Brock Yordy:
Good morning and welcome to episode 138 of the Driller Newscast, your weekly update on the news stories and policy that impact the drilling industry. I'm your host Brock Yordy, and episode 138 is brought to you by Terra Sonic International. Terra Sonic International has sonic drilling dedication. They're uber-focused on developing all aspects of sonic technology, leading the industry in innovation, design, manufacturing, quality, and service after the sale. This dedication and discipline led to the TSi 150 series Sonic Drill Oscillator, which delivers the highest level of sonic drilling, power, reliability, and efficiency. The proprietary Sonic Oscillator produces up to 50,000 pounds of force at 150 hertz, along with 4,677 foot pounds of rotational torque at 62 RPM. All TSI Sonic Drill Rigs feature this proprietary Sonic oscillator providing precise and powerful performance, learn more or schedule a demonstration at www.terrasonicinternational.com. Thanks, Terra Sonic, for sponsoring the last episode of the year.
That's right, friends, drillers, industry professionals. Our final episode is packed full of sharing knowledge from Las Vegas at Groundwater Week. I want to jump right into this episode starting with a discussion on the industry with the co-founder of the Geothermal Drillers Association, Robert Meyer. Next we're going to jump into a discussion on leveling up professionalism, being a groundwater professional, being a drilling professional with Will Keyes. Next, we're going to jump over to what's going on with the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association with Jeff Hammond, what's going on with Geo Exchange, with Ryan Dougherty, and finally Mission Geo and the brand-new champion Eric Torykian. Finally, we're going to wrap up with all that we experienced in 2024. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Brock Yordy:
Hi, welcome to 2024 Groundwater Week Las Vegas. It's National Groundwater Association's big show. Lots of great things are happening today, people coming back and forth.
Lots of discussions on what 2025 is going to look like, and let's face it, we have plenty of pieces happening right now with policy that, as we get into January and February, are going to be very influential on what the industry is going to be making for decisions in geothermal drilling and geotechnical drilling, in water well, in aquifer storage management systems. All of this is happening right here now in Las Vegas at Groundwater Week. We hope to see you there. I'm going to grab some special friends of the industry and we're going to have some discussions on what's going on.
Hi, we're live at Groundwater Week 2024 and I have grabbed the co-founder of the Geothermal Drillers Association, Robert Meyer, and we're going to talk about geothermal 2025 and what it looks like for next year and the following years. I'm going to start with this: you had an article that was published in the New York Geo Driller edition magazine on where are all the projects, and it has sparked a conversation, but in reality as we've talked about ramping up and now we're changing administration, where are all the projects?
Robert Meyer:
It's a great question, and as I continue to bring that question up with various stakeholders, there's myriad reasons. I think they predominantly fall in the category of trying to do too much all at once, and so these various entities are realizing from some lessons learned on Framingham, for example, that while the idea is fantastic, the buy-in takes effort and installation doesn't necessarily need to be as complex as we initially thought, but there's also potentially value in decentralized ground source heat pump installations, so district energy management, but maybe decentralized installation. We're starting to see more discussion of those things and that allows utilities to come in a different way and be more proactive at the individual user basis. So I don't know that that particularly answers the questions, but I think that there are a lot of people that are trying to navigate if the change of administration does mean anything or not, which obviously exchange and Mission Geo are working diligently to advocate on the behalf of the industry in those regards.
However, I think that at the end of the day, as I always go back to, geothermal makes financial sense with or without subsidies. The only issue then becomes financing. And so, if the only issue is financing, then we can work with larger entities to amortize those costs for the homeowners. So it's just navigating some of these infancy-type issues within the U.S. — very important property rights discussions and state rights discussions that come up, how to get engagement at scale within these frameworks that have been established through the initial writing of the Constitution. So there's so many different layers and we're working through them one at a time, but there's also buyers that are continuing to forge ahead. No thought of the administration. Some of them didn't even know there was a tax credit for it because it makes financial sense. And so we'll continue to see that it's just people are going to shift how they market it and how they get different projects to the finish line.
