Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

0:00 I got a couple of my friends on the podcast today from Conduit Power. We got Ben and Travis, my guys, what's going on? Travis, they've known each other for a few years now. Yeah. So it's 2020.

0:12 Yeah. Yeah. I think we were both getting started on different ventures at the same time. Yours, yours took off. Yeah. Well, that's what's funny is like when we actually met, you know, we're

0:20 just working on completely different things and what we're doing now. And so it's been kind of funny to see that come. But fun journey. I love fellow travelers in the entrepreneur space Yeah,

0:30 absolutely. So I appreciate you guys coming on conduit power. Just real quick, give me the two minute pitch on what you guys are. So we take stranded flared gas and convert it to power and give

0:43 the benefit of those that power uplift to EP producers. Cool. Power producers are or EP producers are experiencing low gas prices. We're able to take low gas price with high power prices and

0:45 volatility and capture that value and align with them

0:57 to pass that value back to them.

1:00 Interesting. So are you, I don't want to get two in the weeds here yet, but are you guys offering night gas turbines, the actual equipment and operating home is that? Yeah, we do, we do full

1:13 turn keys. So we're, you know, full EPC, we build, build, design, build, operate, manage dispatch into our COT for the, for the producer. So what you think of us as the independent power

1:24 producer for, for an EP producer Now, this will be a good conversation. You know, it's just, this has been a topic that's just been growing over the last couple of years. And, you know, I have

1:36 a lot of friends that are into distributed energy sources and things of this nature. And so it's a fun market. It's always a, it's a fun topic. Always and it's just continuously evolving. Right.

1:45 And so, real quick, tell me about y'all's backgrounds. Travis, I know a little bit about yours, been, I don't know as much about yours But yeah, just tell me like y'all's life story and sure we

1:57 all come from Yeah, so, you know, coming out of undergrad, I went into the merchant energy space. So back, you know, 20 years ago, this was when the Enron El Paso's DynaGs were out there

2:07 trying to build assets, power plants, for example, to operate those as merchant facilities, breaking up PPAs. That's kind of where I cut my teeth, and I've always had that in the back of my mind

2:17 on all adventures. It's, how do you take physical assets with disparate commodities and find optionality between those commodities, and how do you capture that value? Yeah Coming out of the blub

2:27 of the merchant energy space, I went into investment banking, did my stint there, did my private equity stint, ended up joining as a CFO for an upstream oil and gas company where it was really my

2:38 first exposure to the upstream space, and it really gave me

2:44 a lot of insight onto some of the opportunities and the problems the EP producers face, and one of those was power. Yeah. Power is so critical to the operations for an EP producer, but it's also

2:55 kind of a. kind of an ugly stepchild, it's just assumed you go develop an area, connect power and the utility shows up with a little bit of power, but yeah, you know, my experience doing that is,

3:05 you know, power doesn't always show up and the power quality of it's pretty disparate. And so, um, coming at an interesting point, because I mean, that's something I didn't appreciate a few

3:13 years ago was the quality of that power as well as super important, especially, you know, with things like ESPs and exactly this nature. And that that's actually one, you know, one of the

3:24 experiences that kind of fed into the conduit story is we were developing an asset, you know, lift on ESP and ESP kept going down because we had power quality issues, voltage sags, major, major

3:36 issue. And so, you know, when we, you know, coming out of, coming out of the experience of the upstream started my first venture is about the time I met you on the developing investment vehicle

3:47 around upstream and capturing optionality in undrilled locations. But really wanted to see leaving that business one solid disconnect between what we're seeing on you. gas prices and with flaring

3:57 being a major issue, the methane penalty was kind of in the air coming down the pipe. And we're seeing with the influx of renewables, wind and solar coming in, what it was doing to the grid

4:09 involved today pricing. And so really trying to figure out, how do we take this experience on the merchant side? How do you take the experience on what the EMP producers facing on power quality?

