There are over 22,000 abandoned oil and gas wells across Oklahoma. Each one is a liability on someone’s books — an environmental risk, a cleanup cost, a scar from an extractive era that took what it needed and moved on. If you’ve driven through rural Oklahoma, you’ve seen them. Rusting things on someone’s land that nobody’s doing anything about.
But each one is also a borehole that already reaches deep into the earth. The drilling is done. The infrastructure exists. And the temperature gradient between the surface and those depths is a permanent, inexhaustible energy source. The Earth already did the work. We’re just accepting the gift.
Phoenix Wells is a proposal to convert those abandoned wells into community-owned geothermal power plants — energy infrastructure that powers local AI systems, community oracles that serve education, healthcare, agriculture, municipal planning, and civic engagement. Not cloud computing shipped in from somewhere else. Intelligence that lives where people live, powered by the earth beneath their feet.
The workforce that drilled those wells has the skills to convert them. The communities whose land sits over geothermal heat get the revenue. This is oil country ingenuity applied to the next century’s problem.
Oklahoma is 50th in education. The fossil fuel economy is ending whether we like it or not. The question isn’t whether to transition — it’s whether Oklahoma leads or gets left behind. I know which one I’m betting on.
The wells are already there. The future is waiting underground.
— David