Why Geothermal Energy Is Garnering So Much Attention

By Haley Zaremba - Jul 26, 2025  oilprice.com

• Geothermal energy, a constant and limitless clean energy source, is poised to become a major disruptor in global energy markets.
• New technological advancements are making deep geothermal energy extraction more feasible.
• The widespread adoption of enhanced geothermal technologies could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy anywhere on Earth.

Geothermal energy holds massive potential to disrupt global energy markets and provide nearly limitless and constant clean energy. Unlike solar and wind energy, which rely on climatic factors outside of human control, the heat from the Earth’s core is a steady and constant commodity. It’s just a matter of tapping into it. And the race is heating up to determine the best technological approach to do just that.

Way back in 2021, Oilprice asked, “Why is the world still ignoring geothermal energy?” In the four years since that report, everything has changed. The promising clean energy source has – at long last – become a very hot topic. Rising from near obscurity, it’s now shaping up to be “the decade of geothermal.” That’s according to Cindy Taff, chief executive of geothermal company Sage Geosystems, in an interview in The Hill published in February of this year.

So what took so long? Geothermal is already easily accessible in places like Iceland, where heat from the Earth’s core already leaks up to the surface and can be easily captured and converted into electricity. But on most of the planet, temperatures useful for creating electricity are trapped far, far under the ground. The Earth's crust varies from about 3 to 47 miles in thickness, and most of those thinnest areas are inconveniently located way out in the deep ocean. 

“The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit,” reports the New York Times. “At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam.” This ‘superhot’ geothermal “could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.”

Drilling a hole deep enough to enable cost-effective and commercial geothermal energy is no easy task. But research and pilot projects trying to figure out the best way to do it are finally taking off. 

One potential method borrows hydraulic fracturing technologies that are already well-tested and widely in use in the oil and gas industry. Using fracking infrastructure, geothermal companies can crack open subterranean layers of rock to inject water into the fractures at high volumes and pressures, resulting in artificially made geothermal reservoirs. This technology is not yet cost-effective enough to be commercially viable, since traditional fracking equipment can’t withstand the necessary levels of heat, but it was one of the first “enhanced” geothermal technologies and is therefore more developed than some of the more nascent alternatives.

Another, more futuristic technological approach involves nuclear fusion. Researchers are currently investigating the utility of gyrotrons, a technology used in nuclear fusion to super-heat and maintain plasma with millimeter waves, to basically melt away rock to drill deeper and more efficiently into the Earth. Mathematical modelling from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that this technology “could blast a basketball-size hole into rock at a rate of 20 meters per hour,” according to IEEE Spectrum. “At that rate, 25-and-a-half days of continuous drilling would create the world’s deepest hole.” And now the gyrotron approach is ready to leave the lab and face real-world testing. 

A Slovakian company called GA Drilling is also looking to plasma, but rather than using millimeter waves the technology uses a plasma torch for high-temperature drilling, which they say can reach 10-kilometer depths to “provide clean, inexpensive and nonstop available geothermal energy” at “any location on Earth.” 

A geothermal technology breakthrough could reshape global energy industries and shore up energy security – just in the nick of time as energy demand surges on the back of data center growth. A recent report suggests that geothermal energy could meet up to 64 percent of the expected growth in data center energy demand as soon as the early 2030s. Plus, enhanced geothermal drilling technologies would democratize clean energy, as any country could theoretically tap into this universal heat source to become energy independent.