4:19 Well, we're seeing the power market side and combining those into a thesis. And that's what led me to the conduit. Yeah. What about you, Ben? No, I appreciate all the perspective Travis gave on

4:29 conduit. I'm right now working for Travis directly on business development for conduit. And I'd say characterize my last few years of career is focused on energy transition related businesses and

4:41 especially at the earlier stage where we're seeing adoption of new technology, but a real need for innovative business models and financing structures that get technologies like this to scale I would

4:51 say conduit in a sense is a little bit more of something. more traditional I've worked on because before, work for solar, work for solar and wind developers worked on the battery energy storage

5:01 side of things, I've worked for an EV transition business on the biz dev side. But now, just exciting to take more familiar technology and deploy it in a creative way, where you're really just

5:10 looking at the bits and pieces of which EP and midstream and et cetera that they're familiar with, but we can deploy it in a way that actually creates a lot of value in the field So yeah, when I

5:21 started learning more about this topic and this nuance in the industry was several years ago when Bitcoin miners were really looking for cheap electricity and coming over here from China, and I

5:34 started realizing, yeah, you have all the strain of gas, but also these EP's have these substations and they understand

5:43 how to access cheap electricity and things of this nature and start realizing, I was like, oh, there's actually this entire Ecosystems and and I found that to be kind of Yep. Eye opening and I

5:56 know I actually have podcasts. You guys would appreciate this. You can go back a couple of years and I was like, yeah, someday I was like, you know, I think that you'll have oil and gas

6:04 companies that are using that gas to build power plants out on location and then it's out and - He had to go to the ball? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so - We didn't want to admit it, but that's where

6:12 we got it right. Yeah, that's it. Exactly. It wouldn't be the first time someone's got an idea. We came up with ourselves. Take the idea, yeah, take the ideas. But I always just found that

6:21 fascinating and especially, you know, I have this whole thesis that, you know, there's gonna be the onshoring of manufacturing and they're gonna come co-locate where there's high energy density.

6:31 And so it's like, hey, yeah, you can put electricity back into the grid through Arcad or you start building these microgrids out in remote locations. So, you know, it's a pretty interesting

6:41 concept. And the first time I saw one of these turbines, I went out to a recorded a piece of content with EET several years ago and they were using it for their EFRACs I just want to just like start

6:52 as like damn you can use these as like mobile You know how I just put them out. Well, I mean, that's what was fascinating to me. I mean, going, bridging the gap from when I started in the power

7:02 space 20 years ago to where we are today, just how technology has improved across the board. So when you're talking about pico plants back 20 years ago, you're talking about 14, 000 plus heat rate.

7:12 Yeah. You're talking about now, you run a gas reset at 8, 500 heat rate or below. Yeah. And so when you get to those points, you're saying that you can actually have efficient deployment of

7:21 small-scale generation that can capture value to track and compete with best technology. It's very, yeah. It's very dispatchable and mobile. Exactly. I mean, you know, like with these, and I

7:33 know I'm gonna like dumb this down a little bit. It's not this simple, but it's like, essentially, you know, you have a turbine and then you bring out on a trailer and it's very mobilized, right?

7:42 Whereas a peaker plant, like huge capex. Huge capex, you're stuck at that interconnection point. Interconnection queues and Urkot are extremely long for transmission level generation for

7:53 distribution. distribution level, which is where we play. Yeah. So when we design these and we're using gas resips for our main thermal, our main thermal technology, we use batteries to combine

8:03 with that, to participate in both thermal or energy and ancillary services. I wish I'd talk about that because, you know, I recorded this, so you'll find this funny, but when I was the hurricane

8:12 that hit New Orleans a couple of years ago, I was at Ida. Yeah, I think so. I lose track of them now There's, yeah, anyways, you know, flooded New Orleans. I was actually the wind damage that

8:12 was really bad, but I sent out a tweet that went viral because you saw all these videos, like the Cajun Navy and Chad bringing down like diesel generators. I was like, I don't see any solar panels

8:12 being shipped out there. That's right, exactly. And someone, someone's actually, there's a nonprofit that's headed down there that has these solar trailers. And I was like, you know what? As I

8:12 put me in contact with them, I said, I'm

8:48 gonna go down there and I'm gonna help them set up these solar stations and blog it. That's like more than one day. it out. And then anyways, when I was talking to the founder of that, he's like,

8:56 we're just talking about battery technology. And he's like, one thing, he's like, I think it's really important. He's like, it doesn't matter what your, what source of energy you're using to

9:04 charge batteries. He's like, batteries are the future. He's like, even you look at like diesel generators, they're, they're efficient at 80 load. He's like, and so it's not efficient to just

9:13 have generators sitting there running. He's like, you need batteries to charge them. That way, you can be more efficient across the whole process. So I think that that's an interesting thing to

9:22 talk about is utilizing batteries along with net gas turbines. And then the business model of, you know, ancillary services with our data. Yeah, and this goes back to the ecosystem idea, right?

