Oklahoma ranks 50th in education in the United States. We lead the nation in abandoned oil and gas wells. Our politics are dominated by culture war theater while the actual economy hollows out underneath.
The conventional wisdom says this is a problem to be solved incrementally. Better funding here, a new program there. Decades of slow improvement if everything goes right.
Here’s a different take: Oklahoma is perfectly positioned to leapfrog.
The states that invested heavily in 20th-century infrastructure are now burdened by it. Legacy systems, legacy costs, legacy thinking. Oklahoma has less of that weight. And we have something nobody else has: 22,000 boreholes reaching deep into geothermally active earth, already drilled, already mapped, waiting to be repurposed.
Phoenix Wells converts those abandoned wells into distributed geothermal energy powering local AI systems. Not cloud computing rented from California. Intelligence that lives in Oklahoma communities, serving Oklahoma needs — education, healthcare, agriculture, civic engagement.
Imagine every rural community with access to a local AI oracle that knows their soil, their weather patterns, their school system, their municipal needs. Powered by energy from beneath their own feet. Not dependent on anyone’s server farm or subscription model.
This isn’t charity. It’s not even progressive politics in the way people usually mean it. It’s strategic positioning. The AI era needs energy and it needs distributed intelligence. Oklahoma has both, sitting unused in the ground.
50th doesn’t have to be permanent. It can be the thing that made us hungry enough to skip straight to first.