Brock Yordy:
So this is a very important piece because as we talk about this as an industry, as our advocate throughout the industry in different pieces, we talk about thermal networks, we talk about large buildings, we talk about these pieces. There's a massive pie in residential and small commercial that, frankly, we have to have in order to work. And if we are at Groundwater Week, there's only 14 million private water wells in the United States. 40 million Americans drink from a private water well, but there's plenty of rural communities and urban sprawl and how do we get back to that? We're talking about this equitable access on a large scale, but we got lots of houses and lots of places that are going to need this that aren't on this millions upon millions of dollars to fund it.
Robert Meyer:
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I continue to go back to what is the core issue from a buyer perspective, and it's my opinion, the core issue is buyer education, consumer education in the middle 50% of American income earners. And those people that pretty much represent the entirety of the middle class don't understand the technology and they don't understand the benefits and they don't understand the avenues to be able to get access to it. However, that population is what's going to economize the service for the large scale application. I think that at its outset, a lot of people viewed it the other way around where these large projects were going to help to economize application at scale. But the issue is those large projects happen in city centers, but the applications that we're talking about to achieve the energy reductions that we need to see at a societal level don't live in those city centers.
And so they aren't going to be able to take advantage of the economies of scale that are shown on those large projects. And so we have to approach it from a separate perspective in my opinion, which is consumer education and providing avenues to get them financial access to it. Because let's face it, nobody has money sitting in their savings account. They say, you know what I'm going to do with that this year? I'm going to drill some geothermal holes when there's all of the uncertainty around the economy and all of this stuff. However, as the point was made last night as a society, we were getting far more comfortable with buying things as a service in perpetuity or near perpetuity, and that decreases capital cost than it gives us more buying power with the same dollars. Of course, we're paying someone for access to that service, but it also allows us to make decisions today rather than plan for a decade for 'em. And that also gives the opportunity for the utility companies to provide some advocacy and access support while still bolstering other incentives at the community level.
Brock Yordy:
So complete curveball. Right now, I could use my home equity loan or something like that to put in my ground-source geothermal system. We see from Canary Media to inside the climate news all over the place, Hey, I just got my new heat pump and then you read the article and it's air-source and I got all these incentives that I didn't have drilling it, and I think about this, why can I not finance? The loop field that's at my house is the same as my septic tank or these pieces that are long-time, they have a long lifecycle. My home in Kalamazoo is a hundred years old. Why can't I finance a geothermal system like a car?
Robert Meyer:
I think the short answer is you can, the long answer is there's education problems within the lending systems too. And so, as we talked about in New York in October, some of the funding arms and the funding vehicles are looking at the wrong criteria when they're establishing whether or not they are willing to fund these things. And because they're looking at the wrong criteria, they're arriving at, well, that doesn't really make the most sense from our perspective. That doesn't mean that it doesn't make the most sense, but they have some misinformation as well. But then I go back to this hour-long phone call that I had with a concerned homeowner a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how she got my cell phone number, but we ended up talking about heat pumps for an hour, and I came to find that over the course of the previous two months that four different contractors had come to her house offering four messages.
And so what that led to was a lot of distrust because she's like, okay, these systems aren't supposed to be that complicated. Why are there four different messages that I'm hearing? One of which was an engineer saying that ground source heat pumps aren't efficient and that the information is not true, which we know is not the case. One of them was from a heating and air contractor who is one of the only in that metro area that provides ground source heat pumps saying that, well, those are going out of style. Find that to be very interesting. And then there was two other geothermal contractors that basically walked off the job because it was confusing and it's just frustrating to hear about those things. And through that hour-long phone call, I was pretty quickly able to derive what was happening and then it was repaired the following Monday.