9:33 There's not one size fits all like, like it's lost in the noise of what's, you know, what's green, what's not, what's energy transition, what's not, you know, we're definitely not against wind

9:44 and solar. We think that solar is a great energy is energy is energy is energy is that that has a place, but it does create a chain. It fundamentally changes how the grid. Yeah. And so for all

9:56 megawatts, all capacity put on through wind and solar, wind doesn't, we know, wind doesn't blow all the time. We know the sun doesn't shine all the time. So you need a form of dispatchable power

10:05 that can meet that heat. And so, the transition fuel that we see is natural gas. That's the main backbone for dispatchable power. Well, how does battery fit into it? And there's lots of it too.

10:14 And there's lots of it. And there's lots of it. Yeah. Especially when we start talking about the concentration associated gas and the Permian and concentration of wind and the Permian area or LZ

10:23 West, but you need dispatchable power. You know you need that. And the word is battery fit into the equation. Well, it fits in a couple of places. Like battery itself is, you know, it can be

10:32 both considered a form of storage and a limited form of generation. Yeah. But it's primary function. It also provides a substantial amount of grid stability. So those ESB stripping and a voltage

10:43 sags. That's primarily driven by the ability for a battery being able to supplement the grid and maintain voltage I think it's interesting. Anyone that talks about batteries, you get a different

10:53 answer on how it's categorized. Yeah, exactly. 'Cause he made a comment about it being like, it generates power. I'm like, nah, it doesn't generate power. It stores power. It stores power.

11:02 Yeah, and that's what it can do. It can, but very little limited basis. I mean, you're like one hour, two hour battery dispatching. So, you know, even with like the influx of battery in there

11:11 and charging overnight with low cost wind, you know, low cost wind overnight and solar wind, it's shining. It still doesn't provide that dispatchable power need What we saw is, you know, again,

11:22 you have a major shortage in ERCOT or dispatchable power. We're short. Like when you look at like some of the peak components, we were short of the 18 gigawatts of dispatch. You need that, that's

11:32 not gonna be solved by battery. That's not gonna be solved by more wind. You need more of a generation. The compounding problem that's happening right now is that investment dollars aren't going

11:42 towards thermal generation and a lot of the peak plans that we have are extremely old little a me scares actually it so And.

11:49 bit because I've been talking about this a lot is. You know, if you look at wind capacity, I mean, it's just crazy how much wind has been built in Texas. And the problem is, is that, um,

11:59 thermal doesn't have the same incentives, that goes to dollars. That's right. But us as citizens, we need that thermal generation. We need dispatchable power. And so this is where it gets super

12:08 interesting when that gets and that's the place where we love. So, you know, we, you know, you look at wind and solar to press, wind and solar to press prices over the long run, because it's

12:19 once it's installed, it's very low, no cost of generation. But it doesn't always, wind does always blow, and it doesn't always shine. And what that creates is while board curves and the

12:27 long-term outlook for prices can be flat or low volatility, what happens when the wind isn't blowing, the sun isn't shining is that's creating daily and hourly wild fluctuations in price. And

12:39 that's where at a distribution level, with our design of both thermal and battery, we're able to capture that value. And that's, that's what's unique, again, combining where the technology for

12:49 the generation to this intersection point where our backbone is analytics and quantitative analysis on being able to capture those very short periods of value that are, we call it clip and nickels

13:02 and dimes and dollars and being able to capture the big amounts when we have major mismatches supplying the man that happened now more frequently. It's funny, I have this Twitter post that I wrote

13:14 out about this power plane, I want to build up my house and it has solar, power wall, I have a night gas generator, I have a Ford F-150 with battery capacity, lightning, and then I've got 12

13:26 valve Cummins just in case any something that runs on a diesel, but you know what's funny is I used to be a customer of Gritty, and I actually fucking love Gritty, but the problem with Gritty's

13:37 business model is that 99 of their users didn't actually understand what the business model was and that yet exposure to wholesale pricing, but I was always like, if I actually took the time, you

