Building Social and Political Momentum for Geothermal Projects

This panel features:
Kimilia Jones, Commercial Manager, Chevron New Energies
Bryant Jones, Executive Director, Geothermal Rising
Amel Barich, Project Manager, GEORG - Geothermal Research Cluster
Matt Traldi, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Greenlight America
Terra Rogers, Program Director, Superhot Rock Energy, Clean Air Task Force
About the Speakers:
Kimilia Jones joined Chevron in 2006 and has diverse experience as a Land and Commercial professional in asset development and management, negotiations, operations, value chain optimization, and divestments & acquisitions across upstream, midstream and new energies. In 2021, she joined the newly formed Chevron New Energies Business Unit, where she serves as a Commercial Manager focused on technology innovation and lower carbon energy solutions such as geothermal. In her role, she is responsible for supporting the management and strategy for Chevron’s geothermal opportunities. She believes in a lower carbon future and geothermal has the potential to play a role in the safe delivery of affordable, reliable and ever-cleaner energy to meet the growing world demand. She is married with 2 sons and loves experiencing other cultures through art, wine, food and travel. One of her favorite quotes is “I belong everywhere!”
Dr. Bryant Jones is the Executive Director of Geothermal Rising. Geothermal Rising (GR) serves to build community and empower the geothermal industry by aligning all geothermal technologies and applications. GR is a nonprofit community organizer, research organization, and educational association. Bryant has 20 years of experience advancing public policy at federal, state, and local levels. His career has taken him from Idaho to Vermont, abroad to China, Ukraine, Mongolia, Germany, Chile, the UAE, Namibia, and from Capitol Hill down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and over to the U.S. Department of State. His academic research explores social, policy, organizational structure, and collective action reasons that energy technologies remain stagnant and how these hurdles-that prevent technological adoption-can be reduced and eliminated.
Dr. Amel Barich is an earth scientist and works as project manager at the GEORG Geothermal Research Cluster in Iceland. Dr Barich is working on projects related to geothermal energy, including geological carbon capture and storage, magma research, policy, and social sciences. She was the task lead of the Social License to Operate (SLO) in the CROWDTHERMAL project and is the author of the SLO model for geothermal energy.
Matt Traldi is one of the co-authors of the Indivisible Guide and a co-founder of the Indivisible organizations, for which he was named one of TIME Magazine’s “25 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2017. Previously, he worked for more than a decade in the labor movement as an organizer, researcher, policy director, and Secretary-Treasurer of a local union. In 2022, he led the Democracy Defense Coalition’s election crisis boiler room, a movement-wide coalition effort involving hundreds of organizations, and in 2023, he helped found the Election Sabotage Response Network. He leads Greenlight America, a new independent non-profit focused on leveraging grassroots energy to help more clean energy and transmission projects win local permitting and approval more quickly. Matt serves as Greenlight’s CEO and President of the Board.
Terra Rogers is the Program Director for Superhot Rock Geothermal at Clean Air Task Force (CATF). In this capacity, Terra leads CATF’s geothermal strategy and technical team to make clean, safe, zero-carbon energy possible anytime, anywhere. In 2022 she joined CATF to create a global vision for Superhot Rock and implement pathways for large-scale deployment. Terra has been active in the renewable energy industry since 2004 and has served as Sr. Vice President, Program Director and consultant to companies providing pioneering services and R&D solutions in the geothermal, biofuel and energy storage markets.
At CATF Ms. Rogers leverages her experience in power purchase negotiations and financial modeling for renewable energy startups to create the ecosystems necessary to foster and grow this promising new industry. Having secured over $100M in public funding to test, demonstrate and deploy early-stage technologies, she offers insights into technology innovation, permitting, and business strategy. Before Terra turned her focus to research and new technology deployment, she worked within conventional geothermal at Ram Power where Terra led the project management and financial controls for a state-of-the-art, $0.5B geothermal power plant in Nicaragua.