This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part four in a four-part series. Read part one here, part two here and part three here.

On any other day, David Rodriguez’s truck would have been helping extract oil, and as he sucked mud from a well beneath a towering drilling rig, any passersby might have assumed he was doing just that.

“Compared to oil and gas, it’s the same thing, man,” Rodriguez shouted over the motor.

But he was working to produce something entirely different. Rather than pulling oil out of the earth, the hole he was helping drill would be used to store clean, transient power from south Texas wind and solar farms.

Rodriguez, who was helping drill the hole for geothermal energy company Sage Geosystems, is one of a growing number of workers across Texas employing some of the same skills and technology used to extract fossil fuels for the production of renewable energy.

Those efforts come at the height of the largest oil and gas boom in American history, which centers on an expansive oil-producing region extending across western Texas and eastern New Mexico known as the Permian Basin and has been driven by the increasing use of novel technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling.

That boom has seen oil and gas output consistently hit record levels in recent years. At the same time, however, due to the pace of drilling and the declining need for workers amid the rise of high-tech forms of extraction, the expansion in production has come with a sharp and protracted decline in both the number of rigs and rig workers.

“We drilled ourselves out of a job,” consultant Mark Pinson said, eyeing the bobbing pump jacks that were still pulling oil from the Eagle Ford shale.

The Texas rock formation was once at the heart of the oil and gas boom. But beneath its bones lies another resource central to the new movement in the region's energy industry: heat that Texas companies like Sage and Fervo Energy hope to tap for clean power.

The field centered on that geothermal energy has long been a niche one in the renewables sector because of its reliance on a very particular set of underground conditions: accessible, superheated pools of underground water, like those found beneath pockets of California, the Pacific’s Ring of Fire and the nation of Iceland.

Over the past decade, however, hundreds of millions in investor capital have flowed into largely Texas-based firms seeking to develop methods that could be used to generate geothermal power virtually anywhere in the country.

One big pitch for the industry is security for the grid as a whole. Investing and bipartisan political support for geothermal in Texas has picked up after the state’s deadly 2021 blackouts showed the need for secure power sources not subject to extreme weather or alleged market manipulation by oil and gas companies. In the 2023 Texas legislative session, geothermal proponents’ ability to cast themselves as a bulwark against the risks of extreme weather helped the industry win nearly unanimous support for its policy agenda in a session where renewables were under nearly continuous assault. More recently, the Department of Defense has been a major backer of the technology, which it describes as a means of giving bases access to a source of power that neither the weather nor........

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