13:48 know, write a script where it. Utilizes and we're going to charge up my home batteries and I'm getting cheap electricity from gritty and you know Start using software that make everything

13:59 communicate. And so you can we just stole your idea. That's all that's all we all we did Yeah, we took it to the generations any royalties But no,

14:07 that's what it's super interesting to me, especially as

14:11 You know, I really love the idea of virtual power plants and bi-directional metering on home Yep, yep, you know, I think that this is the future is like taking all these distributed Assets and

14:22 being able to make it all coordinated and communicate with each other and yep Obviously, there's a lot of barriers and misaligned incentives. I have to kind of get through but Yeah, yeah I

14:36 think too for us Primarily what we've been focused on so far is grid facing applications and that's really where most people think about generation mix and power consumption But what we've seen

14:46 growing as part of our strategy is that Even beyond EP, most folks are looking to be power consumers at the local level, so any kind of distributed generation that you can build that's reliable,

14:58 that can bridge you to a great connection or provide a long-term source of reliable energy on site. We're seeing that emerge beyond EP and even in the data center space and even into the mid-stream

15:09 space. We're seeing a large application of distributed generation projects become more of an integrated strategy with new development for large CNI commercial industrial load on the electrical grid.

15:20 Yeah, you know, that's why we started the Empower of it because that was our thesis was that data centers, whether it's any form of high performance computing, whether it's Bitcoin mining or GPUs,

15:31 it's energy infrastructure. Yeah. I don't know if y'all saw the last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they added John Arnold to their board of metadata because they need to get smarter around

15:39 energy. Yeah. that what happened was Mark Zuckerberg went to Google as like, who's smart in energy? Yeah, and John - Our podcast of John Arnold came up, yeah.

15:49 It's only like good public piece of content with John Arnold. So, Zach, if you're listening to this man, change of jits, let's go get a roll. Yeah, you're all good. Podcasts in a match. Yeah,

16:00 exactly. And, but that was the whole thesis was like, there's all these end users that, you know, want power on a localized level, and there's just all of these different parties, whether it's

16:13 ENPs, whether it's renewable operators. Well, you talk about the ecosystem I. mean, that's the part where it's so much fun in the space right now is that ecosystem's there, but it's not well

16:24 connected. Yeah, yeah. And so you have the end users, you have the generation. You have all the components in the parts, but it's not connecting the dots. Yeah. And that's where we found that

16:33 we like, we really make an impact is like, you know, again, the technology we're using, It's not the newest. The latest and greatest, this is all proven technology on this side. The

16:42 quantitative analysis, taking some best practices, machine learning, and how do you optimize? It's really in the commercial constructs of finding what the pain points are for these various parties.

16:51 So it's at the utility side, it takes too long to build out interconnections to meet the fast-paced growth for EMPs, for the EMP producer who's flaring, or has stranded or curtailed gas, or just

17:04 uneconomic gas right now, they're not incentivized to build out midstream infrastructure So it's, How do you connect the dots to give a value proposition that captures value, where it's available

17:13 in the

17:15 ERCOT market, which is lack of generation, slow transmission, build out EMP producers, which is we need an outlet for gas, where we can get more value. The solution that we've created is our

17:27 connet. We've created, it's funny you mentioned the virtual power plant. What we offer to EMP producers is called the virtual pipeline outlet. It's basically giving you capacity in our generation,

17:37 which It gives you higher gas prices. It's funny 'cause that's always what I've said with Bitcoin mining. It has like, you're just moving the midstream and downstream portion to on location at the

17:45 moment. Right, right. It's just a digital pipeline. And it has a major impact. It does. We start talking about large scale transmission lines, large scale transmission

17:54 generation. It just takes too long and it's too cappic. You're not economically incentive to do so at this moment. At the

18:02 distribution side, you're able to transact quickly, you're able to get built quickly, you're able to capture that value at those smaller increments, which, again, you're doing it more times over,

18:11 but you're able to deploy more capital, more megawatts. Yeah. Address the producers' concerns quicker than what's any other option that's out there. Yeah, no, this is, you know, I had a tweet

18:26 that was a little bit controversial a while back. No, you, I don't, I don't, I just don't believe it. I've never seen anything controversial in this country. That was a really stupid statement

18:36 by me. Um, essentially what I was talking about was, um, Travis, you'll, you'll appreciate this, but remember back in the day when EMPs were like, Oh, we have 40 IRR and these wells at half,

18:48 half cycle, yeah, always have always got all the, all the cycles, the shit. And it wasn't intellectually honest, right? If you're not looking at things from into in holistically, I was like,

18:58 the same thing has happened in renewables because what happens is people like to tote that, Hey, uh, renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, but that's only looking at the asset level.