And it's not because I'm so smart, it's just taking a look at the variables at play and by process of elimination can figure out what's happening. But it was an expensive repair, but not as expensive as a traditional HVAC install, which was what she was about to do was just scrap the whole thing and reinvest in a traditional system after 30 years on geo. And so that doesn't make any sense. And so there's all kinds of issues on the education side. I think from the moment that I started down this path on Geothermal, I identified that at its core every problem has an education base. There's an education root cause in almost every problem that we have in the marketplace. And so we need to continue pushing ahead on educating contractors, but how are we pushing wide-scale education to buyers? Because we can't be there to educate every buyer in the United States, neither can any one driller or HVAC contractor. And the reality is that a lot of those contractors get about half an hour of FaceTime with these people to explain a lot of information when somebody says, “What even is geothermal,” and how do you explain not only why it costs so much where the value is, but even how it works so that somebody can say, “Oh, okay, I get it. I'm comfortable with having that installed in my house now.”
Brock Yordy:
So at the end of the day as we're at Groundwater Week, as in March we'll be at IGSHPA, as we've been to the New York GEO conferences, traveling a lot, talking advocation, it's that old cliche: are you doing theater for theater people, or are you doing theater for the public? We ain't doing theater for the public right now. We're all just patting each other on the back in a room where the rest the world doesn't know we exist.
Robert Meyer:
I would agree.
Brock Yordy:
It's a tough reality as we go into 2025 and we're seeing ESG programs slowly pull back on initiatives for 2030, and we're five years away from our 2030 goals. If we don't hit those, we don't hit 2050. Our planet's hotter. There's so many pieces to this side. I guess if I'm going to the homeowner, it's right here. No different than why I recycle right now or why I do the things I do.
Robert Meyer:
Yeah, I don't know. It is an interesting problem. The reality is that the 440 people in the room at NY-GEO, how are they supposed to reach 40 million?
Brock Yordy:
I mean, New York GEO has one of the best conferences that we can attend. And from Albany to Manhattan, there were champions from around the country around the world, lots of great legislation and policy-making happening. But man, when you go to a builder show, where's everybody hanging out? In the sprinkling systems, swimming pools, the hot tubs, the convection ovens...
Robert Meyer:
Yeah. Well, I mean that goes back to a core issue of the drilling industry: water wells aren't sexy. We come to these shows and talk to the contractors that are out there selling to homeowners every day, and you don't get to show off your new water well to your neighbor when you have it installed. It's like, yeah, we had to have a new well drilled last week, and it was like, oh, that sucks. Not like a pool where somebody says, oh, we had to have a pool installed last week. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. And so it's just a different thing. Whereas then there are the buyers who are educated and somebody said yesterday, oh, let me go to the basement and show you my heat pump. And that made me laugh because the buyers that are truly informed are going to be doing that.
They're going to be like, oh, come check this thing out. See those tubes? They go down into these holes that we had drilled and they're going to be excited about it. It is cool. But then it goes back to this idea of micro dirty jobs. Geothermal drilling would be awesome or heat pump installation. And then part of me wonders how much of this has a root cause in our society really discounting trades for a long time, for a lot of years, and it was no, go to college, go to college, go to college. There's no money in the trades. And I'm like, I don't know. I know some drillers that make like $200K-plus a year, so I think there might be some money in the trades.
Brock Yordy:
So let's shift gears there.
Sure, there's some money in the trades. We had this discussion yesterday afternoon where I saw a board go up that said, come be a driller, a driller assistant for $40 to $50 an hour. That is not the reality. The average pay's $21 to $22 an hour and it's dirty and it's cold and it's wet and you're expected to travel and there's a lot of pieces going on there. Whereas I drive through these same rural areas, I see these massive warehouses going up and I'm part of the problem because I love having that brown box show up on my step with the smiley on it. I mean, I even have a device that I tell it to reorder my liquid deaf water and they can go work for 28 or 30 bucks an hour, climate control, 40 hours a week, vacation, benefits, a safety program. We say nobody wants to work the trades.
We say it's hard to want this generation to work. And at the same time, I have a choice between a clean, safe, reliable job that I'm sure is even sexier. What do I do? I work in this massive warehouse and I'm part of everyday life versus water is life or geothermal is saving our planet. But at the same time, I had went to the publisher of the The Driller who I'm married to, Chelsea, and said, Hey, I'm a helper. Can we go on a date? Probably not.
