# Geothermal Industry Timeline This timeline traces the evolution of geothermal energy from a geological curiosity to what may become the first truly bipartisan clean energy source in American politics. Unlike [[Climate in Right-Wing Thought Hub]], where solar and wind have been conscripted into the [[Culture War]] as symbols of liberal overreach, geothermal occupies a unique political niche: it looks and feels like oil and gas drilling, employs the same workforce, operates in the same red-state geographies, produces baseload power around the clock, and requires no visible infrastructure that triggers the aesthetic objections conservatives have lodged against wind turbines and solar farms. The technology story is inseparable from the political story. The same hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling revolution that made the United States the world's largest oil and gas producer has now been repurposed to crack open hot rock formations miles underground, circulate water through them, and generate electricity from the earth's heat — a resource unrelated to the [[Greenhouse Effect]] dynamics of burning fossil fuels — anywhere, not just in volcanic zones. This is the enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) breakthrough, and it transforms geothermal from a niche resource available only near tectonic plate boundaries into a potentially universal energy source with a resource base orders of magnitude larger than all fossil fuels combined. Understanding geothermal's trajectory matters for the Right Wing KB because it represents a test case for whether [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] and the [[Koch Network]]'s opposition to clean energy subsidies — funded through [[DonorsTrust]] and orchestrated by [[Charles Koch]] and [[David Koch]] via [[Koch Industries]] — are actually about markets and ideology — or whether they are simply about protecting incumbent fossil fuel revenue. Geothermal's bipartisan appeal reveals the contours of what energy policy looks like when you remove the culture-war overlay. --- ## Ancient and Pre-Industrial Use: Heat Before Electricity ### 10,000+ Years Ago — Hot Springs as Sacred and Medicinal Sites Humans have used geothermal hot springs for bathing, cooking, and heating since prehistory. Archaeological evidence shows that North American Paleo-Indians used hot springs more than 10,000 years ago. The Romans built elaborate bath complexes over geothermal springs across their empire. In Japan, onsen culture dates back millennia and remains so culturally entrenched that it continues to block modern geothermal development — hot spring operators fear that drilling will drain their water supply, a tension that persists to this day. ### 1818 — Larderello's Boric Acid Industry François Jacques de Larderel began extracting boric acid from geothermal steam vents in Tuscany, Italy. The region that would bear his name — Larderello — became the cradle of the geothermal power industry. By using the natural steam to evaporate boric acid solutions rather than burning wood, Larderel inadvertently created the first industrial application of geothermal energy. This early commercialization established Italy's century-long head start in the field. ### 1892 — Boise, Idaho District Heating Boise, Idaho established the first geothermal district heating system in the United States, piping hot spring water to heat homes and businesses. Within a few years, over 200 homes and 40 businesses were connected to the system. This early deployment occurred in exactly the kind of western red-state geography that would later make geothermal politically palatable to Republicans — a preview of the bipartisan dynamics that would emerge a century later. --- ## 1904–1960: The Birth of Geothermal Power ### 1904 — First Geothermal Electricity at Larderello Italian engineer Prince Piero Ginori Conti lit five light bulbs using steam from Larderello's underground reservoirs, powering a small dynamo to produce approximately 10 kilowatts of electricity. This was the world's first generation of electricity from geothermal energy — proof of concept that the earth's internal heat could be converted to power. ### 1913 — First Commercial Geothermal Power Plant A 250-kilowatt commercial power plant opened at Larderello, making Italy the world's first and for decades only producer of geothermal electricity. The plant used dry steam — the simplest and most efficient geothermal technology, possible only where underground conditions produce pure steam rather than a mix of steam and water. Italy would remain the sole geothermal electricity producer until 1958, a monopoly reflecting how rare ideal geological conditions are for conventional geothermal. ### 1958 — New Zealand's Wairakei Breaks Italy's Monopoly New Zealand commissioned the Wairakei Geothermal Power Station on the North Island — the world's second geothermal power station and the first to use flash steam technology, which separates steam from hot geothermal water under reduced pressure. Wairakei represented a critical technological leap: it proved that geothermal power did not require the rare dry steam conditions found at Larderello. By exploiting hot water rather than pure steam, flash technology dramatically expanded the number of viable geothermal sites worldwide. Wairakei has operated continuously since, producing over 1,100 gigawatt-hours annually as baseload power for New Zealand's grid. ### 1960 — The Geysers Opens in California Pacific Gas & Electric began operating the first commercial geothermal power plant in the United States at The Geysers field in Sonoma County, California, with a 12.5-megawatt turbine. Magma Power Company founder B.C. McCabe had leased the acreage in 1955 and partnered with Thermal Power Company to develop the resource. The Geysers would grow to become the