Energy Secretary Chris Wright throws support behind geothermal boom

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Tuesday threw his support behind a vast expansion in geothermal energy.

Emerging forms of geothermal use technology from the fossil fuel industry to generate power on demand without air pollution — something Wright's company, Liberty Energy, invested millions in.

While geothermal “hasn’t achieved liftoff yet, it should and it can, Wright told attendees at MAGMA, a Republican-facing pro-geothermal event in D.C on Tuesday.

A mature geothermal industry, he said, "could “better energize our country, improve the quality of life for everyone. It could help enable AI, manufacturing, reshoring and stop the rise of our electricity prices."

“I look across this room and I see people that are going to make geothermal happen,” he added.

Wright name-checked geothermal as one of his department's primary areas of focus, and it was one of the zero-carbon forms of energy — along with nuclear and hydropower — specifically cited by President Trump in his National Energy Emergency executive order.

But Wright's comments on Tuesday were by far his most fulsome on the subject of geothermal as secretary. They came as a significant coup for an industry that has feared wholesale cuts to the support it has received through Biden-era tax credits and programs at the Department of Energy — where it sits exposed as part of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Wright’s remarks allayed some of those fears. “I want to be a service provider and help the government get out of the way. Make it easier to get regulatory approvals, easier to do innovations, easier to take that next step.”

“Let's bring abundance,” he added.

MAGMA (which stands for Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances) was the latest in a series of moves by renewable energy — notably the solar industry — to cast itself in terms palatable to an administration skeptical of climate action and focused on fossil fuels.

In February, for example, solar industry leaders traveled to Texas to pitch local lawmakers on the their sector’s potential role in a broader Republican campaign for “energy dominance.”

Geothermal’s advocates say that it is particularly well-placed to make that pitch, because it can generate pollution-free power round-the-clock, on-site and on-demand — something in high demand from both military bases and data centers.

Years of lobbying by the industry around the national security case for geothermal have borne fruit — even among the sort of Republican lawmakers prone to throwing shade on solar and wind.

“My friends across the aisle, they're touting all wind and all solar, I'm saying, ‘I don't know if y'all know this, but the sun goes down at night,” said Houston-area Rep. Randy Weber (R) at MAGMA.

But unlike wind and solar, Weber said, “geothermal is 24/7, so it’s something we can count on year in, year out.”

Many wind and solar advocates argue this is based on an obsolete idea of their industry. They say utility scale batteries — including some based on similar technology to geothermal — mean that renewables can now provide something close to around the clock power themselves.

But Weber’s remarks pointed to a new Republican cultural embrace of geothermal, which was based in part on its overlap with an energy source far more in favor with the party in power: Fossil fuels.

Geothermal isn’t the “red headed stepchild of renewables” — it’s the “smokin’ hot trophy wife of the oil and gas industry,” Matt Welch of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance told The Hill.

In their pitch to the right, geothermal leaders have emphasized the extensive overlap between oil and gas technology and geothermal, as well as work it offers for fossil fuels drilling crews idled in an increasingly efficient oil sector, where fewer than ever rigs pour out record amounts of oil.

In his keynote, Wright himself hit that point. The technology that squeezed oil and gas from shale, opening an era of record American oil and gas production, was “tailor made for geothermal.”

Fracking and horizontal drilling had opened up key technologies which made it possible to transfer heat from rock — which is reluctant to give it up — and into water, which is slow to take it, Wright said.

Those technologies meant a “large contact area and cheap-water based plumbing [that let operators] mine massive heat from underground,” he said.

He added that geothermal resources could generate electricity, district heating for neighborhoods, process heat for industry. “They can even produce cooling. It’s an awesome resource under our feet.”

There is strong cultural overlap and technical overlap between the fossil fuel and geothermal worlds, exemplified by Wright himself. He is the former chief executive of Liberty Energy, which under his leadership invested $10 million in Houston-based geothermal startup Fervo energy.

Most of the startups featured at MAGMA were similarly led by oil and gas veterans, and oil companies like Devon or their service companies Baker Hughes now boast in-house geothermal divisions.

Asked what oil and gas skills transferred to geothermal, “you almost have to ask what’s not transferrable,” Alex Biholar of Devon Energy’s low-carbon unit said during one panel.

These professional connections, added to the role fossil fuel burning — and methane venting — plays in the rapidly heating planet, have led some geothermal leaders to suggest that their industry represents a natural off-ramp for the oil and gas industry.

When faced with staunch fossil fuel opponents, “I say, ‘Well, if you really don't like oil and gas that much, you should really love geothermal. Because if it takes off, [oil and gas companies] are going to take all their capital” and pivot to geothermal, said Rob Klenner, president of geothermal company Greenfire.

In a sense, Klenner was describing his own trajectory: He spent most of his career at oilfield services company Baker Hughes. For senior executives at oil companies, geothermal offers an exciting chance to be “part of the new energy,” said fellow Baker Hughes veteran Ghazal Izadi — herself now chief operating officer at Palo Alto-based geothermal firm XGS.

By way of describing the outer limit of the possible, a 2021 University of Texas study found that if the world’s oil and gas drilling fleet was used to tap heat, geothermal could generate 80 percent of global energy by mid century.

Those numbers, Klenner said, were almost certainly overheated — barring a revolution in materials science, chemicals manufacture will require oil and gas drilling well into the century. But even if geothermal represented 15 percent of power demand, he said, that would be a thirty-fold growth over its current level.

“But it's actually more than that,” he said, “because total electric generation is growing that whole time.”

A December report by the International Energy Agency suggests that the limit is the willingness to drill, rather than the available resource. The authors, which included MAGMA co-host Project Innerspace, found that there was enough accessible geothermal to meet 140 times the current global electric demand.

Geothermal companies say they urgently need permitting reform to drill at the scale that will let them cross-pollinate and drive costs down.

The 2005 energy omnibus bill that laid the foundation for the renewables boom largely deregulated fracking and left geothermal out. One result: It currently takes twice as long to permit a geothermal well on federal land as it does an oil and gas well.

The other obstacle is finance. The current round of geothermal startups is now caught in the “valley of death” between their early stage — when venture capital funds risky new ideas in exchange for a chance at high profits — and their mature form, when cheap project finance helps companies with healthy cashflow expand.

That, not technology, is now the bottleneck, said Cindy Taff, chief executive of Houston-based geothermal company Sage Geosystems.

She recalled being asked by data center developers at Meta about whether geothermal could provide 5 gigawatts of power by the end of the decade.

“We said, ‘Yes, we can: it's 500 wells per year to be drilled over five years. That's leveraging less than 5 percent of the oil and gas industry, which is ready to go, ready to be pivoted.”

What they lacked, she said, was money. “We need to get in the field, drill wells and actually demonstrate the technology.”

Wright offered help on both fronts. The idea of “natural resources” was flawed, he argued: There was nothing natural about them.

“It's very hot underground," he said. “It was very hot underground a long time ago, too, and that wasn't of value to anyone. That's just a condition of the material,” he said,

“It only becomes a resource when technology and people and action turn it into a resource.”

The industry, he said, had “to put money to work. We've got to put capital to work. But that condition is underground,” he said. “Let’s make it a resource.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

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