America's Geothermal Breakthrough

ssleepyguy about 5 hours ago 61 commentsRead Article on oilprice.com

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WarOnPrivacy•about 4 hours ago

I worked on geothermal control systems a decade or so back. There are some less obvious applications for geothermal that reduce electric use (as opposed to generating electricity).

The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.

I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.

wood_spirit•about 4 hours ago

In the nordics it is common to have ground source heat pumps (brine in closed circuit pipe or bore hole) that are run backwards in summer to cool the house while actually assisting in storing heat back in the ground to extract in the winter. It’s a bit like regenerative breaking on electric cars.

jjtheblunt•about 2 hours ago

There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.

It seems so smart.

maxerickson•13 minutes ago

It's expensive. A relative has one in the northern Great Lakes, they wouldn't have installed it if their house had access to natural gas.

Animats•about 4 hours ago

Shallow geothermal works fine for heating. And you can use the ground as a heat sink. But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. Fervo Energy claims to have found 270C at 3350 meters well depth. That's progress.

lostlogin•about 4 hours ago

> if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells.

That’s going to be very dependant on location.

Here in NZ there are regions where water is boiling at surface level.

According to the below, 18% of our power is produced with it.

https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/energy-in-new-zealand/rene...

quijoteuniv•about 2 hours ago

I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.

Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.

mlwiese•about 2 hours ago

Framingham, MA has a geothermal system using ground source heat pumps like what you are describing

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/first-networked-geother...

solarpunk•about 4 hours ago

I think you're describing what is known as "district energy" systems.

quickthrowman•about 3 hours ago

District heating and chilled water is uneconomical for single-family homes. It does work well in medium to high density areas.

gambiting•about 2 hours ago

I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.

hunterpayne•about 1 hour ago

"I don't know how economical that is"

Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.

PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).

mschuster91•about 1 hour ago

At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].

[1] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Windkraft-und-Erd...

readthenotes1•about 4 hours ago

Isn't that similar to how neighborhood heat pumps work?

https://www.araner.com/blog/district-heating-in-sweden-effic...

hunterpayne•38 minutes ago

Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).

pedalpete•about 1 hour ago

According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption.

But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.

hunterpayne•34 minutes ago

There isn't one. They are trying to politically pressure a utility to build some geothermal plant. But utilities have engineers who will tell their bosses that this plan doesn't work. So the companies selling the geothermal plant are trying to politically pressure the utility to do yet another thing that they know won't work. PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.

hn_throwaway_99•about 1 hour ago

4th paragraph of TFA:

> Several companies are now building upon existing techniques for accessing geothermal resources by integrating enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) into operations. While conventional geothermal systems produce energy using hot water or steam, pumped from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs trapped in rock formations underground, EGS use innovative drilling technologies, such as those used in fracking operations, to drill horizontally and create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t currently exist.

nandomrumber•3 minutes ago

Sounds like marketing hype to me.

Geothermal reservoirs exist at depth.

Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.

nusl•36 minutes ago

So it basically says nothing useful other than try to generate hype and make them look good.

Animats•about 4 hours ago

Oh, Fervo Energy again. They're trying to IPO, hence the hype. Wikipedia's warning: This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (February 2026) This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.

Here's a more realistic evaluation of Fervo.[1]

[1] https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/what-fervos-approach-says...

w1•about 3 hours ago

This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).

Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.

Animats•about 1 hour ago

They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.

There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.

hunterpayne•21 minutes ago

"There's no reason why this shouldn't work."

Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.

PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.

runicelf•9 minutes ago

Would be great to see this in our lifetime

jmward01•about 3 hours ago

Here is an article that is a bit old but discusses the start of things [1]. It would be a bit ironic if fracking tech helped get us further from using natural gas. I think the reality will be if this gets established we will see rapid improvement as scale comes on line so if it is remotely economical now it will be massively better in 5-10 years. Of course the 'if' applies.

[1] (2023) https://time.com/6302342/fervo-fracking-technology-geotherma...

idontwantthis•29 minutes ago

Is 150GW enough for a “revolution”? That’s about 10% of current total power production.

taffydavid•about 4 hours ago

> Trump has shown support for geothermal energy projects in his second term in office, unlike for other renewable energy sources,

He heard there was drilling involved

giarc•about 2 hours ago

You might be joking, but he might just be that simple. Today he seemed to conflate capital punishment with crimes committed in a capital city.

ryandrake•about 4 hours ago

It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution.

hunterpayne•16 minutes ago

"It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution."

They are pro nuclear and that alone means their energy policy is more environmentally friendly than the previous one. Renewables are a dodge for those who either don't look at industry numbers or are scientifically illiterate. It isn't an accident that the last 2 governors of CA came from very big oil money and spoke a lot about renewables.

r3trohack3r•about 2 hours ago

Pretty sure they’re interested in collapsing the cost of domestic energy production in a way that’s resilient to adversarial supply chain risk since energy production is the base of the economic pyramid - energy availability is upstream of nearly all economic output.

bmitch3020•about 2 hours ago

When you have a supply chain failure on solar or wind power, you stop adding capacity. When you have a supply chain failure on oil and gas, you stop generating power. These are not the same problem.

We can build capacity to manufacturer renewable power domestically. But I suspect this administration is more interested in protecting the business interest of those that gave them the largest campaign donations than they are in long term energy sustainability.

burkaman•about 2 hours ago

They have spent immense effort blocking huge amounts of domestic solar and wind production, even paying off developers to simply not build planned power plants.

triceratops•26 minutes ago

Saying solar power is dependent on China because panels come from China is like saying fracking is dependent on China because some pumps and drilling equipment come from China.

breakyerself•about 1 hour ago

They're interested in protecting the profits of industries that line their pockets. It's the most corrupt administration in US history and it isn't even close. Theres some far right ideology mixed in. Particularly from Stephen Miller, but mostly it's grift and graft

tialaramex•about 4 hours ago

It has exclusivity which might be enough, you can't own the sun (modulo Simpsons episode) but you might be able to "own" geological hotspots for this purpose, the same way you can "own" a coal mine or an oil well. Remember the goal here is to create poverty. I mean, obviously you say you want to create "wealth" but only in a relative sense.

ch4s3•about 3 hours ago

They're pretty friendly to nuclear which comes out of the ground.

mmooss•about 3 hours ago

Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported. Maybe the drillers are from the fossil fuel extraction industry.

D-Coder•about 2 hours ago

> Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported.

$$$.

davidw•about 2 hours ago

There's one of those sites near where I live. The numbers would be amazing if true, but feel a lot like "to good to be true" to me

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/06/super-hot-rocks-geoth...

mskogly•about 4 hours ago

The whole continent of America made a breakthrough?

ButlerianJihad•about 2 hours ago

Yes. North America.

United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (formerly NAFTA)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Mexico%E...

https://www.ghy.com/trade-compliance/guidance-on-us-energy-i...

https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/analysis-the-united-st...

mc32•about 2 hours ago

You know how the United Arab Emirates are known as the Emirates, how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico and how the United States of America is known as America? Are you unfamiliar with what synecdoche is?