crew drilling a boring to 105 feet. They drilled to 105 feet, no issues. They turned the air off. All of a sudden some weird stuff started happening. We started getting returns coming back up the hole 15 minutes after we turned the compressor off. But that driller, he took a minute to say, wow, this is weird. And then stopped and he said, here are the things that I think could be happening. And we talked through it and we devise the plan and move forward, and ultimately we finished the hole. 

And so again, it just, how do I get out of my own head? How do I get out of my own way so I'm not the guy that says, “This isn't going according to the plan that I had this morning. And now I'm going to throw my hard hat and I'm going to throw my pipe wrench and I'm just going to stomp angrily like a child around the site because my plan isn't working”. That's the biggest challenge.

Briezenny

How was your transition from driller to CEO? What did you have to sacrifice in order to get there?

Robert Meyer 

Well, so it's interesting. It wasn't quite so simple, right? So when I first made a transition from the field to the office, when we're talking about drilling, we often talk about the office. So you have field operations, and you have the office. The office is your overhead staff, management, sales, whatever. When I first made that transition, I was moving from, we'll call it a driller, it's a little bit more complicated, but we'll just say driller to operations management - operations manager. When I was the operations manager, I was actually a driller, a helper, a mechanic, fleet manager, and HR manager. I was all of these things. And then I was working 80 hours a week. It was ridiculous! It was not sustainable. Good thing I was 24 because I could not do that today. I just couldn't. 

What allowed me to do that was to prioritize. My priority was operations manager, which means everything else went down the list, and I started delegating, figuring out how to cut these other things off the bottom, and as I cut them off the bottom, it allowed me to be a better operations manager. And then, after that, I moved into what we'll call general manager, meaning I ran the office completely. 

There are some differences between operations and general manager, but again, when I was a general manager, I had a transition phase. I was the GM, so I was worried about the financial performance of the office company. But then I was also worried about making sure that operationally we had everything that we needed. But my priority, my title was general manager, so that had to be first. And then I had to start cutting off the bottom these other tasks and train people to do them and get them off of me. 

And then after that, I went back into project management for a while because I was just burnt out on the financial management stuff, and I wanted to just do projects. And that allowed me to get back to this place of being able to learn because when I was just managing, I was no longer learning anything about drilling. I was hardly ever even on a drilling site, and that wasn't a place I liked to be at that time. 

And then after that, I went back into a general management role, and I approached it differently that time because I started training people to do my general management tasks. When you're talking about business management, there are two major functions - people are either working in the business or they are working on the business. When you're working in the business, you're worried about the day-to-day, functionality of the business - getting proposals out, getting invoices out, getting paid, talking to clients, those types of things.

When you're working on the business, you're improving the processes that allow the business to function. You're improving the staff that do the work every day. You are up and out seeing what opportunities are on the horizon, those types of things. Once I started doing that, that allowed me the opportunity to start Thermex. Now at Thermex I am general manager, operations manager, business development, HR, all of it. But now I'm going back to what I did before, which is, okay, what do I need to do? I need to be the president, which means I need to work on the business, so I need to find people to work in the business. And so I have found an operations person that I am going to hire before the end of the year. It's a guy that has worked for me off and on for more than a decade, and that will allow me to continue working on the business and not have to work in it. 

Julian 

What would you say the three most important skills to becoming a driller?

Robert Meyer 

I don't think it's skills. I think it’s traits that are more important than skills. I mean, that's going back to some of the things that I was talking about earlier. Successful drillers all have different skills, but they all have similar traits. Really work on critical thinking. I guess that's a skill, right? We'll call that a skill. Critical thinking and exercising your brain to solve problems with an open mind. I think that critical thinking is often degraded to be something that it's not. But really critical thinking is a willingness and ability to see parts of problems that are not immediately obvious or to read something and gain a message that's not on the paper. 

So critical thinking is a willingness to put yourself into challenging situations with a group of people not knowing where you're going to end up. I don't know how to say that in a more concise way, but one of the things that I do outside of work is a lot of work with dogs in protection sports, and that involves a lot of dog biting and things like that, that are normally violent activities. That is some of the most mentally challenging work because you have to make decisions at the snap of a finger, and a dog is paying attention to you and nobody else. And so it really makes you work through problems really quickly. Probably the most mentally challenging thing I've ever done is to work with dogs. That helps me keep my brain going, but then also challenges my critical thinking and open mind to say, “What am I not seeing here? What am I adding to this problem?” Usually when you're training a dog, it's not the dog that's the problem, it's the person. So dog trainers aren't dog trainers, they're people trainers. 

But anyway, same thing applies with drilling. Normally the rig is a machine. The problem is normally not with the rig, it's with the person pulling all those levers on the control panel. That's where the problem is. So a willingness to be vulnerable and self-aware, challenge your own thinking, what am I doing that I can do differently? And that comes with some humility. 

