Geothermal energy poised for boom, as U.S. looks to follow Iceland’s lead

Some experts believe geothermal development could help reduce American emissions and help avert catastrophic climate change.

LONG READ

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Sat, January 7, 2023 

The Climeworks AG Orca direct air capture and storage facility, right, and Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, left, in Hellisheidi, Iceland, in September 2021.

 (Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The small island nation of Iceland is known among environmentalists for its low greenhouse emissions — per capita, roughly one-third of those of the United States — thanks in part to its reliance on clean, geothermal energy derived from the more than 30 active volcanic systems that also power its famous hot springs.

Yet, in terms of total geothermal energy output, the U.S. is actually the world’s single biggest generator of geothermal energy — and some experts believe further development of that sector, including digging deep into the Earth, could reduce American emissions and help avert catastrophic climate change.


“It just really seems as though geothermal has an upward trajectory at the moment, in terms of innovation, funding, interest at all levels of business, but also the government,” Kelly Blake, president of the board of directors at Geothermal Rising, a geothermal-focused trade association, told Politico earlier this week.

“We’re kind of on the cusp of moving into the cost-effective range [for geothermal], just like we did with solar, over the next 20 years,” Roland Horne, a professor of earth sciences at Stanford University, told Yahoo News.

At present, geothermal energy, which is derived by using steam heat from underground to generate power, accounts for less than 1% of the U.S. electricity portfolio. Unlike wind and solar energy, which do not produce as much energy in certain conditions, geothermal energy is much more constant. Yet the cost of tapping it can be expensive in places that require extensive digging. In 2021, a kilowatt hour of electricity generated by geothermal cost an average of $3,991 in G20 countries, compared to $857 for utility-scale solar power and $1,325 for on-shore wind.

A geothermal plant outside Myvatn, Iceland, in on April 2017. (Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images)

Recent technological advances, such as “enhanced geothermal systems,” also known as EGS in the industry jargon, may solve that problem, however. Traditionally, geothermal has only been economical in places like Iceland, where heat and water are close to the Earth’s surface. In an EGS, much as in a fracking well, fluid is injected deep underground, causing fractures to open in the rock, which allows hot fluid to rise from far below.

That’s why in June, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $165 million investment in geothermal energy research and deployment, and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law included $84 million for research into enhanced geothermal demonstration projects.

The private sector is also taking tentative steps into geothermal energy. A slew of geothermal energy startups have each raised millions of dollars in capital. Last month, the oil and gas giant Chevron partnered its Chevron New Energies with Sweden’s Baseload Capital to develop geothermal projects in the United States. In 2021, Chevron and BP invested $40 million in Eavor Technologies, a Canadian geothermal energy company. In November of that year, Hawaiian Electric, the Aloha State’s energy utility, unveiled a plan to increase its geothermal generation capacity to help meet its goal of a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

“It’s like solar: If you look at solar 20 years ago, nobody’s interested in solar because it costs too much. But as solar has grown, the cost has come down as it’s improved in scale,” Horne said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, is greeted by Iceland's minister of foreign affairs, Gudlaugur Thor Thordarson, at a meeting of Arctic Council Ministers in Reykjavik, Iceland, on May 19, 2021. (Brynjar Gunnarsson/AP Photo)

“It’s unbelievable how geothermal has gone under the radar,” Iceland’s environment minister, Gudlaugur Thór Thórdarson, told Yahoo News. Iceland’s use of geothermal for heating and a mix of geothermal and hydropower for electricity has given it uninterrupted access to affordable heat and power, insulating its economy from the natural gas price shocks being felt by the rest of Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Now, when you see the bills [in] electricity and the gas prices go up everywhere — at least, around us — it doesn’t affect us,” he said.

“This can be done all around the world,” Thórdarson added. “You don't need to be the most active volcanic island in the world to use geothermal.”

In January 2022, a Danish company signed an agreement to develop the largest geothermal heating plant in the European Union, and Icelandic companies are currently developing geothermal heating and energy projects in other countries. Under a partnership between Iceland’s Orka Energy Holding Ehf and China’s state oil and gas company Sinopec, the 390,000-person Chinese county of Xiong is being converted to rely solely on geothermal for residential heating.

Wells roughly 1,500 to 1,900 meters (4,900 to 6,200 feet) deep bring up water at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) that is used to heat homes. In an area where families previously burned coal for heat, the result has been a dramatic cut in carbon emissions and conventional air pollutants like smog. Orka and the Icelandic firm Mannvit are also building power plants that will produce electricity from geothermal in countries including Slovenia and Hungary.

“And we can do it in a lot of other places,” Thórdarson said. “It’s not very complicated. It’s just drilling for hot water.”

The Reykjanes geothermal power station is pictured on March 23, 2017, in Reykjanes, at the southwestern tip of Iceland. (Halldor Kolbeins/AFP via Getty Images)

Geothermal accounts for 6% of the electricity produced in California and 10% in Nevada. Hawaii, Utah, Oregon and Idaho have geothermal plants as well. Like Iceland, where 27% of the electricity and heating in 90% of homes comes from geothermal, these western states have volcanic activity that brings heat close to the Earth’s surface. That makes geothermal more economically viable than in the eastern half of the U.S., where heat tends to be buried deeper underground.

“The reason we have [geothermal] in the western states, and the reason they have it in Iceland, is basically geological advantage,” Horne said. “If you go to New York state, you don’t find that sort of recent volcanic activity, so to get to higher temperatures, you’ve got to drill a lot deeper, and that, of course, is expensive.”

Skeptics of geothermal’s potential note the technological challenges to drilling deeper.

“You have to remove all the rock you’ve cut from the hole, which gets harder and harder as the hole gets deeper,” writes Alice Friedemann, author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy,” on her website, Energy Skeptic. “The deeper you go, the hotter it gets, and the more expensive the drilling equipment gets, using special metallurgy.”

The Strokkur geyser in the Haukadalur geothermal park in Reykjavik, Oct. 21, 2022. (Jorge Mantilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Some energy companies hope to facilitate deeper drilling through EGS, which offers the possibility of a geothermal boom similar to the way fracking has transformed oil and gas extraction. The Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office, which supports EGS research and demonstration projects, calls EGS “the next frontier for renewable energy deployment.”