largest geothermal complex in the world, surpassing Larderello's output by the 1970s and reaching over 1,000 megawatts of capacity by 1980. It remains the single most productive geothermal field on Earth, though output has declined from peak levels due to reservoir depletion — an early lesson in the sustainability challenges even renewable resources can face. --- ## 1961–1979: Global Expansion and the Oil Crisis Catalyst ### 1961–1970 — Geothermal Goes Global Through the 1960s, geothermal electricity generation spread to Mexico (Cerro Prieto, 1959), Japan (Matsukawa, 1966), the Soviet Union (Pauzhetka, Kamchatka, 1966), and Iceland (Bjarnarflag, 1969). The Soviet installation at Kamchatka in 1967 included the first binary cycle power plant, a technology that would later prove revolutionary: binary plants use a secondary working fluid with a lower boiling point than water, allowing electricity generation from geothermal resources too cool for conventional steam turbines. This expanded the viable temperature range for geothermal power and would eventually enable exploitation of moderate-temperature resources worldwide. ### 1970 — The Geothermal Steam Act The US Congress passed the Geothermal Steam Act, establishing procedures for leasing geothermal resources on federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. This was the first federal framework for geothermal development, though the leasing process it created would prove cumbersome enough that permitting delays remain a major constraint on the industry more than fifty years later. ### 1973–1974 — The Oil Crisis Transforms Iceland The OPEC oil embargo and resulting energy crisis had outsized impact on Iceland, which was almost entirely dependent on imported fossil fuels for heating. The crisis catalyzed a national transformation: Iceland rapidly expanded its geothermal district heating infrastructure, converting Reykjavík and other cities from oil-heated to geothermally-heated systems over the following two decades. By the early 2000s, 90% of Icelandic buildings were heated by geothermal energy, and the country had transformed from one of Europe's poorest nations to one of its most energy-independent. Iceland's transformation is the single most successful national energy transition in history — achieved not through mandates or subsidies but through the brutal economic logic of replacing expensive imported oil with free underground heat. ### 1974 — DOE Predecessor Begins Geothermal R&D The Atomic Energy Commission (soon to become part of the new [[Department of Energy]] under [[Jimmy Carter]]) launched the first federal geothermal research and development program. This included funding for the hot dry rock experiment at Fenton Hill, New Mexico — the conceptual ancestor of today's enhanced geothermal systems. ### 1977 — The Fenton Hill Hot Dry Rock Experiment Los Alamos National Laboratory began circulating water through artificially fractured hot rock at the Fenton Hill test site, 40 miles west of Los Alamos, New Mexico. The concept was radical: rather than finding naturally occurring geothermal reservoirs, engineers would create them by drilling into hot but dry rock, fracturing it hydraulically, and circulating water through the cracks to extract heat. The Phase 1 reservoir, at 2,800 meters depth and 195°C, produced up to 5 megawatts of thermal energy. A deeper Phase 2 reservoir at 3,500 meters and 235°C followed, producing about 10 megawatts thermal at 190°C. Fenton Hill proved the hot dry rock concept worked but also revealed the economic challenge: drilling costs were enormous, and maintaining fractured rock permeability underground was technically difficult. The project ran from 1971 to 1995 with [[Department of Energy]] funding plus international participation from West Germany and Japan. Its ultimate lesson — that engineered reservoirs were physically possible but economically prohibitive with 1970s-era drilling technology — would take three decades and the fracking revolution to overcome. ### 1978 — Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) Congress passed PURPA as part of [[Jimmy Carter]]'s National Energy Act, requiring utilities to purchase power from qualifying small generators including geothermal plants. PURPA created a guaranteed market for independent geothermal producers and triggered a wave of development at The Geysers and in Nevada throughout the 1980s. The law demonstrated a principle that would recur throughout geothermal's history: federal policy intervention — not pure market forces — has been essential to every phase of industry growth. --- ## 1980–1999: Growth, Plateau, and the Ormat Era ### 1980 — The Geysers Hits 1,000 Megawatts The Geysers complex in California reached 1,000 megawatts of installed capacity, making it by far the world's largest geothermal facility. The rapid build-out was driven by PURPA contracts and California's aggressive energy policies. But overexploitation soon became evident: steam pressure began declining as extraction outpaced the reservoir's natural recharge rate. By the late 1980s, output had peaked and begun to fall. The solution — injecting treated wastewater into the reservoir — was implemented in the 1990s using reclaimed water from nearby cities, partially stabilizing production and creating an elegant circular resource management model. ### 1980s — Ormat Technologies Emerges as Industry Leader Israeli-founded Ormat Technologies, established by Lucien Bronicki in 1965, pivoted from being a supplier of power generation equipment to becoming a vertically integrated geothermal developer — exploring, drilling, building, and operating its own power plants. Ormat's binary cycle technology was the key innovation: it allowed profitable power generation from moderate-temperature geothermal resources (as low as 100°C) that were far more common