Robert Meyer:
Well, but it's funny because somebody said, well, it's not like you can control a drill rig from an Xbox controller. And I'm sitting in the back and I'm like, Yet. It would be cool if we could though, and I'm not saying that we need to be sitting in our living room operating a rig that's a hundred miles away, but can we separate ourselves to get out of the line of fire? Can we separate ourselves to get out of the rain so that the crew isn't like, well, it rained three inches on me today. Working out in that is not fun. Certainly degrades safety depending on how your site is set up. And so there are things that we need to do infrastructurally as to how drill rigs are made, manufactured and people are trained on 'em. Roger Skillings, I think yesterday said, we need to stop trying to change people to fit us and we need to change us to fit the next generation. And it was really impressive to me to hear that from him, having been in the industry for as many decades as he has been in this industry, to be at the front of the class saying, no, we need to stop. We need to stop trying to make everybody fit us and start trying to fit them. And I think that that is a point of wisdom in every generation. We've gone through that. I was watching a video this morning of an ironworker on the Empire State Building Hopp and skipping and jumping around at 50 stories with zero fall protection.
You couldn't pay anybody to do that today. They'd say, you can't give me enough money to do that. And so then the industry changed both as a result of learning the hard way, but then as a result of workers becoming educated to say, no, I'm not going to do that. Thank you. And so I think that to a certain extent we have to continue to morph as an industry, and you're seeing it here at the show with these rigs that are incorporating more technology. And I saw something that I've been asking for years, and on a digital display readout on one of these rigs, you have your mud outbound flow in gallons per minute, and then you have your rotational head rotation speed in RPM, both on a digital readout on the rig. It doesn't seem to me with all the industrial process equipment that we have at our fingertips that that should be that difficult.
I don't think it should take five years for that to come to fruition, but we are finally starting to see some of that stuff, which not only helps people to not have to. Well, if you really want to be a good driller, you got to learn how to listen and figure out what's going on and be able to look at the flow coming out of the hole and know exactly what's going on. Yes. But there are also tools that can make that a little bit easier. And so there's so many prongs to how to resolve it, but I think it all starts with how can we make it a little bit easier, a little bit safer, a little bit less backbreaking and help people from getting caught up in a drive shaft on a 1976 speed store. What can we do to just change things a little bit at a time to make it a little bit more of an amenable job?
Brock Yordy:
I think that's perfect. Well said. I know you're busy. We have outside of The Driller and contributing lots of things going on and I appreciate your insight on this. And any advice for anybody that's not here at the conference right now, why they shouldn't be here?
Robert Meyer:
Well, I wrote an article about continuing education. I think continuing education is critically important. I think staying connected to the industry, seeing the incremental changes that are coming, and every one of these manufacturers that are making these incremental changes would also be very interesting. How do I take that change from this 2025 model year rig and put it on my 2015 model year rig? They want to figure out those problems too. And so this is the place where those things happen. And outside of education, outside of staying connected with our peers in the industry, even if all that you do here is figure out what new stuff people are working on, there is more new stuff at this show than I've seen at any groundwater show I've ever attended. There's more interactive displays than at any groundwater show I've ever attended. I saw a pump running, there's a tank of water and the pump is running, the centerline pump is running, and that's just cool.
I like mechanical stuff. But the show is getting to be a lot more interactive and not just, oh yeah, that's a pump sitting over there in the corner, and there's families here and there's people explaining to their kids, oh, this is how this works and this is go over to this rig and this is how that works. And all of this works together, but there's interactive displays that help them explain all of it to their families, who really, some of them know very well, but some of them just have no idea. What does it mean when you go to work as a driller? All you do is you leave and it's early, you come back, you're real dirty and real tired of what happens in between. And so it's kind of cool to see all of this interactive stuff. It's really impressive. But anyway, outside of all of that, come here and learn something.
Brock Yordy:
Yeah, thanks man.
Robert Meyer:
Thanks.
