Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 24, 2025
Amazing advances in enhanced geothermal!
A fast-growing enhanced geothermal industry offers 24/7 clean power for America.
Tell Congress to save the clean energy tax credits incentivizing geothermal innovation!
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Reasons For Hope
Rising-star U.S. enhanced geothermal startup Fervo has drilled their hottest, deepest, and fastest geothermal well yet! The Sugarloaf well at their Cape Station project in Utah goes 15,765 feet (about 4,800 meters) down, to harvest 24/7 clean energy from 520°F (about 271°C) rocks — and it was drilled in 16 days, 79% faster than the industry baseline. Relatedly, they just got $206 million in new investment to build out 500 MW of geothermal clean electricity capacity in Utah by 2028.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) produce energy by drilling deep wells, injecting water underground until it heats up, and then drilling another well to let that water rise back up and turn a turbine, producing emissions-free electricity. There’s a lot of good news here, but to get an idea of just how incredible the potential is, here are two vital points about EGS:
It can be done nonstop at night and in any weather, providing clean 24/7 “baseload power.”
And it can use the huge amount of existing drilling technology we have lying around from the oil and gas industry.
And this isn’t an isolated incident: a whole new sector is arising to produce a new scalable source of much-needed 24/7 clean baseload power! Startup XGS Energy recently signed a deal to provide 150 MW of geothermal energy in New Mexico for Meta’s AI data centers by 2030. This follows up on Meta’s previous 2024 deal with geothermal energy storage startup Sage Geosystems, a company which is already building the world’s first “geopressure battery” in Texas.
Over in Europe, a new experiment in Germany is trying a different closed-loop enhanced geothermal system. Canadian startup Eavor, working in Bavaria, used real-time magnetic ranging (brand-new tech that cuts costs dramatically) to drill a borehole which sends water 4.5 kilometers (4,500 meters) underground, far enough to it to heat up amid 160°C rock layers and then rise back up to turn a turbine and produce electricity (and/or power district heating via a no-contact heat exchanger).
The U.S. is well positioned to lead on advanced geothermal, with a broad field of off-the-shelf parts and experienced workers from the oil and gas industry available to work in the fast-advancing and deployable-anywhere field of clean drilling. A recent study in Nature calculated that “enhanced geothermal is expected to achieve plant capital costs (US$4,500 kW−1) and a levelized cost of electricity (US$80 MWh−1) that are competitive with market electricity prices by 2027”!
As Congress decides the future of the nation’s clean energy tax credits, it is absolutely critical to ensure that enhanced geothermal development remains supported by the federal government. An amazing new American industry is about to take off, providing a brand-new source of abundant clean energy! Let’s make sure that build-out happens, instead of kneecapping our inventors by senselessly removing the innovation-incentivizing and nation-building federal clean energy tax credits.
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