A young engineer takes on Big Oil to champion a geothermal prospect.
SYNOPSIS
KASE Walker is a grad student close to a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. He is Navajo but in name only, shunning their earth-based spirituality. Kase and his family depend on royalties from fracking oil and gas wells. He has latent guilt over his past as an exploration drilling engineer extracting hydrocarbons and hopes to remedy it with a new career in geothermal engineering.
The government closes the Walker family’s oil field. The royalties they depend on for food and shelter dry up. Kase has to quit grad school. Then he gets a chance to engineer a geothermal well.
The geology causes dangerous problems for the drilling rig and its crew. But management is unwilling to help Kase prepare for what is surely coming: a blowout. Bordering on a nervous breakdown –
MELBA (Hispanic, recent graduate) – the rig geologist – helps Kase obtain the data he needs to prepare for catastrophe. Kase must give up his fierce independence and pride as a lone “wildcatter” to work with Melba and her father, the rig superintendent, as a team.
The well blows out. Kase manages to save it, but only to discover it’s not a geothermal prospect at all but an oil gusher. Worse yet, the oil flowing will obliterate the future potential of geothermal energy for central New Mexico.
Fighting the rig hands and the owner, Kase sets the rig on fire. He must evoke the fierce independence of his Navajo heritage to do so, and embrace in heart and soul their overpowering respect for nature.
Kase learns the need for teamwork and, in so doing, achieves an independent pride in leadership, earning him a new tribal name, Fire Walker.
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NOTES
The technical details are authentic. I worked as an exploration drilling engineer for Exxon. I am a past chairman of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering Geothermal Energy Committee. The political decisions that set the story in motion are true events – the US Supreme Court cut off the Navajo’s water rights in June 2023, and two months later an Executive Order from the White House shut down drilling at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The drilling rig setting, at Pecos Ruins next to a Civil War battlefield, is as described; as is the Navajo/Anasazi mythology. The deep geology of the Rio Grande Rift is exactly as stated.
The estimated budget is $8-10 million. The opening scenes take place in Albuquerque, and the rest are set an hour to the east near Santa Fe. Albuquerque is a big film hub with lots of ready-made sets and movie people available, which will help lower costs.
Bill H. Clark