Due to the With promising conditions in Starr and Hidalgo counties, Jamie had been helping a handful of people there. Sage’s team, of course. The utility manager for the city of McAllen, who desperately wants to build a geothermal plant for his city. She had been talking with Dario Guerra, a local water engineer who had been preaching the geothermal gospel for years. However, one person she hadn’t met was James McAllen.
So, late in the afternoon, Jamie and I drove about an hour northwest from the city of McAllen to the 50,000-acre San Juanito Ranch, widely known as the McAllen Ranch. They ushered us through an inconspicuous door, and James, thin, tall, with an ivory cowboy hat on his head, came up to us, a big smile on his face. We make our way to the ranch headquarters: the Rock House, a low-rise stone building that is over a century old. Yes. James’ great-great-grandfather named the town after him. The ranch has worked cattle and horses since before Texas was a state. But, he explained, there is no longer any profit in cattle.
“My job is to see how we can carry this ranch forward for the next 100 years,” he said. “And we’re not going to do that with cattle.” Instead, the family searches for every single resource, “from sun to wind to grass to dirt to gravel.” About five years ago, James and a partner installed a series of solar panels. The ranch shares a property line with a power substation, and they now sell power to the power company. He was planning to build four more solar panels.
But one of his nephews, who was studying at UT Austin, had called him recently. “Hey, you know, Uncle Jim,” the boy said, “I just had a class on geothermal. And McAllen Ranch was everywhere.” As it turns out, in the late 1970s, when the government was looking for places to test geothermal energy, it approached James’s father to see if he wanted to work with them on a demonstration plant. “It was kind of science fiction technology,” James explained. Then no.
After his nephew’s call, James began to think. He talked to the utility company he sells solar to; They were excited about the prospect of buying geothermal power, because it’s an always-on, base-load source. So he called his friend Dario Guerra (himself), and Dario told James about Sage’s team and his work nearby. Soon enough, Cindy, Lev, and Lance showed up for dinner with bottles of tequila. Within a few weeks, James signed a joint venture agreement with the team: he would work to raise the estimated $27 million they would need, and Sage would start planning wells at the ranch.
Jamie had been sitting a bit quiet, for her, on the opposite side of the table while James told us this whole story. But during a pause, she burst in with enthusiasm. “Wait. Is your nephew in petroleum engineering?” she asked. “That class exists because of GEO!” she exclaimed, GEO being the program she’d started in college.“I feel like I’m in a simulation,” she said.The boy’s teacher was the first instructor Jamie had recruited for UT.
On our last morning in Texas, I found Jamie in the hotel dining room, cereal and yogurt on the table in front of her. She was watching a video of her son. Tears on her cheeks. She handed me her phone so she could see Sage. She was at a table having breakfast. He is a beautiful boy: wide smile, fabulous curly dark hair. He communicates through sweet growls and giggles. She missed him. But she, too, was crying because she was exhausted and overwhelmed. That’s because after seeing how far Sage Geosystems had come and meeting James McAllen, he realized that after all the hours, days, and minutes he had spent pushing this project forward, the quest for geothermal energy had come to an end. taken on a life of its own. .
When I have Coming home from the trip to Texas, my husband and I were faced with new test results and horrible conversations with our doctors. He then had the first of two major surgeries. In the moments between ER visits and desperate phone calls, I filled as much space in my mind as I could to keep my thoughts out of the inconceivable. But as the scaffolding of life we had built began to shake, facing the simple requirements of getting through the day became difficult. Then even more difficult.
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