Brock Yordy:
Hi, this is Brock Yordy live at the second day of Groundwater Week and just happened to have a chance to grab Jim, who is president, all of the South Atlantic Drilling Jubilee, which will be happening again in 2025. And as right now we're at Groundwater Week, we're wrapping up the year we're thinking about these things. We might as well start thinking about where are we going to professionally develop, get our CEUs, have a great time, do a picnic, be on the beach, take the family, but in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. So what do you got planned this year, Jim?
Jim McClain:
Well, it's our 70th anniversary, platinum anniversary, and I happen to have one of those this year also. So it's even more special since we're both 70. I don't remember much about 1954 Myrtle Beach, but a lot of people do. They've been coming there for years. And if you miss it, it's your own fault because everybody that goes has a great time and they recommend it. We see the same people over and over. If we weren't doing it right, we wouldn't be seeing these same people. So I'd like to welcome you and invite you to our 70th anniversary at Myrtle Beach, July 26th to the 28th, the South Atlantic Jubilee. We'd love to have you there.
Brock Yordy:
Thanks, Jim.
Jim McClain:
Great.
Brock Yordy:
I had to grab this guy as he was walking past our booth. I just pulled him in here. We slapped a mic on him and said, dang it, we need to share some knowledge. And that's because he's one of my favorite industry colleagues and friends, Will Keyes. You'll remember him from some old-school driller knowledge sharing that we did a couple years ago, and you were talking about leadership and running a crew and finding zen on jobs and taking jogs when you're out of town, having comradery. And from there, you started teaching a lot on Sonic.
Will Keyes:
That's right.
Brock Yordy:
I saw you many places. Now you're with Terra Sonic.
Will Keyes:
Correct. Yep.
Brock Yordy:
And let's talk about this industry. What's going on? What is your 2025 goal for our next generation? What do we need to do in this industry?
Will Keyes:
So what we're looking for is to elevate the industry as a whole. Bring it up. We're now groundwater professionals. We used to be well diggers, then we were well drillers, then we were drillers, then we were professional drillers. And now 2025, we are groundwater professionals. We have to have professional licenses just like an engineer, just like a professional geologist. We have to act like professionals. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the company that you work for. It's going to elevate the company beside you because they're going to have to compete with your level of professionalism and together through companies, comradery and associations like the National Drilling Association, Geothermal Drilling Association, we're going to elevate the industry in 2025. That's what we're working on.
Brock Yordy:
So it's unique how we say we compete by having professional credentials. But let's face it, no different than our first discussion on sharing knowledge and teaching, what the National Drilling Association's up to, what Terra Sonic's up to with the drill schools is, we have been a tribal knowledge industry. Everything's field experience. We have books, but &mdasg; When those books are handed to us, when we first got into this industry, that was like 20 years ago.
Will Keyes:
Brock, when's the last time you took a test on a cable tool? Last year? Because it's still in our tests. But where's the test on sonic drilling? So we have to rewrite the script, and that's what we're here to do. We're going to elevate it. There are new methods, there are old methods that can't be forgotten because that's where we came from.
Brock Yordy:
We can't forget our roots. And growing up, you are already in some well drilling sand and gravel drift, 60-foot wells. I could go in with that 36 cyclones and have a well done in two hours fully developed that will last 30 years. A galvanized steel. Well, but Sonic, and since you brought up cable tooling, will I have seen this crazy correlation between cable toolers and Sonic, like these cable tool drillers adopt Sonic, like we talk about, they skipped Mud Rotary, they skipped conventional. How?
Will Keyes:
Because they understand. They understand the principle and the importance of casing advancement and overburdening. There is no straighter hole than a cased hole. There is no straighter hole than a cable tool hole other than a sonic hole. And we have the white papers on that. Did we just name it wrong? We have the white papers on it. Well, the cable tool rig was the tool of choice at one time. Sonic is the future. Less than 1% deviation up to 800. We've got the white papers. We've seen it. You've seen it. We know where the future's going. We just have to elevate the industry and educate, educate, educate. That's why we do the courses. That's why we do the classes. That's why we do the training.
Brock Yordy:
But it's this newfangled technology, right?