And so the last thing is time. I think that a lot of people want to rush onto this step. A lot of people want to rush onto the control panel, and you can do that, but the faster you rush, the more you're just going to be a lever puller. And it's not meant to be demeaning, but there are certain things that just take time to hone.  

When I first started, I rushed to get on the step. I was young and motivated, and I knew better than everybody else, and I got myself into some problems doing that. I'll be the first one to tell you. And so it took time for me to find the humility, to be able to recognize that that problem, that was my own creation, and it was because I was unwilling to listen to anybody else. And so that just comes with time. There's no way around it. When we're kids and we're yelling at our parents because I know better than you and you're wrong and whatever, and they just sit back and they say, okay, because I'm not going to fix this right now. The only way this is going to be fixed is by letting you go mess it up and learn the hard way. 

So we have to kind of suffer through some of those things, some hard lessons or watching other people make poor decisions. And it all just comes down to time and willingness to just ask questions. One of my favorite questions for people is, tell me about your most challenging project, because I learned a lot of experience without having to learn the hard way by saying, “Tell me about your most challenging project”. And that easily turns into an hour-and-a-half or two-hour long discussion of them telling me what they learned. The problem was, what were you putting into it?  

Anybody that's worth anything in the drilling business has some self-awareness and willingness to be open and say, “Yeah, I was pushing this crew way too hard given the constraints that they had and that was causing them to take shortcuts, and that resulted in these things”. So it all just comes back down to time, time to learn. And it's okay to sit back in the role that you're at right now and just learn.

Ci

I want to know what the process is for state-to-state jobs. How do you operate on state-to-state jobs? 

Robert Meyer 

I want to make sure that I understand the question. Are you asking about a specific occupation, with a specific company, or moving between two companies in between two different states?

Ci

Staying in one state but expanding into another state. 

Robert Meyer 

So there's a couple of issues that depend on what you do. If you are not a driller, then it's easier. Once you become a driller, then it becomes more difficult, and more difficult, and more difficult because there is several different, we'll call them regimes. There's several different licensing regimes that are used for drilling in the United States. 

For California, New Mexico, Georgia, and several others, there is a license holder at a company. That company is a licensed well drilling company, and now anyone that is employed by that company, that is technically competent, as deemed by the license holder can operate a drill rig and drill wells in that state. There are other states, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, some others, South Carolina where the individual is the license holder. So you have to individually be licensed to operate in that state. Massachusetts is one of them. Now, in Massachusetts, you can have multiple drill rigs operating on a site under one license holder, but that license holder has to be on site. In Washington, every person, every driller has to have a license or they have to have a driller sitting on the rig overseeing the person on the controls. And so it really kind of depends on what your role is and what your goal is and all of those things. There's also some states that have reciprocity agreements. 

One of the things that Brock and I are working on is trying to simplify all of this. It's crazy when you zoom out and you look at all 50 states, if you tried to group different states and their licensing practices together, it's nearly impossible because they're all different. There's a group of 14 that fall into one group, and then everybody else is on their own program, so it is a challenge. I took a test yesterday for my Georgia license. I was in and out in three minutes. The lady at the test center was like, are you sure you're done? I was like, yeah, I've done this once or twice because I'm a licensed holder in six states, and so there's a lot of tests that I've taken. You can't throw a drilling test in front of me that I don't know what the answers are at this point, just through repetition.  

But answering your question just depends. You got to identify which states why, what it costs, because then you have insurance and bonding requirements. We haven't talked about bonds at all. Bonds are a challenge, and it's basically getting someone to give you a line of credit for anywhere from 10 to $50,000 that's just sitting that you've signed saying, yep, this insurance company thinks I'm worth this $50,000 and you got to turn that into the state to get your license.

Brock Yordy 

So if there's an incident or something, the state can go after that bond for what you've done, so you have more stakes than, “oops, I screwed up. I guess my license gets revoked”. 

Alright, dude, I know you gotta roll. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for taking your time to talk with us.

Robert Meyer 

All right, well, I appreciate the time. Yep, thank you! 

Thank you for joining us for episode 129 of the Driller Newscast. Next week we're back 100% into the news. There's a ton of news going on with the San Joaquin Valley, with a court case involving over pumping of the aquifers and the courts siding with the farmers saying they should be able to pump what they need. We’ve got a lot more to talk about with thermal networks and PFOS. There's so much coming out right now, and let's face it, we are 30 days just a little over until election day, and we need to start thinking about those champions again. 

We’ve got great new professionals entering this industry every day. The construction industry is hiring 35,000 new workers a month right now. This is a great time to be in drilling, to be in construction, drilling, water well drilling, geothermal drilling, and environmental investigation. We're going to have some great things coming out of the NDA on next week's episode. There's so much going on, but Robert, thank you so much. Stacy, thank you. Angie, Zeyneb, Andrew, and all of these great students will have the graduation ceremony out in its own standalone video. We have all these great emerging drillers entering the industry and wanting to develop. It's a great time to be in this industry. 

Cheers, everybody.