“There have been more than 40 projects worldwide of so-called ‘enhanced geothermal systems,’” Horne said. “There’s even been some commercial ones in Germany and France, but at the moment, the cost is higher than other resources, which is what’s held it back.”

Horne expects that over the next decade or so, increased research and development in EGS will bring the cost down enough to make geothermal energy economically competitive.

“[Geothermal] is sort of the unwanted stepchild of renewable energy,” Geoffrey Garrison, vice president and senior geochemist at AltaRock Energy, a geothermal energy company, told Yahoo News. “The marginal cost of electricity from geothermal is more than solar and wind. Solar’s gotten so cheap, and wind has gotten so cheap, that when the power utilities look to renewables, those are the ones they go to.”

Since wind and solar are intermittent power sources, they need to be complemented with “peaker plants,” which burn coal or gas to even out the ups and downs in solar or wind production. Geothermal doesn’t have that problem.

An array of solar panels and windmills in Kern County, an hour north of Los Angeles, on Nov. 15, 2022, near Mojave, Calif. (George Rose/Getty Images)

Garrison is working on making geothermal energy cost-competitive by finding cheaper ways of drilling deeper, where the heat is greater and would deliver more electricity production. Altarock is building a demonstration project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon, to bring up water of more than 400 degrees Centigrade from 14,000 feet below ground. At 374 degrees Centigrade, water reaches a state known as “supercritical,” at which it flows with the ease of gas but carries the energy density of a liquid, so it would provide far more bang for the buck when piped to the surface.

“You couple that with the fact that, at the surface, power plants work much more efficiently at higher temperatures,” Garrison said. “So a power plant using an input of 400C is going to be twice as efficient as 200C water.”

Bringing up water that hot in states like New York would require going 20,000 to 30,000 feet below ground. So, with support from DOE, AltaRock is currently working in a laboratory with a company called Quaise Energy on using millimeter wave technology — essentially a heat ray — to vaporize rock.

Whether anything that futuristic pans out, experts and industry observers say the U.S. geothermal energy industry may be on the cusp of its own, fracking-like boom.

Still, even enhanced geothermal could be limited in scope. The DOE estimates that there is potentially 40 times as much economically viable geothermal capacity as is currently generated in the continental U.S. But if that were all developed, it would still represent only 10% of current U.S. electricity capacity.

The John L. Featherstone Hudson Ranch Power 1 geothermal facility produces electrical power from underground volcanic-heated steam, on May 10, 2021, near Calipatria, Calif. (George Rose/Getty Images)

Skeptics point out that enhanced geothermal systems will have plenty of technical obstacles. Friedemann’s list includes, among other things, water escaping into the rock cracks, the need for materials that can withstand incredibly high temperatures, and the fact that new techniques that work in one area may not apply everywhere, given the variability in geology around the country.

Then there are the potential political and economic roadblocks, such as objections of nearby residents who — like those who have sometimes blocked fracked gas wells — may worry about chemical exposure and earthquakes that could be triggered by injecting liquid into the Earth. There are also steep costs that utilities would have to bear, such as bringing transmission lines to the sites of future geothermal power plants and the fact that a water-intensive process may not be feasible in areas with water scarcity.

“The depth to be drilled down to is so deep that it is likely this technology will always be too expensive and use more energy to drill than obtained,” Friedemann concludes.

Nonetheless, oil and gas companies are increasingly interested. “Baker Hughes, one of the largest drilling companies in the world, is expanding its geothermal business and has formed a partnership with Continental Resources and Chesapeake Energy — two giants in the independent oil and gas sector — to test whether they can profitably turn spent natural gas wells into geothermal facilities,” Politico recently reported.

A natural gas flare stack at an oil well in Midland, Texas, on April 4, 2022. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It makes sense, geothermal industry leaders say, because oil and gas companies have the technology and know-how to drill deep below the ground.

“Over the last 15 years, huge numbers of wells have been drilled in the United States because of the shale revolution,” said Sarah Jewett, head of strategy at Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy company that has raised over $177 million, told Politico. “All of this technology has evolved and grown, and that can be directly applied to geothermal power.”

That’s what Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was thinking when she implored oil executives at a December meeting of the National Petroleum Council to pivot to geothermal energy.

“Think: You drill holes, too,” Granholm said. “You go beneath the surface, you know where things are. And fracking really opens up a huge opportunity for enhanced geothermal.”

As Granholm told Yahoo News in November 2021, “The Holy Grail is to identify clean baseload power.” The search for that Holy Grail is on.

Geothermal energy is on the verge of a big breakthrough

By digging deep, we could harness enough energy to power generations to come.

But it involves fracking.

AMANDA WINKLER21 August, 2021

Credit: Austin Farrington via Unsplash
This article was originally published by our sister site, Freethink, and is an installment of The Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology

Geothermal energy may finally be on the cusp of its big breakthrough. The often-overlooked energy option has seen a big uptick in demand, investments, and new technologies this past year.

Why this matters

As concerns about climate change grow, we're looking for ways to decarbonize, and renewable energy sources — such as wind and solar — are all the rage. In fact, in 2019 the U.S. energy consumption from renewables exceeded that of coal for the first time since 1885.

Geothermal could make clean energy accessible to everyone.

There's just one teeny-tiny problem with solar and wind: they only work when the sun is out or the wind is blowing. So, if you're completely reliant on solar to generate electricity for your house, you're going to be stumbling around in the dark at night.

That's why we need other energy sources that can pinch-hit for solar and wind.

Battery storage is one proposed solution. Another solution could be geothermal power and — if it can be proven to work reliably — it could be a cheap, reliable, renewable energy source that could make clean energy accessible to everyone.

Tap, tap, tap

4,000 miles below you — the very center of the Earth — is an incredibly hot place…hotter than the surface of the sun. That heat drifts upward so that even the Earth's crust is hot — as Vox reports, just a few miles below the ground you're standing on, there's enough energy to "power all of human civilization for generations to come."