than the high-temperature reservoirs needed for conventional flash steam plants. By the 2000s Ormat would dominate the American geothermal market, operating plants across Nevada, California, and Hawaii. Nevada became the second-largest geothermal state after California, with Ormat controlling the majority of installed capacity — a quiet clean energy success story in a deep-red state that attracted almost no political controversy. ### 1985–1995 — Reagan-Era Cuts and the Geothermal Doldrums The [[Ronald Reagan]] administration dramatically cut [[Department of Energy]] renewable energy research budgets, including geothermal R&D. Combined with falling oil prices that reduced the economic urgency for alternatives, geothermal development stalled. The Fenton Hill hot dry rock project limped along with reduced funding before being terminated in 1995. This pattern — Republican administrations cutting clean energy research, Democratic administrations restoring it — would repeat through the [[George W. Bush]] era — where [[Dick Cheney]]'s energy task force prioritized fossil fuels — and the [[Barack Obama]] era, though geothermal would eventually transcend it. ### 1986 — Philippines Becomes Second-Largest Geothermal Producer The Philippines, located on the Pacific Ring of Fire with extraordinary volcanic resources, expanded its geothermal capacity to make it the world's second-largest producer after the United States. Geothermal would eventually supply roughly 17% of Philippine electricity — one of the highest geothermal penetration rates in the world. The Philippine model demonstrated that developing nations sitting on volcanic geology could use geothermal as a domestic energy resource to reduce expensive fossil fuel imports, a pattern later replicated in Kenya and Indonesia. ### 1992 — Indonesia Begins Scaling Geothermal Indonesia, which sits atop the world's largest estimated geothermal resource base at approximately 28,000 megawatts, began seriously developing its geothermal potential. The country would grow to become the world's second-largest geothermal power producer by capacity, though it has only tapped a fraction of its potential due to financing challenges, permitting complexity, and the fact that many prime geothermal sites overlap with protected forests and national parks. --- ## 2000–2014: The EGS Concept Takes Shape ### 2000 — Iceland Deep Drilling Project Launches Icelandic energy companies launched the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP), an ambitious research program to drill 4–5 kilometers deep into supercritical hydrothermal conditions — temperatures exceeding 374°C and pressures above 220 bars, where water exists in a supercritical state that is neither liquid nor gas. If supercritical geothermal fluids could be harnessed, a single well could produce 5–10 times the energy of a conventional geothermal well. The project represented the frontier of geothermal ambition: accessing the extreme heat that exists deep beneath all volcanic regions, not just the shallow reservoirs that conventional technology could reach. ### 2005 — MIT "Future of Geothermal Energy" Study Begins MIT launched a comprehensive assessment of enhanced geothermal systems, published in 2006, that would become the most influential document in modern geothermal policy. The study concluded that EGS could provide 100 gigawatts or more of electricity in the United States by 2050 with a federal R&D investment of roughly $1 billion over 15 years — an enormous return on a modest investment. The report reframed EGS from a failed experiment (the narrative after Fenton Hill's closure) to a technically viable technology waiting for cost-competitive drilling. It directly influenced subsequent DOE funding decisions and the creation of the FORGE program. ### 2006 — The Basel Earthquake Disaster In December 2006, an EGS project beneath the city of Basel, Switzerland injected approximately 11,500 cubic meters of water at high pressure into a 5-kilometer-deep well over six days. The injection triggered a magnitude 3.4 earthquake — widely felt by the city's 200,000 residents — and a swarm of smaller tremors that continued for months. The project was permanently abandoned. The Basel disaster became the cautionary tale that haunted EGS development for a decade, reinforcing fears that hydraulic stimulation of deep rock formations carried unacceptable seismic risk. The induced seismicity problem — geothermal's version of the earthquake concerns surrounding conventional fracking — would need to be solved before EGS could scale. Basel's connection to the broader debate around Volcanology and Seismology and [[Groundwater]] contamination concerns — and its resonance with public fears about fracking-induced earthquakes — made it a potent political obstacle. ### 2007 — Kenya's Olkaria Complex Expansion Kenya began a major expansion of its Olkaria geothermal complex in the East African Rift Valley, eventually growing its national geothermal capacity to 980 megawatts by the 2020s. Kenya's story mirrored Iceland's in miniature: a developing nation using domestic geothermal resources to reduce dependence on expensive imported oil and intermittent hydropower. The Rift Valley's extraordinary geology — the same tectonic forces that are slowly splitting Africa apart — provides the heat source. Kenya became a model for geothermal development in the developing world, with Iceland actively supporting African geothermal programs through technical assistance. ### 2009 — American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Funding The [[Barack Obama]] administration's stimulus package included approximately $400 million for geothermal energy research and development — the largest single infusion of federal geothermal funding in history. The money supported EGS demonstration projects, resource characterization, and