The company is drilling a four-loop system that will supply 8.2 MW of electricity to the regional grid and 64 MW of industrial heat to nearby towns, with a grant of 91.6 million euros from the European Union. Vany said the first loop should start delivering power in mid-2025 and then heat in early 2026. When completed, the novel geothermal system will reach nearly 2.8 miles below the surface and connect nearly 200 miles of boreholes underground.
“We’re learning and iterating as we go, and there are some speed bumps; things go wrong, tools break,” she said. “But we’ve done all of the things we need to do to demonstrate the commercial viability already.” Vany added that Eavor aims to have its first closed-loop systems deployed in the United States before the end of this decade.
Quaise Energy, a startup with MIT origins, is laser-focused on unleashing geothermal energy from the third category, superhot rock formations. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is developing high-frequency beams that melt and vaporize rocks to tap resources that aren’t technically or financially feasible to reach with existing techniques.
In November, Quaise decided that it was ready “to go beyond the lab” and drill outdoors, said Carlos Araque, the company’s CEO and co-founder.
Quaise is now building machines to conduct two yard tests, with the first slated to take place at the company’s Houston facility in January. The second test involves drilling into rocks placed inside an existing well owned by Nabors Industries, one of Quaise’s investors. After that, the geothermal startup plans to conduct its first field test by boring a 330-foot-deep hole at a quarry outside Austin, Texas.
All those steps are intended to help Quaise validate its drilling technology — and raise significantly more funding — as it works to complete its first commercial pilot and begin producing superhot steam, potentially as early as 2026. On December 3, Quaise said it was partnering with Nevada Gold Mines to pursue another initiative: a “deep geothermal” power plant at a mining site in Elko, Nevada.
“Nothing but tailwinds is what I’ve seen,” Araque said of the geothermal industry in 2024. “The recognition of geothermal as an important piece of the puzzle has only gained traction year after year.”
Geothermal joins the race to supply 24/7 carbon-free energy
That recognition comes at a pivotal time for providers of “clean, firm” energy.
Soaring U.S. power demand is causing states, utilities, and major energy buyers to scramble for electricity. The country’s five-year forecast for load growth has increased almost fivefold in the past two years, to nearly 128 GW, driven primarily by tech companies’ plans to build giant AI data centers.
“It’s catapulting and helping to remove some of the development barriers” for geothermal, said Fervo’s Owens. She added that rising load growth, together with Fervo’s recent cost improvements, has changed the conversations the startup is having with potential off-takers.
“All of a sudden it’s ‘how much [power] can you give me, and how fast can you give me it?’” Owens said. “It feels like the industry and the world has woken up to the problem being real, and realizing that the solution is right there.”
Along with the Utah project, Fervo is developing a 115 MW geothermal plant in northern Nevada, which could start delivering electricity to the grid by 2029. This summer, Google and NV Energy sought state regulators’ permission to enter into a power supply agreement around Fervo’s project, based on a proposed “clean transition tariff.” The idea is that Google will pay a premium in order to help bring the carbon-free energy resource online faster, ideally without raising other ratepayers’ electric bills.
Meta, the owner of Facebook, is also turning to geothermal to support its data-center ambitions. But the tech company is partnering with a different U.S. enhanced geothermal startup: Sage Geosystems.
In August, Houston-based Sage announced plans to supply Meta with 150 MW of baseload geothermal power from a first-of-a-kind installation. The details remain vague, but Sage said it will build its geothermal system in a state “east of the Rocky Mountains,” with the goal of bringing the project’s first phase online in 2027.
That same month, the startup launched a separate geothermal project not for generating new electricity but for storing excess clean energy in the ground.
Sage is building a 3 MW installation in Christine, Texas, that will pump water underground and build up pressure that can be released as needed, spinning a turbine and sending electricity back to the grid. The company successfully tested its “earthen battery” system at an abandoned gas well in 2023. In February, Sage raised $17 million in Series A funding to advance the technology, in a round led by the pioneering fracking company previously named Chesapeake Energy.
Emerging success brings more scrutiny
Companies like Sage and Fervo say that they benefit from using the same tools and workforce as fossil-fuel companies. But there are key differences in how the two industries operate, said McLaughlin of World Resources Institute.
To extract oil and gas, shale developers use a slurry of toxic chemicals, sand, and water. Copious volumes of wastewater are then reinjected into old wells — a practice that has caused damaging earthquakes in Texas, Oklahoma, and other states. Scientific research has also shown that fracking practices have contaminated groundwater and surface water in some areas.
Closed-loop systems don’t directly inject fluid into the ground. Enhanced geothermal systems largely recirculate fluids and don’t produce lots of wastewater; they also typically use very few or no chemical additives to fracture rocks. Although earlier enhanced geothermal projects did trigger earthquakes in Switzerland, South Korea, and France, geothermal companies in the U.S. now follow DOE’s protocol to mitigate the risk of induced seismicity.
As next-generation geothermal projects multiply, the industry must stick to those protocols and be transparent about the types and volumes of fluids used for drilling to limit the risk of environmental impacts and community pushback, McLaughlin said.
“We see these measures as being something the industry can do to help it scale responsibly … and earn public trust,” she added.
Geothermal developers will also have to keep chasing the goal of “deeper and hotter” if the world’s enormous heat and electricity needs are to be met without cooking the planet, said Quaise’s Araque. Recent computer modeling suggests that a superhot system can deliver five to 10 times more power than is produced today from enhanced systems for up to two decades.
“The companies that are already in this space and are scaling geothermal … are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Given the scale of the challenge ahead, this is not the end of the road. It’s just the beginning.”