Geothermal energy, as the name suggests, is all about harnessing that power. The concept is nothing new; we've actually been using some geothermal energy for centuries, tapping into geysers and hot springs for bathing, cooking, etc.

But to make electricity, you've got to go deeper.

Just digging a few miles below the surface can provide enough energy to generate electricity. In fact, the first commercial geothermal plant opened in 1960 in California, and there are 64 in operation today. These plants are located in areas with hot pressurized water — like a hot spring. Then, wells are drilled. As the hot water rises through the well, the heat is extracted…and voila, you've got sustainable electricity. The cooled water is then returned to the ground to be reheated.

That's all great — the problem is, doing it this way is pretty location-dependent. It works best in places like California or Iceland, where there's a lot of moving tectonic plates or volcanic activity to create these reservoirs.

But what about the rest of us?

Deeper into the furnace

Conventional geothermal depends on natural reservoirs because that's the easiest. But Earth's energy is everywhere, including in the dry deserts. The next-level form of geothermal energy (called enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS) is all about drilling into dry rock and creating man-made reservoirs by injecting pressurized water into the well, which fractures the rocks around it. The water passes through the hot, fractured rock and is collected and drawn up through another well on the side of the fractured area.

In theory, these artificial underground furnaces could be made anywhere in the world.

While EGS plants do exist (the first experiment dates back to 1974), due to the enormous expense and rudimentary techniques, they haven't shown a lot of promise — until recently. Thanks to better technology and an increase in funding, several successful EGS reservoirs can now generate electricity at "close to commercial prices," according to Quartz.

But as we drill deeper into dryer land, the engineering obstacles get bigger.

Baggage

In order to transition from the conventional location-dependent geothermal to EGS, a little support from the public is needed. That can be tricky because technically EGS is "fracking" — shooting liquid into the ground in order to fracture a rock. And fracking has some baggage when it comes to public opinion — in fact, in some areas it's completely banned.

But as David Roberts at Vox points out, EGS fracking is safer than gas fracking — the fluids used here have no risk of contaminating the water.

Still, it remains a dicey political issue. But without public support, experts fear that geothermal energy will remain an overlooked energy source, limited to states with natural reservoirs and no fracking bans.
The upshot

If the technology continues to advance and the public support is won, geothermal energy could be a game-changer — we could technically harness this energy anywhere. The DOE estimates that geothermal could provide around 5,157 gigawatts of electricity — about five times the electricity generation capacity in the US, enough to sustain us for years.

Or, if geothermal was used for direct heat, the DOE writes that it would be "theoretically sufficient to heat every US home and commercial building for at least 8,500 years."


Costa Rica Has Achieved 100% Renewable Energy – But What's ... ›
Volcanoes to power bitcoin mining in El Salvador - Big Think ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
Geothermal energy is poised for a breakout - Vox ›
Geothermal Basics | Department of Energy ›
Geothermal explained - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) ›

GEOTHERMAL
There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It.

Brad Plumer
Tue, August 29, 2023 

Steam rises from the Roosevelt Hot Springs, near the FORGE and Fervo geothermal sites outside of Milford, Utah, on July 31, 2023. 

(Brandon Thibodeaux/The New York Times)


BEAVER COUNTY, Utah — In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change — maybe even more.

It was a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota. But the softly whirring rig wasn’t searching for fossil fuels. It was drilling for heat.

Latimer’s company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth’s hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet.

“There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” Latimer said. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power. Everyone who looks into it gets obsessed with it.”

Traditional geothermal plants, which have existed for decades, work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this, however, so geothermal only produces 0.4% of America’s electricity.

But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it’s possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. The potential is enormous: The Energy Department estimates there’s enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat.

Dozens of geothermal companies have emerged with ideas.

Fervo is using fracking techniques — similar to those used for oil and gas — to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs. Eavor, a Canadian startup, is building large underground radiators with drilling methods pioneered in Alberta’s oil sands. Others dream of using plasma or energy waves to drill even deeper and tap “superhot” temperatures that could cleanly power thousands of coal-fired power plants by substituting steam for coal.

Still, obstacles to geothermal expansion loom. Investors are wary of the cost and risks of novel geothermal projects. Some worry about water use or earthquakes from drilling. Permitting is difficult. And geothermal gets less federal support than other technologies.

Still, the growing interest in geothermal is driven by the fact that the United States has gotten extraordinarily good at drilling since the 2000s. Innovations like horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing have pushed oil and gas production to record highs, much to the dismay of environmentalists. But these innovations can be adapted for geothermal, where drilling can make up half the cost of projects.

“Everyone knows about cost declines for wind and solar,” said Cindy Taff, who worked at Shell for 36 years before joining Sage Geosystems, a geothermal startup in Houston. “But we also saw steep cost declines for oil and gas drilling during the shale revolution. If we can bring that to geothermal, the growth could be huge.”

States like California are increasingly desperate for clean energy sources that can run at all hours. While wind and solar power are growing fast, they rely on fossil fuels like natural gas for backup when the sun sets and wind fades. Finding a replacement for gas is an acute climate challenge, and geothermal is one of the few plausible options.

“Geothermal has historically been overlooked,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said at a hearing. But with innovation, she added, “the potential is out there, I think, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

Fracking for Clean Energy

Near the town of Milford, Utah, sits the Blundell geothermal plant, surrounded by boiling mud pits, hissing steam vents and the skeletal ruins of a hot springs resort. Built in 1984, the 38-megawatt plant produces enough electricity for about 31,000 homes.

The Blundell plant relies on ancient volcanism and quirks of geology: Just below the surface are hot, naturally porous rocks that allow groundwater to percolate and heat up enough to create steam for generating electricity. But such conditions are rare. In much of the region, the underground hot rock is hard granite, and water can’t flow easily.

Three miles east, two teams are trying to tap that hot granite. One is Utah FORGE, a $220 million research effort funded by the Energy Department. The other is Fervo, a Houston-based startup.

Both use similar methods: First, drill two wells shaped like giant L’s, extending thousands of feet down into hot granite before curving and extending thousands of feet horizontally. Then, use fracking, which involves controlled explosives and high-pressure fluids, to create a series of cracks between the two wells. Finally, inject water into one well, where it will hopefully migrate through the cracks, heat up past 300 degrees Fahrenheit and come out the other well.