the early stages of what would become the FORGE initiative. This investment occurred alongside the broader stimulus funding for clean energy that also produced the Solyndra controversy, but geothermal's lower political profile meant it attracted virtually no conservative backlash — an early indicator of its bipartisan potential. ### 2009–2019 — Turkey's Exponential Geothermal Boom Turkey experienced the most dramatic geothermal expansion of the 2010s, growing from 3 geothermal power plants in 2009 to 49 by 2019, with installed capacity exceeding 1.5 gigawatts. The boom was driven by feed-in tariffs under the Renewable Energy Support Mechanism (YEKDEM), strong private sector participation, and Turkey's favorable geology along the Anatolian tectonic boundary. Turkey's growth demonstrated that the right policy framework could unlock rapid geothermal deployment — capacity grew over 800% in a decade. By 2024, Turkey ranked fourth globally in geothermal power capacity. ### 2011 — Fukushima and Japan's Geothermal Reckoning The Fukushima nuclear disaster — triggered by the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan — forced a national reassessment of energy strategy. Japan possesses the world's third-largest geothermal resource base, with over 100 active volcanoes, but decades of protective regulation for the hot spring (onsen) industry had blocked development. Post-Fukushima, the Japanese government relaxed restrictions on geothermal development in national parks and introduced feed-in tariffs for geothermal power. But progress remained glacially slow: the onsen lobby — representing a $26 billion tourism industry — continued to resist, fearing that deep drilling would reduce hot spring temperatures and water levels. Japan's paralysis illustrated a peculiar irony: one of the world's best geothermal resources remained largely untapped because of cultural attachment to the very same underground heat in its bathing form. The [[Nuclear Energy Debate]] that Fukushima intensified — and that feeds into broader [[Climate Science]] policy discussions — provided geothermal with rhetorical ammunition — here was baseload clean power without meltdown risk — but cultural and bureaucratic inertia proved more powerful than logic. ### 2014 — DOE Launches FORGE The [[Department of Energy]] launched the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) initiative to create a dedicated field laboratory for EGS research. After evaluating sites in California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada, the DOE selected a site near Milford, Utah in 2019 as the sole FORGE location. Run by the University of Utah, FORGE would receive over $200 million in federal funding and become the proving ground for next-generation geothermal technologies — the equivalent of a national laboratory for drilling innovation. FORGE's location in deeply conservative Utah was no accident: the state's familiarity with extractive industries and drilling meant geothermal faced minimal local opposition. --- ## 2015–2021: The Fracking-to-Geothermal Bridge ### 2017 — The Pohang Earthquake On November 15, 2017, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck the city of Pohang, South Korea — the country's second-largest earthquake in modern history. It injured dozens and forced over 1,700 residents into emergency housing. A government investigation concluded that the earthquake was triggered by an EGS project that had been injecting water into a deep well, inadvertently activating a previously unknown fault. The Pohang quake was far more destructive than the Basel incident and represented the worst-case scenario for EGS-induced seismicity. It led to the permanent shutdown of the Pohang geothermal project and intensified global scrutiny of EGS safety protocols. However, the industry's response was constructive rather than paralytic: companies like Fervo Energy developed monitoring techniques — including fiber-optic distributed sensing — specifically designed to detect fault activation before it produces damaging earthquakes. The lesson from Pohang was not that EGS was impossible, but that it required far better subsurface characterization than the early projects had attempted. ### 2017 — Project InnerSpace Founded Jamie Beard founded Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating geothermal energy by bridging the gap between the oil and gas industry and the clean energy community. Beard's insight was that the geothermal industry's biggest barrier was not technology but communication: the drilling expertise needed for EGS already existed in the oil and gas workforce, but the two industries didn't talk to each other. Project InnerSpace became the connector, convening oil and gas executives, venture capitalists, and climate advocates around the proposition that the same drill rigs and roughnecks that produced oil could produce clean heat. This framing — geothermal as an extension of oil and gas rather than a replacement for it — was critical to its bipartisan appeal. ### 2020 — Energy Act of 2020 Congress passed the Energy Act of 2020 with bipartisan support, including dedicated funding for geothermal research and development and provisions to streamline geothermal permitting on federal lands. The act directed the [[Department of Energy]] to pursue EGS demonstration projects and authorized the FORGE program through the end of the decade. Geothermal was one of the few energy provisions that attracted support from both parties — [[Lisa Murkowski]] of Alaska, a Republican with strong oil-state credentials, was a key sponsor. The bipartisan coalition for geothermal reflected its unique political positioning: Republicans saw drilling jobs and baseload power, Democrats saw zero-carbon electricity. ### 2021 — Fervo Energy and Google Sign First Corporate EGS Agreement Fervo Energy and [[Google]] signed the world's first corporate power purchase agreement for next-generation enhanced geothermal power, with the goal of supplying 24/7 carbon-free energy to Google's data center operations in Nevada. Fervo's approach combined two technologies borrowed directly from the oil and gas industry: horizontal drilling (drilling sideways through rock formations, as pioneered for shale oil extraction) and fiber-optic distributed sensing (using fiber-optic cables cemented into wells to monitor temperature, pressure, and microseismicity in real time). The Google partnership gave Fervo the financial backing and demand signal it needed to move from concept to commercial deployment — and gave the geothermal industry its first major tech-company customer. ### 2021 — Bipartisan Infrastructure Law The [[Bipartisan Infrastructure Law]] included significant geothermal provisions, funding pilot projects and research through the [[Department of Energy]]. The law's bipartisan passage — with support from both [[Joe Manchin]] and Republican senators from western states — reflected geothermal's ability to command cross-aisle support that solar and wind could not. [[Joe Manchin]]'s support was particularly telling: the West Virginia senator who torpedoed much of the Democratic climate agenda was comfortable supporting geothermal because it looked like drilling, employed drillers, and could be framed as energy independence rather than climate action. --- ## 2022–2024: The Breakout Begins ### 2022 — Inflation Reduction Act Geothermal Provisions The [[Inflation Reduction Act]], passed without a single Republican vote, included investment tax credits of up to 30% for geothermal power projects and extended production tax credits for geothermal electricity generation. The IRA treated geothermal equivalently to solar and wind for tax credit purposes — a significant policy win that made geothermal projects dramatically more financeable. While the IRA as a whole was intensely partisan, the geothermal provisions themselves were modeled on bipartisan proposals and reflected a rare consensus: even the [[Heritage Foundation]]'s Project 2025 document, which called for repealing most IRA clean energy provisions, notably did not target geothermal with the same hostility directed at solar and wind subsidies. The [[Project 2025]] document's selective tolerance of geothermal underscored the technology's unique political positioning. The [[Inflation Reduction Act]] represented the first time geothermal received tax parity with other renewables. ### 2023 — Fervo's Technology Breakthrough in Nevada In July 2023, Fervo Energy announced a technology breakthrough at its Project Red pilot site in northern Nevada: the company had successfully drilled a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3,250 feet at 191°C. The well produced 3.5 megawatts of electricity — enough to power approximately 2,600 homes. More importantly, it proved that oil-and-gas-style horizontal drilling worked for geothermal at commercial scale. Fervo had done what the Fenton Hill project could only dream of three decades earlier: created a commercially viable engineered geothermal reservoir. The breakthrough was enabled by forty years of advances in drilling technology, directional drilling, and subsurface monitoring — innovations developed and paid for by the oil and gas industry's investment in fracking. ### 2023 — Cape Station Breaks Ground in Utah Fervo broke ground on Cape Station, its first utility-scale EGS project, in Beaver County, Utah. Cape Station was designed to produce 400 megawatts initially, with permits in place for up to 2 gigawatts — enough to power a mid-sized city. The project secured power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison, Shell Energy, and community choice aggregators. Cape Station's location in rural Utah embodied the red-state geography of the geothermal opportunity: it was being built on land more associated with ranching and mining than clean energy. ### 2023 — Sage Geosystems Emerges in Texas Sage Geosystems, a Houston-based startup, demonstrated a novel approach combining geothermal energy production with underground energy storage. Sage's "geopressured" technology exploits the same geological formations that oil and gas companies have mapped extensively across Texas and the Gulf Coast. The company's Houston headquarters and its workforce of former oil and gas engineers made it a poster child for the drilling-industry crossover narrative. Meta (Facebook's parent company) would later sign a 150-megawatt power purchase agreement with Sage — marking another major tech company's entry into the geothermal market. ### 2024 — BLM Streamlines Federal Geothermal Permitting The Bureau of Land Management adopted categorical exclusions to expedite geothermal energy permitting on federal lands, reducing the environmental review timeline for certain geothermal activities. The [[Joe Biden]] administration had approved 14 geothermal projects on public lands by early 2025, as part of its broader goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on federal land. Permitting reform was one area where geothermal attracted genuine bipartisan action: both parties agreed that the years-long permitting timelines for geothermal projects on federal land were absurd, given that geothermal has among the smallest surface footprints of any energy source. The contrast with the permitting fights over oil drilling, wind farms, and solar installations — where environmental review had become a political weapon — made geothermal's streamlined treatment remarkable. ### 2024 — Utah FORGE Achieves Major Breakthrough The University of Utah-led FORGE project achieved a critical breakthrough: successfully hydraulically stimulating rock formations a mile and a half underground and circulating water through the