How might we advance enhanced geothermal systems so that baseload energy becomes regionally reliable and complementary to other energy sources?

Traditional geothermal power has been limited to locations with naturally occurring hot water near the surface — rare geological conditions found in places like Iceland, New Zealand, and the western U.S. But Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) change this by creating artificial geothermal reservoirs: drilling deep into hot rock, fracturing it to create permeability, and circulating water to extract heat. Because Earth's temperature increases with depth everywhere, EGS could theoretically work almost anywhere, turning geothermal from a niche resource into a globally scalable form of clean baseload power.

EGS offers unique advantages: it's weather-independent, has a small surface footprint, produces power 24/7 with capacity factors exceeding 90%, and can be deployed regionally to complement other clean energy sources. In windy regions, EGS can provide stability when wind drops. In sunny regions, it can fill in when solar output declines. And unlike nuclear, it has no fuel supply chain, no waste disposal challenges, and minimal public concern. The challenge is making it work reliably and economically: drilling to 10,000+ feet is expensive, creating fracture networks is unpredictable, and managing induced seismicity requires careful monitoring. But recent advances in drilling technology, reservoir modeling, and subsurface sensing are making EGS increasingly viable.

Geothermal energy has been used for electricity generation since 1904, when the first plant began operation in Larderello, Italy. The United States became the world leader in geothermal power in the 1960s with the development of The Geysers field in California, which grew to over 1,500 MW capacity by the 1980s. But growth then stalled because conventional geothermal requires three conditions in the same place: underground heat, naturally occurring water, and permeable rock. Only a few locations worldwide have all three, limiting conventional geothermal to about 15 GW globally — less than 1% of world electricity generation.

The concept of Enhanced Geothermal Systems emerged in the 1970s at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Researchers realized that if you could artificially create the permeability and water circulation that occur naturally in geothermal fields, you could access the vast heat resources that exist in hot dry rock formations worldwide. Early experiments at Fenton Hill, New Mexico, demonstrated the basic concept: drill deep wells into hot rock, hydraulically fracture the rock to create connected pathways, and circulate water between injection and production wells to extract heat.

But making EGS commercially viable proved difficult. The Fenton Hill project, despite running from 1974 to 1995, never generated electricity economically. Similar projects in Europe, Australia, and Japan struggled with technical challenges: drilling costs were too high, fracture networks didn't always connect injection and production wells, and circulating water sometimes caused small earthquakes. A high-profile 2006 project in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down after fracturing operations triggered a magnitude 3.4 earthquake, creating public backlash that set the industry back years.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: the shale revolution. Between 2005 and 2015, the oil and gas industry perfected horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, driving down costs and improving success rates dramatically. These same technologies apply directly to EGS — in fact, creating fracture networks in hot rock is similar to fracking shale, just at higher temperatures. By 2020, drilling costs had dropped by 30-50%, and companies like Fervo Energy began demonstrating that EGS could work commercially using proven drilling techniques adapted from oil and gas.

Recent projects have validated the commercial potential. Fervo's Project Red in Nevada achieved continuous power generation in 2023, delivering 3.5 MW using horizontal wells and fiber optic sensing to map fracture networks. The DOE's FORGE project in Utah has become a testing ground for next-generation drilling and reservoir characterization technologies. And major tech companies have signed offtake agreements for EGS power, providing the long-term revenue certainty needed to finance large-scale projects. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that EGS could provide over 100 GW of baseload capacity in the western U.S. alone if deployment barriers can be overcome.