The Great Geothermal Talent Shortage
Haley Zaremba

Geothermal energy is poised for a breakthrough in the United States. One of the vanishingly few clean energy forms that made it through the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill unscathed, the time is right for the carbon-free energy source to take center stage. With a positive policy environment and rapid advancements in technology, there’s only one critical hurdle in geothermal energy’s way – an exceedingly shallow talent pool.

The geothermal revolution will need a whole lot of geologists – but a huge number of those qualified are already (quite gainfully) employed in the oil and gas sector or the mining industry. It will also need drilling engineers, pressure control specialists, and data scientists, among other specialized roles. “Geothermal needs more than geologists—this is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Marcus Oesterberg, chief operating officer of geothermal company Ignis H2 Energy, recently told the Wall Street Journal.

“This is no longer a niche, backroom segment of energy,” Oesterberg continued. “It’s stepping into the spotlight as a viable, front-line solution in the global energy transition. And to meet that moment, we need to expand our thinking around talent.”

As geothermal energy gains traction, it will likely need to borrow or poach talent from the oil and gas industry, since the knowledge and experience those workers have is extremely applicable in this new context. But experts say that geologists and other would-be geothermal employees simply aren’t aware of the opportunities. Class sizes for geothermal-specific college courses remain small compared to classes oriented toward oil and gas – but there is hope that this can change with some awareness-raising. 

“If we can figure out a way to educate the younger generation that you can actually have a career that you can be proud of and help solve a problem the world is facing, but also work in the extractive industry, I think that could go a long way,” says Jeanine Vany, executive vice president of corporate affairs for Canadian geothermal firm Eavor.

Today, geothermal energy is still a small and nascent sector, providing just 0.4 percent of U.S. utility-scale electricity generation as of 2023. But recent breakthroughs in advanced geothermal indicate that it could soon take up a significantly larger share of the U.S. energy mix. Until now, geothermal energy has only been feasible in places where the heat from the Earth’s core naturally reaches the Earth’s surface, like in geysers and hot springs. 

But scientists have been making major headway on drilling ever deeper into the ground to access geothermal heat from virtually anywhere on Earth. Borrowing hydraulic fracturing technology from the oil and gas sector, companies have been making major headway digging to new depths. Some researchers are even playing around with technology from nuclear fusion to essentially melt through rock to dig deeper and faster. 

“The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit,” the New York Times reported in 2023. “At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam.” This ‘superhot’ form of geothermal “could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.” 

While we’re not quite there yet, we’re getting closer at a rapid clip – and advanced geothermal could not come at a more opportune time. Energy demand in the United States is growing for the first time in a decade, driven by power-hungry artificial intelligence and the rapid spread of data centers. Meeting this growing need is critical to national energy security, and geothermal could go a long way to satisfying it without compromising climate goals. A recent report from the Rhodium Group found that “geothermal could economically meet up to 64% of expected demand growth by the early 2030s” as long as their baseline assumptions prove accurate.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the Bay Area, and music/culture reviews.

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