19:08 It doesn't look at backup generation, uh, storage, transmissions, things of this nature. And what that results in is a higher cost to the end user, which is us as taxpayers and, um, energy

19:23 users. And what happens is like, you have these big spikes and volatility, like you're talking about. And so what's interesting to me about this is it, um, essentially, you know, with Nat gas

19:34 generation and battery storage. this solution to level things out, right? And essentially bring flatter, flatter costs. And that again, we're all full in support of renewable energy

19:51 as a backbone to the overall energy mix. But the downside of renewable energy and how it's levelized costs once it's built in incentives

20:20 to do so, it does crowd out thermal generator. It crowds out dispatchable generation Sure, and the incentives aren't the same or the power generation. And my thing too is like I've always said,

20:20 I'm like, hey, building out wind capacity is good, but the problem has been the acceleration or the rate that we're building get out without the same investment dollars going into thermal because

20:25 that's where you start to get into these huge issues. Wild swings. And that's the ERCOT, well, just focus on ERCOT We focus on ERCOT primarily. We also look at PJM as PPE. But ERCOT-specific,

20:38 they're trying to get ahead of that. We don't have a capacity market in ERCOT as primarily

20:44 managed their insoleary services. Doesn't provide that base cash flow you need to justify large-scale build. But

20:54 they're trying to get ahead of that with incentives, so tax incentives that are coming down the pipe, et cetera. But it still doesn't, the time to get those projects designed, built,

21:03 interconnected, and up and running, we're talking multiple years out. And that's where there's this open market to close that gap, connect that ecosystem between the producers, the problems

21:16 they're facing, the fact that we're grossly, just wildly short, dispatchable power. I mean, it's a capitalistic solution. It's capitalistic, it's all commercial, not driven on any tax

21:24 incentives. Yeah, and so, and the best solutions always come from capitalistic. And that's what I love about a lot of gas and energy. And that's what we love about our model, like we don't, we

21:33 don't, we're not. we're not relying on any taxes. And it's like, we do have a great tailwind, like the methane penalty is coming down the pipe. That's something that EEM pre-producer should be

21:41 taking very seriously on how to address it. You know, it's not being addressed by midstream right now. There's a kind of a standoff between, you know, EEM - But even if you don't, this is the

21:52 thing though. What's crazy is, it's not even, oh, methane regulations and penalties are coming. It's like, you are literally burning off your product. Oh, that's right. Yeah, how can you

22:01 extract more value in your product? That's right. And that's the case. Yeah, it's. Even if it's not a environment or climate thing, it's from a pure capitalism perspective, you should be

22:13 generating value. And there's waste to, like technology has allowed us to do that. Just burning dollars added into there. And so it's, you know, I have, I got three EMPs that hit me up last

22:24 week alone, but that gas price is where they're at. Hey, what should we be doing with our night gas on the Bitcoin mining space? And so like, it's funny how low night gas price starting everyone

22:34 in a capitalist. And like, what should we do with this gas? But in the next, it's like, you don't have to, you don't have to flare. And so I think it's one of the more interesting opportunities

22:44 in the world right now, because not only is it good for the environment and good for, you know, the ESG fucking check marks, but it's a good business decision. It's just good business. Yeah,

22:54 it's just commercial. Yeah, yeah. So if I'm an EMP, let's dive into like the model, a little bit of like what the value prop is for an EMP, working with you guys. So I'm an EMP out in West

23:05 Texas and I have, you know, 6 million cubic feet of gas

23:12 a day. And I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with this. Let's say I'm flirting it. How do I engage with you guys? How do I work with you? And what's the value prop, you know, for me?

23:22 How am I making money on doing this? Sure. Why don't you start? Yeah, so pretty straightforward from our side I think it starts really with the.