Will Keyes:
Yeah. Well, it's not new, right? As you're going to learn. I'm joking. I know. As you're going to learn, how old is it? You're going to learn tomorrow. I'm not going to give it out. Actually, I am. I am. Because I want to see who's listening. 1913 is when Sonic Drilling was invented. So when somebody says it's newfangled technology, 1913 is the answer.
Brock Yordy:
What's ironic about that? Spindletop, 1901, Lucas Oil well - that's conventional mud Rotary with a huge bicone bit. So if you think about conventional mud rotary, you start thinking about sonic being 1913, you start looking at advancements, and I do a class on history of drilling, but that's like, at 1913, Howard Hughes hadn't quite dialed in the tricone bit. That became Hughes Industries. That becomes Baker Hughes. And so when you start looking at the opportunities or how we've advanced as professionals sharing our knowledge, we can take technology adoption and acceptance beyond.
Will Keyes:
Yep. And that's what we're going to do. And that's the goals for 2025. What are your goals for 2025?
Brock Yordy:
Project? Buy a boat, name it the drill. Float off into the sunset and have everybody go, where's that Brock at? No, I'm kidding. 2025 documentation sharing knowledge, enabling everybody to share knowledge because we have this stigma that you had to be on that first 1913 sonic drill to be knowledgeable enough to teach. You don't have to wait until the last five years of your career. The cool thing is right now, this is a bunch of the youngest of Gen X and the oldest of millennials in this industry that now we've been here 25 years in the professional sector. We have knowledge to share and we want to grab more young individuals. I want to be the middle aged guy for a little bit because I feel like I've been the kid forever and I'm suddenly going to be the old man. Average age of our industry right now is 58. You look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's more like 61, 62, 20, 30 goals for net zero. That's five years away, but those lead into 2050 goals. 2050, I'm going to be 70 and I better have that boat called the drill. It better be electric and air driven. And I'm gone.
Thank you for letting me, you interviewed me for a minute.
Will Keyes:
That’s right. I love that. Hey, we see each other enough to know we've both got event when we get the chance. Yeah. 2025 is the year. It is. It's the year. It's the year of advancement in the drilling industry. It's the year of raising the bar for professionalism. Heck yeah. Thanks for having me, Brock.
Brock Yordy:
Thank you. Hi, this is Brock Yordy live at Groundwater Week day two and walking around, and we have our friends with IGSHPA, Geo Exchange and the new initiative Mission Geo with us. And not that they're too busy doing all these other great things, but they're here and we're supporting the Groundwater Association and everything that's going on. We got great geothermal classes going on, but we also have this great conference coming up in March and we all need to be there. And I just wanted to ask Eric, as your first time at NGWA, what do you think of the conference?
Eric Torykian:
It's amazing. I am soaking up all of the market knowledge and the wisdom from the people that have worked in this industry for decades. They're a wealth of information. How about the equipment? The equipment is amazing. I feel like I'm a little kid. If I could actually just get that stuff out into the parking lot and have some fun with it, it would be a blast.
Brock Yordy:
Hey, I think Eric's asking us if we could drill a hole at where are we going to be for expo?
Jeff Hammond:
We're going to be in Champaign, Illinois at the I Hotel on the University of Illinois campus, and we will have equipment outdoors, so maybe Eric can get his hand on.
Eric Torykian:
How about a training class, Brock?
Brock Yordy:
Yeah, it would be fantastic. Alright, so we also have Ryan here. And Ryan has been busy in DC and this is the importance of the community of the industry and everything we're doing right now, being connected as groundwater professionals, geothermal professionals, geotechnical professionals, getting into the HVAC side of this, Ryan, how has DC been right now?
Ryan Dougherty:
It’s been great. And something I love about going to Washington and talking to our elected officials is the energy and excitement in this room, in this industry. We've got a story to tell, a great story about American ingenuity, about craftsmanship, about skilled engineering and a great economic story. So I'm out there all the time promoting that and it really gets their attention and gets them excited.
Brock Yordy:
Jeff, what are you excited about for 2025?
