When Cindy Taff was a vice president at the giant oil and gas company Shell in Houston, her middle schooler Brianna would sometimes look over her shoulder as she worked from home.
“Why are you still working in oil and gas?” her daughter asked more than once. “Is there a future in it? Why aren’t you moving into something clean?”
The words weighed on Taff.
“As a parent you want to give direction, and was I giving her the right direction?” she recalled.
At Shell, Taff was in charge of drilling wells and bringing them into production. She worked on oil and natural gas that’s called unconventional in the industry, because the oil or natural gas is difficult to get out of the ground — it doesn’t naturally gush out like in movies. It’s a term often used for oily shale rock. Taff was somewhat unconventional for the industry, too. Her coworkers used to tease her for driving an efficient hybrid.
“You’re not helping oil and gas prices by driving a Prius,” they’d say.
Taff wanted Shell to pursue the energy that comes from the Earth’s natural heat — geothermal. Her team looked into it, but Shell never greenlit any of those projects, saying it would take too much time to recoup the investment.
When Brianna went to college, she was passionate about energy too, but she wanted to work on renewables. After her sophomore year, in the summer of 2020, she got an internship at a geothermal company — one that in fact had just been launched by Taff’s former colleagues at Shell — Sage Geosystems in Houston.
Now it was Taff looking over her daughter’s shoulder and asking question as she worked from home during the pandemic.
And Sage executives were talking to Brianna, too. “We could use your mom here,” they said. “Can you get her to come work for us?” Brianna recalled recently.
That’s how Cindy Taff left her 36-year career at Shell to become chief operating officer at Sage.
“I didn’t understand why Shell wasn’t pursuing it,” she said about applying the company’s drilling expertise to heat energy. “Then I got this great opportunity to pivot from oil and gas and work with these guys that I have the utmost respect for. And also, I wanted to make my daughter proud, quite frankly.”
Brianna Byrd, now 24, is the operations engineer and spokesperson at the company. She’s glad her mother, now CEO, left oil and gas.
“Of course I’m biased, she’s my mom, but I don’t think Sage would be where it is without her,” she said.
The United States is a world leader in electricity made from geothermal energy, but this kind of electricity still accounts for less than half a percent of the nation’s total large-scale generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2023, most geothermal electricity came from California, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico, where there are reservoirs of steam, or very hot water, close to the surface.
The Energy Department estimates this next generation of geothermal projects, like what Sage is doing, could provide some 90 gigawatts by 2050 — enough to power 65 million homes or more. That hinges on private investment, and on companies like Sage introducing this form of energy to regions where, until now, it’s been thought to be impossible.
Because of her oil and gas background, Taff said she knows geothermal will only be adopted widely if the cost comes down. The mantra at Sage is: It’s going to be clean and it’s going to be cheap. She’s excited to be working in a field she feels is on the cusp of playing a big role in cleaning and stabilizing the electrical grid.
