By Kennedy Maize
For decades in the U.S., geothermal energy has been full of promise but short on delivery. With private sector technology developments and an energy secretary who really knows, far more than his boss, what it means to “drill, baby, drill,” the fortunes of that renewable energy source may change.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, 59, has long been at the forefront of the development of hydraulic fracturing, aka “fracking,” which has transformed the U.S. oil and gas industry. After earning mechanical engineering and electrical engineering degrees from MIT, in 1992 at age 27, Colorado native Wright founded a company that focused on mapping potential fracking sites.
In 2006, he became affiliated with Range Resources, one of the earliest companies to use fracking to unlock the enormous natural gas resources in Marcellus Devonian shale formation in Pennsylvania.
Wright founded Denver-based Liberty Energy in 2011 to provide the equipment the fracking companies need to drill the wells in the rich but hard to exploit shale formations. In 2020, oil field drilling giant Schlumberger sold its North American fracking business to Liberty, taking a 37% share of Liberty. Reuters reported that the sale “would make Denver-based Liberty the third-largest U.S. oilfield services firm by sales.” At the time of Wright’s nomination to be Trump’s energy secretary, Liberty Energy was valued at close to $3 billion.
As Liberty and others were making their fortunes in using directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing to release oil and gas – making the U.S. the world’s leading producer – some savvy oil field veterans were pondering how to use the technology to reach deep into the hot bowels of the earth.
Conventional geothermal, one of the oldest forms of distributed energy, has been location limited. It has required hot permeable rocks, usually combined with underground water, to produce a renewable and carbon-free form of energy, often combining residential heat and, most recently, electricity. The ancient Romans used geothermal energy to heat their buildings.
Today, geothermal has been limited to areas with recent volcanism: Japan, New Zealand, Kenya, Iceland, and the western U.S.
Leading the leap into a new approach to geothermal was former oil man Tim Latimer in Houston, who founded a company named Fervo Energy in 2017. Latimer is a mechanical engineer who was a drilling engineer at BHP until 2015. Latimer and others are pushing what they call “enhanced geothermal systems.” It aims to overcome the limitations of traditional geothermal projects, such as California’s “The Geysers.”
Latimer explains the technology: “We employ precision directional drilling technology to drill horizontally in geothermal reservoirs. This enables us to drill multiple wells from a single location, dramatically lowering our surface footprint and reducing drilling risks. Horizontal drilling also facilitates greater access to geologies that were previously challenging to reach, increasing the total resource potential for geothermal energy.”
As a startup, Fervo raised significant capital from Houston oil interests, ran a successful test project in 2023 in Nevada, won support from the Interior Department for a 400 MW project in Utah, got technical and financial support from DOE. The company caught the eye of Chris Wright. Liberty invested $10 million in Fervo.
In December, Fervo announced it had nailed down $255 million in new investments for its enhanced geothermal technology: $135 million in equity from Capricorn investment group’s “Technology Impact Funds and a $120 million loan from energy investor Mercuria. Altogether, Fervo has raised around a half a billion dollars for its technology adventure.
In addition to Wright’s long-stdanding interest in enhanced geothermal, proven with his former company’s money, the administration’s mid-February nominee to become DOE assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy fits into the mold of geothermal enthusiasts. Audrey Robinson sits on the Liberty Energy board (although she said she will resign if confirmed) and was co-founder of Permian Basin O&G firm Franklin Mountain Energy.
The real test of enhanced geothermal is likely to be economics. Can the new way to reach the endless heat of the earth produce electricity competitive to conventional power generation? The prospects look good, as the drilling technology has proven itself, and the “fuel” to turn water into steam is essentially endless. Geothermal looks much closer and much less costly than fusion, the dream of many energy visionaries.
How promising is geothermal for U.S. energy supplies? An optimistic report last December from the International Energy Agency, enthusiastic about the new technologies where ever the geology is favorable, sees the U.S. as having enormous potential. “As a country, the United States is assessed to have the world’s largest technical enhanced geothermal capacity potential, with about one-eighth of the global total (over 70 terrawatts),” says the report. “Even at a depth of 5 km, U.S. technical potential is over 7 TW, seven times more than the country’s total installed power capacity today.”
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