This is “enhanced geothermal,” and people have struggled with the engineering difficulties since the 1970s.

But in July, FORGE announced it had successfully sent water between two wells. Two weeks later, Fervo announced its own breakthrough: A 30-day test in Nevada found the process could produce enough heat for electricity. Fervo is now drilling wells for its first 400-megawatt commercial power plant in Utah, next to the FORGE site.

“Those are major accomplishments, in a time frame faster than we expected,” said Lauren Boyd, head of the Energy Department’s Geothermal Technologies Office, which estimates that geothermal could supply 12% of America’s electricity by 2050 if technology improves.

Latimer seemed less surprised. Before founding Fervo in 2017, he worked as a drilling engineer for BHP, an oil and gas firm. There, he became convinced that previous attempts at enhanced geothermal failed because they hadn’t taken advantage of oil and gas innovations like horizontal drilling or fiber-optic sensors.

Fervo didn’t invent many of the tools it uses. In Utah, drilling is conducted by Helmerich & Payne, a major oil and gas contractor that developed a high-tech rig with software and sensors that allow operators to precisely steer drill bits underground. Sixty percent of Fervo’s employees came from oil and gas.

“If we had to invent this stuff ourselves it would have taken years or decades,” Latimer said. “Our big insight was that people in geothermal simply weren’t talking enough to people in oil and gas.”

The hard part now is making enhanced geothermal affordable. The Energy Department wants costs to plummet to $45 per megawatt-hour for widespread deployment. Fervo’s costs are “much higher,” Latimer said, though he thinks repeated drilling can lower them.

Research at FORGE could help. Drilling deeper and hotter can make projects more cost-effective, since more heat means more energy. But existing oil and gas equipment wasn’t designed for temperatures above 350 degrees, so FORGE is testing new tools in hotter rock.

“No one else is willing to take the risks we can take,” said Joseph Moore, a University of Utah geologist who leads FORGE.

Enhanced geothermal faces other challenges, Moore cautioned. Underground geology is complex, and it’s tricky to create fractures that maintain heat and don’t lose too much water over time. Drillers must avoid triggering earthquakes, a problem that plagued geothermal projects in South Korea and Switzerland. FORGE closely monitors its Utah site for seismic activity and has found nothing worrisome.

Permitting is tough. While enhanced geothermal could, in theory, work anywhere, the best resources are on federal land, where regulatory reviews take years and it’s often easier to win permission for oil and gas drilling because of exemptions won by fossil fuel companies.

Still, interest is rising. California is struggling with electricity shortfalls and recently had to extend the life of three old, polluting gas plants. Regulators have ordered utilities to add 1,000 megawatts of electricity from clean sources that can run at all hours to backstop fluctuating wind and solar supplies. One electricity provider, Clean Power Alliance, agreed to buy 33 megawatts from Fervo’s Utah plant.

“If we can find it, we have a pretty big appetite for geothermal,” said Ted Bardacke, Clean Power Alliance’s CEO. “We’re adding more solar every year for daytime and have a huge build-out of batteries to shift power to the evening. But what do we do at night? That’s where geothermal can really help out.”

Underground Radiators and Superhot Rocks

Fervo faces fierce competition for the future of geothermal.

One alternative is a “closed loop” system, which involves drilling sealed pipes into hot, dry rocks and then circulating fluid through the pipes, creating a giant radiator. This avoids the unpredictability of water flowing through underground rock and doesn’t involve fracking, which is banned in some areas. The downside: more complicated drilling.

Eavor, a Calgary-based company, has already tested a closed-loop system in Alberta and is now building its first 65-megawatt plant in Germany.

“If geothermal is ever going to scale, it has to be a repeatable process you can do over and over,” said John Redfern, Eavor’s CEO. “We think we’ve got the best way to do that.”

In Texas, Sage Geosystems is pursuing fracked wells that act as batteries. When there’s surplus electricity on the grid, water gets pumped into the well. In times of need, pressure and heat in the fractures pushes water back up, delivering energy.

The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill 6 miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam. If it works, experts say, “superhot” geothermal could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.

“The ultimate goal should be to get to the superhot stuff,” said Bruce Hill of the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.

But going that deep requires futuristic tools. GA Drilling, a Slovakian company, is developing plasma torches for drilling at high temperatures. Quaise, a Massachusetts-based startup, wants to use millimeter waves — high-frequency microwaves — to pulverize rock and reach depths of up to 12 miles.

“There are huge engineering challenges,” said Carlos Araque, Quaise’s CEO.

“But,” he added, “imagine if you could drill down next to a coal plant and get steam that’s hot enough to power that plant’s turbines. Replacing coal at thousands of coal plants around the world. That’s the level of geothermal we’re trying to unlock.”

Oil Interest

The U.S. government plays a leading role in nurturing risky new energy technologies. But lawmakers often overlook geothermal. The recent infrastructure bill provided $9.5 billion for clean hydrogen but just $84 million for advanced geothermal.

“It’s been hard for geothermal to fight its way into the conversation,” said Jamie Beard, founder of Project InnerSpace, a Texas-based nonprofit that promotes geothermal.

Beard has spent years trying to get oil and gas companies excited about geothermal. That’s slowly happening: Devon Energy invested $10 million into Fervo, while BP and Chevron are backing Eavor. Nabors, a drilling-service provider, has invested in GA Drilling, Quaise and Sage.

In Oklahoma, a consortium of oil and gas firms led by Baker Hughes recently launched an effort to explore converting abandoned wells into geothermal plants.

