Turning Abandoned Oil Wells Into Batteries with Renewell's Kemp Gregory

What if the millions of idle oil wells scattered across North America weren't just environmental liabilities, but the key to stabilizing energy grid?

In this episode, we sit down with Kemp Gregory, CEO and co-founder of Renewell Energy, to discuss how his team is repurposing fossil-fuel infrastructure for the renewable energy age. By using fundamental physics and the massive depth of existing wellbores, Renewell is creating "gravity batteries" that move heavy weights to store and release energy on demand.

• The $450 Billion Problem: There are over 2 million idle wells in the U.S. that could take 100 years to clean up under current methods; Renewell offers operators a way to convert these liabilities into assets while meeting regulatory cleanup quotas.

• Mechanical Energy Storage: The system works by winching a 30,000-pound (15-ton) weight up and down a wellbore, providing a solution with zero self-discharge—meaning no energy is lost while the weight is held at the top.

• A "Win-Win" Business Model: By leveraging funds from oil companies that are already legally required to spend money eliminating wells, Renewell aims to drive the cost of storage down to an unprecedented $5 per kilowatt-hour.

• Scalability & Regulation: While they have already secured critical regulatory wins in California, Colorado, and New Mexico, the potential scale is massive—Kemp estimates that 10% of idle wells, or roughly 200,000 sites, are suitable for this conversion.

• Efficiency at Any Duration: Unlike chemical batteries, this mechanical system maintains the same round-trip efficiency whether it is discharging for one hour or 100 hours.

Join us as Kemp Gregory shares how his background as a petroleum engineer at Shell led to an innovation that could provide 5-10% of the total energy storage the U.S. grid needs to go green.

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