Jeff Hammond:
2025, we have all new training programs being announced as well as a lot of industry tools, new services. We had a new membership program this year that I think will really come up to life in 2025. Mission Geo is part of the initiative, so I could go on, but that's a lot.
Brock Yordy:
Quick plug for Mission Geo, what are you up to? What is Mission Geo?
Eric Torykian:
Mission Geo is an initiative born out of Geo Exchange and we're the outreach and advocacy initiative. First it's awareness, then it turns into an adoption campaign, right? And so it's layered with workforce development, policy and advocacy, standardizing terms for the industry. So we've got a lot ahead of us where we call it the triad or the three legs of the stool. Workforce development and standards, policy and advocacy and marketing and outreach.
Brock Yordy:
Who's having the most bond in this tryout?
Jeff Hammond:
I am. Depends on your challenges, I guess.
Brock Yordy:
I would say right now in this industry as we're looking at our 2030 goals, and yes, 2025, it's a big year for us. We're starting the second quarter of the 21st century.
Eric Torykian:
I hadn't thought about it
Brock Yordy:
Like that in a while, but the clock is ticking our 2030 goals for net zero. If you're a driller, if you're a professional, you're thinking about what's the best industry to diversify into right now? Putting ground source, geothermal holes in looking at dynamic closed loop, looking at our traditional pump and dump systems. You got a drill rig. We need drillers, right, guys?
Eric Torykian:
Absolutely.
Ryan Dougherty:
Hundred percent. Building decarbonization the electrification of homes and businesses around the country. It's a trend that's not going away DC It's a wild west in a lot of ways. Politicians come and go, but there are certain trends that are here to stay and geothermal is a rising star in so many ways, and we need as many people as possible to get involved so we can really deliver this amazing technology to American homes and businesses.
Brock Yordy:
You bookended it perfectly. Thank you guys for your time today.
That's a wrap, everybody. 2024 is in the can and it has been one heck of a ride for the Newscast and The Driller team and the entire drilling and construction industry. We started in January at episode 91, and we're ending right here, December 20th at episode 1 38. That's 47 newscasts that we've had this year all around 30 minutes.
I want you to think about the dedication we've had to staying up to date on the news and stories that are impacting our industry. As we've seen California, Arizona, and Nevada reduce the amount of acre-feet they pull from the Colorado River, we've watched Texas sue New Mexico over water being pulled out of groundwater wells at the Rio Grande that was impacting citrus farmers in the Texas Valley. We've seen a myriad of PFAS lawsuits one and others stopped.
We experienced an election that will completely shift our priorities as it comes to our country for construction for the better. And many when it comes to PFAS and water quality standards could be for the worst. We have to be the champions that are advocating for that. I want to thank everybody who has come on the Newscast this year. I want to thank The Driller team from Harrison, our video production guru to our publisher Chelsea Yordy, our editor Johnny, who just joined us to the entire production team that is helping us day in and day out, put these newscasts together as we've advocated for better workforce development in safety. Want you right now to take a moment and pause and think about your safety policy and what's all happened this year and how are we going to do better in 2025? Because this is the final piece of knowledge I want to drop.
We're wrapping the first quarter of the 21st century when we all see each other again in January, 2025. It'll be the beginning of the second quarter, and we have a lot of work to do. 21st century came in like a lion and is going out like a lion. And we got water quality in environments and sustainable energy and drilling upon. Drilling upon drilling that we need to get done as drilling professionals. So from all of us at The Driller team and the contributing writers and everybody that shares knowledge through the community, that is www.thedriller.com.
I want to wish you the happiest of holidays. Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and let's get back to work on January 2nd with just an entire bowl of fire in our stomach, ready to provide as many ground-source heat loopholes or dynamic wells or water wells or geotechnical investigations, monitoring wells, defining those PFAS and Gen X and other chemicals, all the things that progress civilization. Start with a hole in the ground and let's be damn proud that we're getting to do it. Be safe. Have a wonderful holiday. Take time, take a breath, hug your family. Happy New Year. We got a big 2025 ahead of us. Cheers everybody.
