Hoping to bring geothermal skills home

Gavin Blower had only the vaguest notion of what geothermal energy was four years ago. Since leaving Ireland for the US in 2010, though he has become something of an expert on the subject. He hopes one day to bring that expertise to bear closer to home.

The Cork native works as financial manager in Washington DC with GeoGlobal Energy, a company focused on the development and acquisition of geothermal resources to generate renewable, low-carbon electricity.

Geothermal energy is heat energy that has been generated and is stored in the earth. The energy can usually only be accessed when it arrives at the surface through geological processes such as through fault lines, or by drilling through the surface to access it.

Since it began in 2007, GeoGlobal has invested $250 million (€181.5m) to build a strong portfolio of geothermal projects in the US, Chile and Germany, including an investment in Hudson Ranch Power I, a 49.9MW plant in California.

Blower (26) started off in a lowly role with the firm shortly after completing an MSc in corporate finance at University College Cork in 2010. He has now become one of its key staff members, with responsibility for raising capital for a number of concessions in Germany.

“I started as a staff accountant,” he says, “but both my superiors and I quickly realised that my skills lay outside this area. Accounting was a big part of my job initially so I obviously got on and did it, but I wasn’t particularly interested in closing books and was much more interested in seeing why and how you’d spend $10 million (€7.3m) on a well.

“At that time, we had both a project development team and a finance and accounting team and so, while I started off on one side of the fence, I began to move over to project work, firstly as an analyst and then as a financial manager, before ending up in my current role as a project associate.”

Development activities
Blower joined the firm as an opportune time.

Two years earlier, GeoGlobal entered into a partnership with the state- owned New Zealand power company, Mighty River Power, to finance its development activities in the US, Germany and Chile for up to $250 million over a five-year period.

GeoGlobal rapidly developed one of the largest global portfolios of geothermal opportunities over the next few years and successfully managed the full deployment of the Mighty River Power investment. The relationship was mutually ended in 2013 when Mighty River Power took control over the Chilean and US investments.

GeoGlobal was now focused on managing and furthering the German assets, where $50 million (€36.3m) had been deployed since 2010. The restructuring meant big changes for GeoGlobal and for Blower, as the company slimmed down to just a handful of employees.

He is now one of the longest- serving employees and has moved into a more senior role, in which he is charged with trying to raise $100 million (€72.6m) minimum on five concessions in Germany. Not an easy task, given the risky nature of the work.

“We have the potential to raise at least $500 million (€363m) as each concession has the potential to build out to multiple projects,” he says. “I’m fully confident that our concessions will receive funding in the coming months and am excited to be given the responsibility of helping to ensure this happens.”

As Blower points out, Ireland isn’t exactly a hotbed for geothermal energy, given that it lies outside any active tectonic zones. A career in the sector wasn’t exactly top of his list when he was younger, but a yearning to experience working abroad was enough to push him to leave Ireland. “I really wanted to go abroad when I finished college. While I was in the Master’s programme, we would have business professionals come in to talk with us and I realised that those who had worked overseas had more experience and a better outlook than those who hadn’t.”

Two offers
He was working with accountants KPMG while in UCC but, driven by his interest in working abroad, he applied for jobs in Mexico, Brazil and the US. Two companies offered him a position – one of them was GeoGlobal Energy.

“Where I landed was brilliant in terms of opportunities, as there certainly isn’t a company in Cork spending millions of dollars on exploring energy and taking risks. It’s unlikely that many firms would have let me be involved in big transactions so early on in my career.”

While he is enjoying his current role, Blower hopes to return to Cork. “I think that those who have worked abroad, particularly in a big economy, and then come back to Ireland have ended up playing a bigger part in the company they found themselves in. I’d also like that to be the story for me.”