“Historically, the upfront costs and risks of geothermal have been challenging,” said Ajit Menon, vice president for geothermal at Baker Hughes. “But we think it’s got a huge role to play. And we have workers with the right skills, the right technology. You can see why it makes sense for us.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

 FRACKING  BY ANY OTHER NAME

The Rise of Geothermal Power Networks

By Felicity Bradstock - Aug 13, 2024

• Governments worldwide are increasingly interested in geothermal energy as a clean, renewable source of heating and electricity.
• 
  
• The UK and US have significant untapped geothermal resources that could be developed to power communities and support decarbonization efforts.
• 
  
• Geothermal power networks, which distribute heat from underground reservoirs, are emerging as a promising solution for sustainable energy.
• 
  

As governments rapidly search for ways to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels to renewable alternatives, there could be huge potential for developing natural geothermal resources underground. Investing in networked geothermal power could provide abundant clean heating and electricity for millions of households and businesses worldwide. Although countries with abundant geothermal resources have been tapping into the natural power source for thousands of years, governments have only recently funded greater research into the use of advanced geothermal systems aimed at expanding the use of the energy source. 

Geothermal energy is a type of renewable energy that comes from the Earth’s core. Energy can be extracted from the thermal sources stored in rocks and fluids several miles below the Earth’s surface. Underground geothermal reservoirs of steam and hot water can be used for electricity generation and other heating and cooling applications in rich geothermal regions. Accessing geothermal energy requires the drilling of a borehole at a depth of between two and three miles underground, flowing cold water at low pressures through hot rocks, and transporting the warm water to the Earth’s surface through a second borehole for use as heating or for electricity generation.  

In the U.K., a 2023 report suggested there is significant potential for the development of the country’s geothermal resources to provide clean heating and electricity. The report highlights several regions of untapped geothermal energy in the U.K., which could be developed to provide networked geothermal power. Many of these areas happen to coincide with towns and cities included in the government’s Levelling Up White Paper, which lists several deprived parts of the U.K. that require greater attention and investment. These areas include Redcar and Cleveland, Middlesbrough, East Lindsey, Hartlepool, Northumberland and Bassetlaw. Other areas of potential for geothermal energy production include Newcastle upon Tyne, Northeast Derbyshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire and Nottingham. 

The MP Kieran Mullan, who managed the production of the report, said there was a “strong overlap” between areas where investment is required and the best geothermal locations, which could encourage greater support for renewable energy development in these areas. Mullan stated of the potential to tap into the U.K.’s geothermal resources, “Unlike wind or solar this technology provides baseload – it is there constantly. And our expertise in drilling in the North Sea means we are well placed to motor ahead.” 

The U.K. has vast amounts of untapped geothermal power, with enough geothermal energy underground to heat every home for a hundred years, according to estimates. However, Mullen emphasised that there is “catching up to do because across Europe there has been much stronger government intervention to support nascent deep geothermal industries in those countries.” 

The U.S. is also looking to tap into the natural energy stored underground through investment in new technologies to tap into geothermal resources and distribute the power. Earlier this year, Eversource Energy commissioned the first networked geothermal neighbourhood in the U.S. to be run by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. There is great optimism around the potential for project expansion, as much of the equipment needed to tap into geothermal sources is already in place. Utilities can use gas line equipment to deploy networked geothermal power, circulating fluid rather than gas., with the potential to set up networks anywhere. 

Audrey Schulman, the executive director of the nonprofit climate-solutions incubator HEETlabs, stated, “In the end, what we would like is if the gas utilities become thermal utilities.” Eversource is using a geothermal loop in Framingham, which could ultimately be connected to an adjacent neighbourhood and another, to expand the network. Schulman explained, “Each individual, shared loop can be interconnected, like Lego blocks, to grow bigger and bigger.”

While a shift to geothermal power may have seemed impossible just a few years ago, there is growing pressure from the White House for utilities to decarbonise. Last year, New York became the first state to ban natural gas hookups in most new buildings. This ban is expected to be rolled out in several other states in the coming years, including California, Vermont and Colorado. This gives utilities little choice other than to look for clean heating alternatives. There is also a wide range of incentives, provided by the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies, to invest in renewable energy and clean technologies. Eversource Energy and two dozen other utilities, which together represent 47 percent of the country’s natural gas customers, are joining forces to establish an information-sharing coalition, known as the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative, which is expected to encourage more geothermal power networking projects across the U.S. 

Following several decades of stagnation in the geothermal energy sector, governments are once again looking to the abundant renewable energy source to provide heating and power in place of natural gas. Greater investment in the sector could support the development of large networks of geothermal power, offering millions of households clean heating. Some countries, such as Iceland, are already well acquainted with geothermal power, with countries such as the U.K. and U.S. expected to soon follow.  

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

The DOE Is Betting Big On A Geothermal Game-Changer In Utah

By Haley Zaremba - Aug 08, 2023

• Geothermal energy is currently limited to geographical hotspots, but enhanced geothermal seeks to produce energy from deep drilling anywhere.
• 
  
• Enhanced geothermal offers a continuous baseload power source, overcoming the intermittency challenges of solar and wind energy.
• 
  
• Despite its potential benefits, enhanced geothermal's high upfront costs pose challenges, but its low operational costs and vast potential could make it a significant player in the clean energy sector.

A huge experiment to produce electricity using enhanced geothermal energy is taking place underground in Utah. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is funding an experimental pilot project drilling well over a mile deep into the Earth’s crust to access a continuous heat source for clean energy production. While the technology is in its infancy and there are questions about whether enhanced geothermal could ever be cost-competitive with other forms of clean energy production, the DOE is convinced that it’s a good enough idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on. 

Today, geothermal energy makes up a tiny fraction of energy production on a global scale. All told, it makes up less than 1% of the world’s primary energy supply. This is because currently, geothermal is only produced in geologically anomalous places where water carrying the residual heat of the Earth’s core has cracked through to the surface via hot water vents like hot springs or geysers. “Iceland, straddling two diverging tectonic plates, hits a geological jackpot and produces about a quarter of its electricity that way; in Kenya, volcanism in the Great Rift Valley helps push that figure to more than 40 percent,” Wired recently reported. “In the US, it’s just 0.4 percent, almost all of it coming from California and Nevada.”

The idea behind enhanced geothermal energy is that if you drill down deep enough, geothermal energy can be produced anywhere – not just the places where heat happens to be more accessible closer to the surface. Until recently, the idea was a bit more science fiction than fact, but drilling technologies have improved immensely thanks to the fracking boom of the last few decades. Whereas deep drilling and cracking through rock used to be a headache with little guarantee of success, it’s now a much more exact science.