created fracture network to bring heated water to the surface. This was the proof-of-concept that the [[Department of Energy]] had been funding for a decade — a fully controlled EGS reservoir created from scratch in rock that had no natural geothermal fluids. The DOE subsequently extended FORGE's funding through 2028 with an additional $80 million. FORGE's success meant that EGS was no longer theoretical: it was demonstrated technology ready for commercial scale-up. ### 2024 — Quaise Energy Advances Millimeter-Wave Drilling Quaise Energy, an MIT spinoff, demonstrated progress on what may be the most radical approach to deep geothermal: millimeter-wave drilling using a gyrotron — a device originally developed for nuclear fusion research — that vaporizes rock with electromagnetic energy rather than grinding through it mechanically. Conventional drill bits fail at the extreme depths and temperatures needed to access "superhot" rock (above 374°C), but millimeter waves can theoretically bore to depths of 20 kilometers, where rock temperatures exceed 500°C virtually everywhere on Earth. If Quaise's technology works at scale, it would make geothermal energy available anywhere — not just in volcanic regions or areas with shallow heat — by simply drilling deep enough. Quaise achieved record drilling depths of over 100 meters in 2025, with a target of 1 kilometer by 2026. The company's vision: retrofitting existing coal and gas power plants by drilling superhot geothermal wells adjacent to them, reusing the existing turbines, grid connections, and workforce. ### 2024 — Baker Hughes Invests in Geothermal [[Halliburton]]'s rival Baker Hughes — one of the world's largest oilfield services companies — invested in GreenFire Energy, a closed-loop geothermal technology company, and committed to deploying its drilling technologies, power systems, and subsurface analysis capabilities for geothermal projects. Baker Hughes signed onto the second phase of Hell's Kitchen, a massive geothermal project in California's Imperial Valley designed to produce 500 megawatts of power alongside lithium extraction from geothermal brines. The entry of major oilfield services companies into geothermal represented a watershed: these firms brought the drilling expertise, supply chains, and operational scale that the geothermal startup ecosystem lacked. It also made the workforce-bridge argument concrete — the same engineers and roughnecks were literally switching from oil wells to heat wells. ### 2024 — Eavor Technologies Deploys Closed-Loop System Canadian startup Eavor Technologies deployed its closed-loop geothermal system — a fundamentally different approach from EGS that avoids hydraulic fracturing entirely. Eavor's design circulates fluid through sealed, U-shaped pipes drilled deep underground, extracting heat through conduction without ever contacting underground rock formations or aquifers. This eliminates both induced seismicity risk and the [[Water Politics]] concerns around water consumption — the two main environmental objections to conventional and EGS geothermal. The tradeoff is lower energy output per well, but Eavor's proponents argue that the elimination of seismic risk makes its technology deployable in urban areas and geologically sensitive regions where EGS would face opposition. --- ## 2025–2026: Geothermal Meets the AI Boom ### 2025 — Trump Administration Embraces Geothermal Permitting In a move that would have been unthinkable for solar or wind, the [[Donald Trump]] administration's Department of the Interior implemented emergency permitting procedures to accelerate geothermal energy development on federal lands, citing the national energy emergency declared by Executive Order on January 20, 2025. The framing was "energy dominance" rather than climate action, but the practical effect was identical to what the [[Joe Biden]] administration had pursued: faster permitting for geothermal projects. This was geothermal's bipartisan superpower in action. A [[Donald Trump]] administration that was actively rolling back solar and wind incentives and withdrawing from the [[Paris Agreement]] was simultaneously fast-tracking geothermal — because geothermal could be coded as drilling, as energy independence, as jobs for oil workers, rather than as environmentalism. ### 2025 — Mountain West Geothermal Consortium The governors of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon — a mix of Republicans and Democrats — formed the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium to coordinate geothermal development across their states. Utah's Republican Governor Spencer Cox, who also chaired the Western Governors' Association, became geothermal's most prominent Republican champion, calling it the energy source with "the bipartisan support that we haven't had in a long time." The consortium represented a regional industrial policy play: these states were positioning themselves as the geothermal equivalent of what Texas is to oil and the Rust Belt was to manufacturing. ### 2025 — The Hot Rock Act Bipartisan legislation instructing the [[Department of Energy]] to create a facility for testing hot dry rock geothermal projects and establishing a workforce training program for the geothermal industry was introduced in Congress. The bill's bipartisan co-sponsorship reflected the unusual coalition behind geothermal: Republican members saw it as a drilling-industry extension, Democratic members saw clean energy and climate benefits. The workforce training provisions were designed to create a pipeline from declining fossil fuel jobs to geothermal employment — a "just transition" framed in language acceptable to both parties — free of the [[Propaganda]] baggage that the right attaches to climate-coded workforce programs. ### 2025 — IDDP-3: Iceland Drills for Supercritical Fluids Icelandic energy