Send this article to a friend:
April
14
2025
|
Send this article to a friend: April |
|
Geothermal Energy Poised for Significant Growth in the US
As the Atlantic pointed out in a long-form article on the subject this week, Trump’s ‘Drill, baby, drill’ ethos extends to boring holes to tap into the radiant heat from the Earth’s core. “His administration is embracing geothermal energy, which is primed for a very American boom,” the article reads. This is because geothermal energy can be developed hand-in-hand with the oil and gas industry, which can provide the drilling technology needed to access high enough temperatures to create energy at a commercially viable scale. “The U.S. has a number of different superpowers and putting holes in the ground and taking things out of those holes is one of them — and doing so more economically and more efficiently than basically any other place on Earth,” Drew Nelson, vice president of Project InnerSpace, was recently quoted by Cipher News. Currently, geothermal energy is only deployed at scale in places where the heat from the Earth’s core naturally escapes to the surface, like in the geysers of Iceland. Scaling geothermal energy up and out in locations that do not benefit from such geological anomalies will require digging deep into the earth. The Earth's crust varies from about 3 to 47 miles in thickness, with most of those thin bits located way out in the deep ocean. One way of digging through that crust is by using hydraulic fracturing technologies already widely used in the oil and gas industry. “The embrace of advanced geothermal under this new administration, I’d say is not a giant surprise,” Alex Kania, managing director at Marathon Capital, recently told the Associated Press. “It’s reliable, it’s efficient, and frankly their ties to the more conventional forms of energy production, I think, is probably not lost on some people.” Unlike wind and solar energies, geothermal is a baseload energy, meaning it can produce energy around the clock. This makes it a very attractive alternative to variable energies, which will require large-scale energy storage solutions to maintain grid stability and keep energy prices stable. These benefits make geothermal a rare bipartisan energy solution. As the Associated Press highlights, the former energy secretary under President Biden, Jennifer Granholm, was a vocal supporter of geothermal as a climate solution, and the current Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a geothermal hawk, having invested in geothermal companies through his Denver-based firm Liberty Energy. “This is just an awesome resource that’s under our feet,” Wright said in a March event hosted by Project InnerSpace, a non-profit geothermal advocacy organization. As a result of geothermal’s critical benefits and its current broad support, investment dollars are starting to pour in. According to projections from the United States Department of Energy, next generation geothermal projects – also known as ‘enhanced’ geothermal – could provide about 90 gigawatts of carbon-free energy in the U.S. by 2050. That’s enough to power at least 65 million homes. Enthusiasm about geothermal is not limited to the United States. The technology has emerged as a global solution to the growing problem of runaway energy consumption from data centers, driven by the AI boom. This need has placed new urgency on developing geothermal as a viable option in any location. The International Energy Agency estimates that geothermal energy could meet 15% of global demand by the mid-century if technology continues to advance and costs continue to fall accordingly. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
|
Send this article to a friend:
 |
 |
 |
“It’s going to be the decade of geothermal.” That’s according to Cindy Taff, chief executive of geothermal company Sage Geosystems, in an 