What’s more, geothermal offers some extremely enticing benefits that other clean energies do not. First and most importantly, it’s a potential baseload power source, meaning that it produces steadily and continuously. This is a huge advantage over more popular renewable energies like wind and solar power, which are variable, as they depend on weather, seasons, and the time of day for production. And peaks of production rarely line up neatly with peaks of demand. This creates a huge challenge for the nascent energy storage sector, as well as our aging power grids, which were not designed with variable energy in mind. As such, a baseload clean energy source solves a number of the clean energy revolution’s most wicked problems – if it can be effectively scaled up and out. 

Second, enhanced geothermal energy takes up much less surface area than other forms of renewable energy production. Land use is currently one of the biggest hurdles for clean energy expansion as disputes and competition for land tie up industrial-scale solar and wind farms around the country and around the world. Late last year, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company released an analytic report naming land shortages as one of three key challenges facing the renewable revolution, along with long permitting processes and gravely under-prepared power grids. “Utility-scale solar and wind farms require at least ten times as much space per unit of power as coal- or natural gas–fired power plants, including the land used to produce and transport the fossil fuels,” McKinsey reports, adding that “wind turbines are often placed half a mile apart, while large solar farms span thousands of acres.” Since enhanced geothermal’s reach is down into the earth, and not across landscapes, it could be a key workaround for such issues. 

While geothermal presents some key advantages and circumvents some of the biggest pitfalls of the renewable revolution, however, enhanced geothermal is still wickedly expensive, and by no means easy. While the up-front costs are considerable, however, the operational costs are relatively low. And once the heat source is tapped, it’s a gift that keeps on giving, forever. “The question is whether [enhanced geothermal systems] will be more or less practical than building a nuclear plant or a dam or installing carbon capture at a natural gas plant,” says journalist Gregory Barber, who has written about geothermal energy for Wired. “There are good reasons to think it will be—especially if you factor in safety and ecological concerns presented by the alternatives—but it's early.”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

FRACKING BY ANY OTHER NAME

Government Funding Fuels Geothermal Expansion

By Felicity Bradstock - Nov 23, 2024

Recent technological advancements, coupled with significant government funding, have propelled the geothermal energy industry forward.

The US and Europe are leading the charge, with new legislation and substantial investments paving the way for a geothermal boom.

Asian countries, including China and Indonesia, are also rapidly expanding their geothermal capacities.



Following an influx of funding in the sector in recent years, there have been significant advances in geothermal energy. More countries are backing the clean energy source in a bid to diversify their energy mix and shift away from a reliance on fossil fuels towards green alternatives. In addition to government backing for geothermal projects, many private companies, including several technology giants, are investing in the clean energy source to help meet the growing electricity demand due to the commercial rollout of advanced technologies.

People have been tapping into geothermal energy worldwide from natural heat sources, such as hot springs, for centuries. However, over the last half a century, energy companies have been increasingly looking to source geothermal energy at less conventional locations. This involves the drilling of a borehole up to several kilometres deep, where the rocks are around 200°C, and injecting water and sand at high pressure. This creates fractures in the rocks, which increases their permeability and produces a reservoir of hot water that can be extracted via a second borehole. This water is then used to generate electricity.

In recent years, this process has been modified to incorporate enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). This development was only made possible by applying fracking techniques used in the oil and gas industry. Energy companies have discovered better ways to fracture rock and drill horizontally, even in high-temperature environments. This advancement has been supported by billions in government funding in the U.S. and several other countries around the globe.

This November, in the U.S., two major geothermal bills passed in the House, which is expected to clear the way for a clean energy drilling boom. The CLEAN Act and HEATS Act remove many of the federal permitting regulations that are currently required to drill for geothermal power plants. The bills saw wide support from both Republicans and Democrats and will now go to the Senate for approval.

The Department of Energy (DoE) has pumped billions into research and development in geothermal energy in recent years. It predicts that $25 billion in near-term geothermal investment could spur greater innovation that could lead to millions of homes being powered by the clean energy source. Most U.S. geothermal resources are located on federal land in the west of the country. The CLEAN Act would require the Department of the Interior to hold an annual lease auction for geothermal drilling.

A week before the passing of the two acts, California passed the HEATS Act, which exempts new geothermal wells from the current federal permitting laws, so long as less than half of their footprint is on federal land. Congresswoman Young Kim argued in favour of the bill, stating, “While geothermal uses ”a similar extraction process to that of oil and gas” to exploit a form of clean energy, it faces more stringent permitting requirements than the oil and gas sector does.”

Progress is also being seen in Western Europe, following the backing of a strategy to boost the region’s geothermal energy output by EU lawmakers. This is expected to make way for the development of geothermal projects in geologic basins in the Netherlands, western Germany, and Belgium. In the EU, geothermal energy contributes just 0.2 percent of electricity generation at present, lower than the world average of 0.5 percent.

In 2023, 50 geothermal power plants were under various stages of development across Europe. Regulatory uncertainties at the EU level have been blamed for discouraging greater private investment in the sector in the past.

In November, Germany broke ground on the Laufzorn II geothermal heating plant in Bavaria. The Federal Ministry of Economics is investing almost $65 million in the project and the municipality will invest an additional $158 million. Germany has been a leader in geothermal energy in recent years, alongside Turkey, Italy, France, and Croatia. Europe also has several emerging markets that are beginning to tap into the energy source, including Spain and Greece.

Several countries across Asia are also looking to expand their geothermal resources. The Philippines, Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea are some of the countries expanding their geothermal markets. China is the world's fastest-growing geothermal heat market, seeing a CAGR of over 21 percent between 2015 and 2019 and reaching 14.2 GW of capacity in 2019. The China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) reported an increase in geothermal heating capacity of 15 percent from 2023 to 2024.


Meanwhile, Indonesia is adding 90 MW of installed renewable energy capacity to its grid, with three geothermal power plants expected to commence operations by the end of the year. Eniya Listiani Dewi, the director general of Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, stated, “We’ve seen increasing geothermal adoption in the last 10 years… We hope it will continue to increase more significantly.”