companies Reykjavik Energy, Landsvirkjun, and HS Orka signed a cooperation agreement for IDDP-3 — a project to drill 4–5 kilometers deep to reach temperatures of 400°C and access supercritical geothermal fluids. Building on the IDDP-2 well at Reykjanes, which had reached 4,650 meters and estimated bottom-hole temperatures of 500–600°C, IDDP-3 aimed to prove that supercritical geothermal could be commercially harnessed. Success would mean that a single supercritical well could produce 5–10 times the power of a conventional geothermal well — potentially transforming the economics of geothermal in volcanic regions worldwide. ### 2026 — Fervo Energy's $10 Billion IPO In May 2026, Fervo Energy went public in what became clean energy's largest-ever IPO. The company priced its stock at $27 per share, selling 70 million shares to raise $1.89 billion in gross proceeds. The stock popped 35% on its first day of trading, giving Fervo a market valuation of approximately $10.1 billion. The IPO was fueled by AI data center demand: [[Google]], which had been Fervo's anchor customer since 2021, had expanded its geothermal PPA with Fervo to 115 megawatts, and the broader tech industry's insatiable appetite for 24/7 clean electricity to power AI training clusters was creating a geothermal demand signal that hadn't existed five years earlier. Fervo's Cape Station project in Utah — with 500 megawatts under construction and permits for 1.5 additional gigawatts — was on track to deliver first power to the grid in late 2026. The company had also secured $421 million in non-recourse project financing from commercial lenders, signaling that the financial establishment viewed EGS as bankable rather than speculative. Fervo's IPO marked the moment geothermal transitioned from venture-backed experiment to public-market energy company — a trajectory that solar and wind had followed a decade earlier but that geothermal was now replicating at compressed speed. ### 2026 — Ormat-Google 150 MW Nevada Deal Ormat Technologies — the industry's oldest major player — signed a 150-megawatt geothermal power purchase agreement to supply [[Google]]'s data center operations in Nevada through NV Energy. The deal demonstrated that conventional geothermal operators, not just EGS startups, were benefiting from the AI-driven demand boom. Nevada's geothermal capacity, largely built by Ormat over four decades of quiet operation in a deep-red state, was suddenly in high demand from Silicon Valley hyperscalers who needed the one thing solar and wind couldn't reliably provide: uninterrupted baseload power, 24 hours a day, regardless of weather. ### 2026 — Global Geothermal Capacity Snapshot By the end of 2025, the top 10 geothermal power countries by installed capacity were: United States (~3.7 GW), Indonesia (~2.4 GW), Philippines (~1.9 GW), Turkey (~1.7 GW), New Zealand (~1.1 GW), Mexico, Kenya (980 MW), Italy, Iceland, and Japan. Total global installed geothermal capacity was approximately 16.3 gigawatts — tiny compared to solar (approximately 1,800 GW) and wind (approximately 1,000 GW), but with the EGS revolution potentially unlocking a resource base larger than both combined. --- ## Patterns and Analysis ### The Bipartisan Exception Geothermal's most analytically interesting feature for the Right Wing KB is its near-total absence from the [[Culture War]] dynamics that have consumed every other clean energy technology. The [[Koch Network]], [[Heritage Foundation]], [[Heartland Institute]], and [[Americans for Prosperity]] have spent billions fighting solar and wind energy — funding [[Climate Change Denialism]], lobbying against renewable portfolio standards through [[ALEC]], and framing clean energy subsidies as government overreach antithetical to [[Free Market Fundamentalism]]. Yet geothermal has largely escaped this treatment. The reasons are structural rather than principled. Geothermal drilling looks identical to oil and gas drilling. It employs the same workforce — roughnecks, drilling engineers, geologists — in the same states. Its infrastructure is invisible: no towering wind turbines, no vast solar arrays visible from highways, no aesthetic disruption to trigger the "not in my backyard" reactions that conservative media have exploited. Its resource base is concentrated in red and purple western states — Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California's Imperial Valley — rather than the blue-state coastal corridors associated with renewable energy activism. And it produces baseload power: reliable, 24/7 electricity generation that satisfies the conservative critique of solar and wind as intermittent and grid-destabilizing. This reveals something important about the [[Climate in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] framework: the opposition to clean energy is not purely ideological. If it were, geothermal would face the same hostility as solar and wind — it is, after all, a zero-carbon energy source that competes with fossil fuels and benefits from the same IRA tax credits that conservatives have pledged to repeal. The [[The Climate Denial Machine]] apparatus has simply not turned its firepower on geothermal the way it has on solar and wind. The fact that geothermal escapes suggests that the opposition is as much cultural and aesthetic as economic — it is about what clean energy looks like, who builds it, and which tribal identity it signals — a dynamic explored in [[Astroturfing]] campaigns and the broader [[Tea Party Movement]]'s anti-green energy rhetoric, rather than what it does to the energy market. ### The Fracking Paradox The deepest irony of the EGS revolution is that the technology making it possible — horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, fiber-optic downhole monitoring — was developed by and for the fossil fuel industry. The fracking revolution that