23:32 highest and best use for the stranded gas. So oftentimes we're seeing that there's an application where we can redeploy stranded gas just to provide base load power on site. So if that that's a

23:42 straightforward application, but for six million a day, commonly we're seeing that the amount of that gas being put to work as power generation exceeds their load needs on site. So are you

23:51 essentially saying, Hey, look, you're already drawing all of this electricity from the grid. You

23:56 can put a turbine out here and supply your own electricity. Exactly. I guess. Yes. So there's that, there's that onsite solution. There's something we can do with the gas putting it to work on

24:05 site as base load generation, but primarily what our business is focused on is what we've been talking about is dispatchable gas being sent into ERCOT is where we're primarily focused. And so for

24:15 the producers, the value prop on finding a new market, new place to send natural gas, especially if it's stranded, if there's no other use for it on site, is if we build generation and we can and

24:26 interconnect to ERCOT relatively quickly at those volumes of gas. there tends to be a much higher availability of a market for gas in power. And so we can monetize it in a day of liquidity. For the

24:38 energy. A great, great higher value market, better end user for natural gas and we can, because of how flexible and how quickly we can interconnect to grid, there tends to be a day ahead basis or

24:50 a real time basis under which we can settle for power. So it really becomes what we've talked about as a flexible solution that looks a lot like a new midstream off tape I was just thinking, sorry

25:00 to go off on a little bit of a tangent here, but I like to bash on Massachusetts all

25:07 the time. Just the story of Massachusetts is, loves natural gas.

25:12 60 of their electricity is generated from it, eats over 60 of their homes, but they import all of their LNG from places like the Caribbean and even Russia sometimes and it's like you won't build

25:27 pipelines from the most prolific. the natural gas base in a couple of 100 miles away from you, but it wouldn't have any problem with, you know, E-Q-T generating electricity on location and then,

25:40 you know, tying it into the grid. So it's like, you can almost eliminate this whole pipeline in a

25:48 FERC issue of needing to build in that gas pipelines by just producing the electricity on site and then transmitting electricity. That's that, I mean, you're pointing out the closing of the

25:56 ecosystem, right? Like you can build a, you have nimby issues on building pipeline, you have capital requirements building pipeline to get to market, you have multiple issues, you also have load

26:06 use, gas use in those same areas. It's what's the most efficient way to deploy capital, make return to meet the, meet markets needs. Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. Sorry to cut you off.

26:16 No, I think, I think the point is more broadly, outside of ERCOT, that point is right across people. Like you said, we're looking at PJM, we look at SPP, we're seeing that there's a general

26:25 need deploy natural gas in a more profitable way across the United States. And we've actually seen a lot of people taking proactive steps to permit plants that are market facing and get at least the

26:35 initial steps started. But maybe there's a bit of a gap in how to commercialize it, how to work out the contracts, how to know what it's worth on a merchant and a fixed basis in power markets. And

26:46 so been impressed with the amount of movement there's been just recognizing the fundamentals of what natural gas could be worth as dispatchable generation in power markets. And we're just excited to

26:56 see that we can come in and provide some consulting and some value add on just understanding what it's worth, but then ultimately taking it to COD. So you guys act like a EPC, you mentioned, like

27:09 we'll come in and do the consulting engineering, Fimony and P from the all side. Are y'all putting up the CapEx for generators? Yeah, everything we do is off balance sheet. All the capital comes

27:22 from us. We design, build, operate and manage market operations So that's full turn key in. what we face, the EMP producers, again, we're offering them a virtual pipeline. So there's capacity

27:36 in the pipeline, and they get the revenue share from the participation in the market sales. So very easy to understand. And what the value proposition is, going back to your six million a day

27:47 equation, that's 30 megawatts of value. That's a lot. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, that's super interesting. That's always where someone's taking point is, is who puts up the capex or generation

27:60 and stuff like that, but you come in. Yeah, especially when you're talking about those half cycle

28:06 IRR. We post the returns great, but it's great if it's on someone else's couch. No, if you're an EP, you want to produce. You definitely want to be focused on extraction. Yeah, just being able

28:16 to sell it off is a game. And so, yeah, super interesting. You guys are private equity backed, right? Yeah Yeah, so we were funded by Gray Rock Investment Partners. So we're part of their

28:28 Energy Transition Fund. which, you know, talk about this face, we raised capital in saying we're going to, we're planning on deploying thermal energy using natural gas as an energy transition.