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

Geothermal Power Emerges as Trump’s Favorite Clean Energy

FRACKING BY ANY OTHER NAME

By Felicity Bradstock - Oct 12, 2025

• Geothermal energy remains one of the few renewable sources still supported by the Trump administration, benefiting from Biden-era incentives and bipartisan backing.
• 
  
• Innovative firms like Fervo Energy and Sage Geothermal are pioneering advanced extraction methods that boost efficiency and expand geothermal access beyond traditional hotspots.
• 
  
• Major collaborations and endorsements - from Ormat and Baker Hughes to Bill Gates - are propelling geothermal toward large-scale commercialization across the U.S.
• 
  

One of the few renewable energy sources that the Trump administration has not yet criticised is geothermal power, as companies across the United States continue to develop innovative geothermal projects with financial support from Biden-era policies. The sweeping budget legislation that President Trump signed in July preserved most key tax credits for geothermal power. Bipartisan support has encouraged several energy companies and startups to invest heavily in research and development into advanced geothermal operations in recent years, with promising results, giving hope for future clean energy production.

People have been tapping into geothermal energy from natural heat sources worldwide for centuries. Over the last fifty years, energy companies have tapped into geothermal sources using machinery to access harder-to-reach reserves. To achieve this, companies drill a borehole up to several kilometres deep, where the rocks are around 200°C, and inject water and sand at high pressure. This creates fractures in the rocks, which increases their permeability and produces a reservoir of hot water that can be extracted via a second borehole for the water to be used to generate electricity.

Geothermal energy contributes just 0.4 percent of the U.S. energy mix, largely due to technological and geographical constraints to accessing geothermal reservoirs. Existing plants depend on naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water and steam, in regions such as Northern California and Nevada, to power turbines and generate power. However, companies are now exploring new ways to access geothermal resources using techniques developed for oil fracking and innovative new methods to reach harder-to-access reservoirs in unconventional regions.

Sage Geothermal is now using heat and pressure to generate more power than conventional extraction methods through its cycle-based heat recovery approach. The company’s CEO, Cindy Taff, told Forbes, “By using the natural elasticity of the rock, we can bring hot water to the surface without pumps. Unlike traditional approaches, we maintain pressure in the system rather than venting it at the surface, and we hold open fractures with pressure instead of adding bridging materials like sand or proppant. These innovations reduce friction and energy losses, boosting net power output by 25 to 50 percent compared to other next-generation geothermal technologies.”

In August, Sage announced it was partnering with the international geothermal energy developer Ormat Technologies to roll out its next-generation technology at an Ormat facility in either Nevada or Utah. This is expected to help Sage speed up the development of its first commercial power-generation facility by around two years. Taff said, “For us, the ability to scale faster with Ormat is huge… But it’s also a great opportunity for Ormat to reach a deeper [geothermal] resource than what they’re targeting now.”

Related: Don’t Mess with Texas: Organized Oilfield Theft Triggers Statewide Response

In September, Sage signed an agreement with the geothermal startup Fervo Energy to advance their geothermal activities. The two companies have both invested heavily in research and development into alternative geothermal extraction methods and could work together to advance this work. Fervo recently signed a deal with tech giant Google to provide it with clean power, while Sage has completed an agreement with Meta.

Houston-headquartered Fervo Energy was approved to deploy 2 GW of geothermal power in Beaver County, Utah, by the Department of the Interior last year, with its facility set to begin generating power in 2026. The company uses an Enhanced Geothermal Systems (ESG) proprietary technology to drill horizontally into geothermal reservoirs, allowing it to access multiple wells from a single location and showing promise for greater unconventional geothermal energy generation.

In September, the energy technology company Baker Hughes was contracted by Fervo Energy to supply equipment for five of its power plants in the Cape Station project in Utah. The plants are expected to produce 300 MW of electricity once fully operational, enough to power about 180,000 homes. Baker Hughes will supply engineering and manufacturing equipment as well as turboexpanders and the BRUSH Power Generation generator.

The firm’s CEO, Lorenzo Simonelli, said, “Geothermal power is one of several renewable energy sources expanding globally and proving to be a vital contributor to advancing sustainable energy development. “By working with a leader like Fervo Energy and leveraging our comprehensive portfolio of technology solutions, we are supporting the scaling of lower-carbon power solutions that are integral to meet growing global energy demand.”

In September, Bill Gates visited Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project alongside Senator John Curtis. He described the company’s horizontal drilling method as a “truly innovative approach” and discussed the role companies like Fervo will play in maintaining America’s energy independence. The founder of tech giant Microsoft said, “Geothermal is one of the most promising ways to deliver clean energy that’s reliable and affordable.”

As the outlook for renewable energy in the United States becomes more uncertain, following the Trump administration's attacks on solar and wind power, the geothermal energy sector appears to have maintained the backing of the government as several companies continue to expand operations. Investments in innovative geothermal extraction technologies show great promise for the commercial rollout of new operations across the country. 

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

Tapping into the heat beneath Nevadans’ feet

Amy Alonzo, The Nevada Independent
April 29, 2024

Nevada (Verena Wolff/dpa)

This story was originally published by The Nevada Independent. Sign up for its newsletters here.


With highly fractured, permeable ground, the Great Basin’s geology makes it one of the most geothermally rich areas in the world. Hot fluid rises easily toward the surface, ideal for driving power plants, and present-day Nevada is the second-largest producer of geothermal energy in the nation behind California.

Tapping into hot fluids below the ground to spin turbines in power plants that generate electricity and boasting a lower carbon footprint than many other power sources, geothermal accounts for about 9 percent of energy generated in Nevada. But that number could be much higher, scientists say. The Silver State could produce about 30 gigawatts (GW) of geothermal power — about 30 times more than it does now.

“We truly live in a classic geothermal province, one of the largest on Earth,” said Jim Faulds, state geologist and member of UNR’s Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy, at a geothermal symposium hosted earlier this month at the university.

Established in 2000 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the center aims to accelerate discoveries of commercially viable hidden geothermal systems in the Great Basin while reducing exploration and development risks.

The takeaway from the symposium’s panel of geothermal producers? Renewable energy developers are looking to the state to be an even larger player in the geothermal energy market.

