A SpaceX Engineer Is Looking to the Ocean Floor to Power Our Future

What if the answer to the world’s growing energy crisis had been hiding beneath the waves all along? One former rocket engineer believes it has, and he just secured $54 million to prove it.

Andrew Redd spent years helping build the Dragon and Starship programs at SpaceX before turning his attention to a very different kind of frontier. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, a region increasingly battered by extreme heat and devastating wildfires, Redd felt a deep urgency around renewable energy. But his time at SpaceX taught him that incremental solutions simply would not be enough. What the world needed, he believed, was something built entirely from first principles.

That conviction led him to found Endurance Energy, a startup targeting one of the most overlooked sustainable energy sources on the planet: the geothermal heat pulsing beneath the ocean floor. According to TechCrunch, the company recently closed a $54 million Series A round led by Founders Fund, with a roster of major venture partners joining in.

Geothermal energy itself is nothing new. Humans have drawn on the Earth’s internal heat for thousands of years. But most land-based geothermal development requires drilling miles into the crust, and the best accessible sites have already been claimed. Redd saw that no one had seriously looked offshore, where tectonic plates along the Ring of Fire allow magma to push startlingly close to the seafloor.

Yes, the ocean presents real engineering challenges: corrosive saltwater, immense pressure, and the need for robotic systems to handle much of the work. But Redd notes that the oil and gas industry has navigated similar obstacles for decades. And unlike fossil fuel extraction, a worst-case scenario here means releasing warm water into an ocean already venting vast amounts of geothermal heat naturally.

The potential scale is staggering. Redd estimates that roughly six terawatts of developable geothermal energy sit along the Ring of Fire alone, enough to power major coastal cities across the U.S., Japan, and Southeast Asia around the clock, every single day. In a world that increasingly needs clean baseload power, that is a profound and hopeful possibility worth watching closely.

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