made the United States the world's largest oil and gas producer also created the engineering toolkit needed to make geothermal energy available everywhere, not just in volcanic zones. This is [[The Manhattan Project]] or [[The Space Race]] pattern — reminiscent of the [[Cold War Timeline]] dynamic where military investment seeded civilian breakthroughs — applied unintentionally: massive investment in one domain (fossil fuel extraction, pioneered by companies descended from [[Standard Oil]]) producing transformative capabilities in another (clean energy). The workforce bridge is equally significant. The oil and gas industry employs hundreds of thousands of skilled workers — drillers, wellsite engineers, geologists, equipment operators — whose jobs are threatened by long-term decarbonization. Geothermal offers these workers a direct transfer path: same skills, same equipment, same geographic regions, different energy source. This is the "just transition" that environmental advocates have promised but rarely delivered — and it is happening organically, driven by market demand and technological overlap rather than government retraining programs. [[Halliburton]] and Baker Hughes entering the geothermal market makes the crossover concrete at the corporate level. When the world's largest oilfield services companies deploy their drilling technology and supply chains for geothermal projects, the structural distinction between "fossil fuel industry" and "clean energy industry" begins to dissolve — undermining the [[Administrative State]] vs. free enterprise framing that [[Peter Thiel]] and other right-wing tech investors have used to oppose climate regulation. This convergence may ultimately matter more for decarbonization than any amount of climate advocacy. ### The Data Center Demand Driver The AI boom has created something geothermal has never had before: a deep-pocketed customer base desperate for exactly what geothermal provides. Tech companies like [[Google]], Microsoft, and Meta need enormous quantities of 24/7, carbon-free electricity to power AI training clusters. Solar and wind cannot provide this without massive battery storage. Nuclear can but takes a decade to build. Geothermal can be deployed in 2–3 years and runs continuously. The result has been an unprecedented wave of geothermal power purchase agreements from hyperscale data center operators. This demand signal is transforming geothermal's economics. Fervo's $10 billion IPO valuation, Sage's Meta deal, Ormat's Google contract — these are driven by AI energy demand, not climate policy. The irony is that artificial intelligence — built and trained by Silicon Valley companies that are central to the [[Silicon Valley]] ecosystem — may do more to accelerate geothermal deployment than any climate legislation. ### The "Anywhere Geothermal" Promise The ultimate prize is what the industry calls "anywhere geothermal": the ability to access the earth's heat everywhere, not just in volcanic regions. The earth's temperature increases by roughly 25–30°C per kilometer of depth everywhere on the planet. At 10 kilometers, rock temperatures exceed 300°C virtually everywhere. If drilling costs can be reduced sufficiently — through EGS techniques, millimeter-wave drilling, or other innovations — then every point on Earth sits above a functionally inexhaustible energy source. This distinguishes geothermal from the "always 20 years away" critique leveled at nuclear fusion. Geothermal heat exists now, requires no exotic physics, and can be accessed with extensions of proven drilling technology. The challenge is purely economic: can drilling costs be brought low enough to make deep geothermal competitive with natural gas and solar-plus-storage? Fervo's Cape Station economics, FORGE's research results, and Quaise's millimeter-wave drilling will begin answering that question over the next five years. If the answer is yes, geothermal becomes not just a clean energy source but the clean energy source — available everywhere, running 24/7, invisible to the surface, compatible with existing power plant infrastructure, and employing a workforce that already exists. It would be the rare technology that satisfies the demands of climate advocates, energy security hawks, drilling-state politicians, and [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] proponents simultaneously. Whether the right-wing infrastructure that has fought clean energy for decades will embrace this possibility — or find new reasons to oppose it — will reveal whether that opposition was ever really about markets and freedom at all. --- ## See also - [[Climate Change Timeline]] - [[Climate Change Denialism]] - [[Climate in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] - [[Energy Transition Politics]] - [[Fossil Fuel Industry and Climate]] - [[Nuclear Energy Debate]] - [[Environmental Deregulation Playbook]] - [[Inflation Reduction Act]] - [[Bipartisan Infrastructure Law]] - [[West Virginia v. EPA]] - [[Department of Energy]] - [[EPA]] - [[Koch Network]] - [[Heritage Foundation]] - [[Cato Institute]] - [[ALEC]] - [[Competitive Enterprise Institute]] - [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] - [[Dark Money]] - [[Manufacturing Doubt]] - [[Regulatory Capture]] - [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] - [[Corporate Power]] - [[Movement Conservatism Timeline]] - [[Defense Tech Timeline]] - [[DARPA Timeline]] - [[Dark Money Timeline]] - [[Campaign Finance Timeline]] - [[Google]] - [[Halliburton]] - [[Silicon Valley]] - [[Critical Minerals]] - [[Lobbying]] - [[Revolving Door]] - [[The Manhattan Project]] - [[The Space Race]] - [[Cold War Timeline]] - [[Paris Agreement]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[The Climate Denial Machine]] - [[Greenhouse Effect]] - [[Standard Oil]] - [[Koch Industries]] - [[Water Politics]]