“Nevada is uniquely well positioned in the world with geothermal,” said Kerry Rohrmeier, government affairs manager for Ormat Technologies, an international company based in Reno.

The DOE estimates the nation needs between 700 and 900 GW of clean power by 2050 for a decarbonized economy, and geothermal has the potential to account for nearly 10 percent of that.

The United States has the most installed geothermal capacity in the world, generating 3.7 gigawatts of geothermal power at plants across the West, including more than two dozen in Nevada. Yet geothermal accounts for just 0.4 percent of the nation’s overall electricity.


The production of geothermal energy has taken off in fits and starts because it’s not as simple as putting up a solar panel or wind turbine, Faulds said.

“The Earth is complicated. You think you have a decent resource, and it doesn’t pan out,” he said. “There’s those kinds of things that make geothermal a little bit slower than some other forms of renewable energy.”

But with a low carbon footprint and the ability to continuously produce energy, scientists and energy experts think it has the potential to be a game changer in the nation’s push for clean energy.

And Nevada, the state with the greatest geothermal resources in the nation, has the chance to lead that charge, according to scientists and geothermal energy producers. Recently, major power purchase agreements were signed between geothermal producers and entities such as the University of Utah, Google, Southern California Public Power Authority and NV Energy for geothermal energy produced in Nevada, with some contracts extending as long as 40 years.

“We are now in a new wave of geothermal exploration,” said Cary Lindsey, geothermal research scientist with the Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy.

Jim Faulds, state geologist and member of UNR’s Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy, speaks at a geothermal symposium April 16, 2024, at UNR. (Amy Alonzo/The Nevada Independent)

The heat beneath our feet

Across the Great Basin, particularly in northwestern Nevada, the state’s crust is being pulled apart due to tectonic forces. That pulling motion results in the state’s land mass growing by roughly 2 acres per year.

That pulling of the crust is good for geothermal energy production, Faulds said.

“If the crust gets pulled apart, it gets thin, and you’re bringing hot mantle closer to the surface and you have a high geothermal gradient,” he said.

Geothermal power plants tap into those hot fluids below the ground to spin turbines in power plants that generate electricity. Power can be generated from fluids with temperatures higher than 194 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nevada has 27 geothermal plants, mostly in the northern portion of the state, that combined have the capacity to generate up to 827 megawatts of power at any given time, although many don’t operate at full capacity and only about half that amount is transferred to the grid. A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts, enough to power as many as 800 households.

That number is likely to grow substantially.

The Nevada Division of Minerals has received more than three dozen permit applications for geothermal exploration so far this year, a number fluid minerals manager Dustin Holcomb calls “just bonkers.”

Revenue from geothermal in the state is increasing as well. The state collected $14.3 million in geothermal leases and royalties last year, up from slightly less than $10 million in 2022 and $8.5 million in 2021. All geothermal rentals and royalties are split 50/25/25 between the state, the generating county and the federal government.

The DOE is pouring substantial funding into geothermal research across the Great Basin. The focus is largely on enhanced geothermal, which often utilizes horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology developed by the oil and gas industry. This technology reaches heat in areas untappable by conventional geothermal plants, using drilling and hydraulic fracturing to allow fluid to move through hot rock that was previously impermeable.

The DOE has an enhanced geothermal test site in Utah — FORGE — focused on higher drilling speeds and decreased implementation costs. The technologies tested at FORGE are being utilized in Nevada at a project developed by Fervo Energy in partnership with Google and being used to power its data centers.

While the technology for enhanced geothermal continues to get fleshed out, the department is also focusing on conventional geothermal energy production.


UNR’s Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy’s INGENIOUS project received $10 million in federal funding to map out and build a playbook for conventional geothermal energy production — geothermal that doesn’t rely on fracking.

The goal is to map geothermally favorable resources across the Great Basin and create a template for geothermal exploration, Faulds said. Nearly half of the region’s geothermal resources are hidden, meaning they have no above-ground outlet such as a hot spring, and they are often discovered by accident, Faulds said, during mineral exploration or while drilling an agricultural well.

The Dixie Valley toad. (Patrick Donnelly/Center for Biological Diversity)

The need for more data and environmental oversight

Geothermal isn’t a panacea though.

“Solar, wind, geothermal — they all have their own environmental impacts. Some are more well understood than others,” Jaina Moan, external affairs director for The Nature Conservancy’s Northern Nevada Field Office, said after the symposium. “There’s drawbacks to any technology we deploy.”

Historically, conventional geothermal exploration didn’t take surface expressions such as hot springs into consideration, as evidenced by the ongoing battle over a proposed geothermal plant in the Dixie Valley area that could threaten an endangered toad. Hot springs in the area are home to the endangered Dixie Valley toad, and a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — the agency that listed the toad as endangered at the behest of the Center for Biological Diversity — found that operating a geothermal plant in the area would have significant impact in Dixie Valley by reducing or eliminating discharge into the wetlands.

But technology and science are increasing understanding of the Earth's subsurface, its complexity and the relationship between hydrology and geology and mitigating those issues, Faulds said, adding that creating a database documenting hot springs, nearby energy developments and ensuing environmental impacts — a database that is currently lacking — would benefit industry and conservationists alike and could help prevent environmental issues in the future.

But the federal government seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management adopted categorical exclusions to expedite geothermal exploration permitting. If the agency determines an exploratory project meets exclusionary criteria, the exploratory project can bypass the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and avoid drafting an environmental assessment for permitting exploration, although any subsequent development would require NEPA analysis.

The details of the exclusions have not been outlined by the Bureau of Land Management and is a confusing approach to policy making, Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a call with The Nevada Independent.

“Why would you issue these categorical exclusions without sharing what they are?” he asked. “Without having seen the exclusions, we don’t know if there’s an issue or not … but how are we to know?”

And ultimately, much of the renewable energy produced in the Silver State is exported across state lines, according to Faulds.

This exporting of geothermal power means that Nevada’s landscape — yet again — bears the brunt of clean energy generation while reaping just a fraction of the benefits.

This story was updated at 10:17 a.m. 4/25/24 to correct that Nevada receives 9 percent of its power from geothermal sources, not 4 percent.