28:38 Uh, yeah, we got a, we got a few nose on, on that as a strategy for the purplays, but we love working with Greerock, because they saw how you could do something without that's not tax, that tax

28:48 or government subsidized. Yeah. Purely commercial and a clear value proposition to the carbon station. You know, what's funny though, is I think that narrative has changed. It is over the last

28:57 year. Um, it's funny to kind of see the cycles that we've gone through over the last four or five years where, um, you know, I actually saw someone put this on Twitter. Um, you put the meme

29:06 where it's like the guy standing up and like seeing some like unpopular opinion. And he, he put that and he's like, natural gas is the transition fuel. The transition fuel is from like a climate

29:15 guy. Right. Um, you know, and so that, that narrative is changing. It's like, oh, shit, we actually do need natural gas. Um, there is actually a benefit from it. And The biggest benefit of

29:27 it is that it can be deployed at. on a commercial level with no subsidies. Yeah, like exactly. That's great. Yeah, I think that the timing is definitely - Yeah, it's nice to see it actually

29:38 turning to something that's more realistic. I hate the one size fits all or there's only one solution. It's, we need renewable energy. We need dispatchable gas. We need all the stability. We

29:49 need all of it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so shout out to Gray Rock. I'm gonna bash on Gray Rock for a second, 'cause I think it's funny. No, it's just funny

30:07 It's not a podcast, but I'm not poking fun at private equity groups.

30:12 Did they, do you know, is Granite Ridge a portfolio company? Yeah, so yeah, I was supposed to meet with Granite Ridge yesterday while I was up in Fort Worth, and they told me that they were

30:23 backed by Gray Rocks. Yeah, yeah, so it's now a publicly traded company. Yeah, I was supposed to meet with Granite Ridge yesterday while I was up in Fort Worth, and they told me that they were

30:26 backed by Gray Rocks Publicly try to come to Grant Granner Ridge is so but Gray Rock still has investment in cool. Got you, got you, just connecting some dots there. So, you know, for you guys,

30:36 what's the future look like over the next 12, 18 months, where are you guys at in terms of the life cycle of the company, getting out to market, you know, just kind of give me some color on that.

30:50 Sure, we're in, at this point, we call it super growth mode. So a lot of, you know, getting the adventure off the ground is proving up the thesis and seeing does this actually work? And we're

31:01 able to quickly demonstrate that what we're doing fits the market, we're able to execute an hour at scale, or working to scale as fast as we can. Yeah. You know, the market on the, on the power

31:12 side or how it's going to be short for a long period of time, dispatchable gas, flaring, stranded gas, uneconomic gas or low price gas. That's not, that doesn't have an easy solution. That

31:22 market is attractive. We're trying to partners with as many impedes as we can give them a better outlet for their gas.

31:30 We've been focused primarily on ERCOT, we're about to move into

31:34 PJM, it's a different scenario there, it's not flaring, but curtailment, low economic prices there, but they're short more power, and we'll be expanding that area. So it's really a matter of

31:45 continue to execute, continue to penetrate, and trying to find producers that have this dilemma of getting a little guy for their gas So with that, on an ending note, if EMPs are listening and

31:57 they want to talk to you guys and potentially work with you, where can they find you? Our website, wwwcontuitpowerco. You can also reach out to better myself, be fully, conduitpowerco, and T1

32:11 holds it, conduit power. I haven't given up the email address. Come bring it. Bring it. Bring it, bring it Well, we'll draw links to conduitpowerco and to y'all's LinkedIn, so yeah. You got

32:25 an EMP and you want to talk to these guys. You know, it's definitely interesting, interesting stuff. And I'm glad that y'all got to make it on the show. Yeah, I really appreciate you having us

32:33 on. Yeah, I've been having a lot of pleasure. And so happy for you guys. This is so great to see like how well you - That's awesome. It's awesome. It's fun to see other people building too and

32:41 see the success. I'm glad to be a part of this. It's been a lot of fun. It's been long for the ride. So if you guys liked this episode, please share it with a friend, share it on LinkedIn,

32:50 share it on Twitter, send it by email. I don't give a damn how you share it, just share it We will catch you on the next episode.