WASHINGTON —The oil and gas industry drills about 70,000 wells per year, according to Jamie Beard, founder and executive director of Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit that aims to accelerate the development of next-generation geothermal energy.

If geothermal could hit the same numbers ― using the fracking and horizontal drilling technologies developed by oil and gas — it could meet 75% of the world’s demand for electricity and a major chunk of its heating and cooling, she said.

“Heating and cooling is 50% of the geothermal opportunity, but it does not get 50% of the attention,” Beard said. “It’s very sexy to go after power. It catches headlines. Heat is not as sexy, unfortunately. … But if you think about it … if we knock that out with geothermal, that’s 50% of the world’s energy demand.”

Beard was speaking March 4 on stage at Geothermal House, an event intended to promote geothermal as a clean, 24/7 resource now being enthusiastically embraced by the oil and gas industry, Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump administration. Cosponsored by InnerSpace and right-leaning nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), the conference even had its own Trump-friendly acronym, MAGMA (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances), emblazoned on red baseball caps.

In a closing keynote at the event, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, formerly the CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, laid out the administration’s approach to geothermal as a crossover technology with huge potential. Shale drilling technology is “tailor-made for geothermal,” he said. “We can mine simply massive amounts of heat from underground that we can use to produce electricity; we can use to produce district heating or process heating right at the surface and, done right, can even help produce cooling.”

Framing geothermal as a resource for energy abundance, meeting energy demand from artificial intelligence and cutting electricity prices, Wright said, “We’ve got to put capital to work. 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.

“We don’t want AI somewhere else, not just because we want jobs and investment here, but AI is going to drive scientific progress and national security,” Wright said. “We can’t afford to lose this industry … and the only way to get it here is to implement President Trump’s agenda of affordable, reliable, abundant, secure energy.”

‘Ready to Go’

Republican lawmakers including Sen. John Curtis (Utah), Rep. Randy Weber (Texas) and Rep. August Pfluger (Texas.) echoed Wright’s call for the government to get out of the way of geothermal development, adding permitting reform and transmission expansion to the geothermal to-do list.

“Sometimes it’s easier to drill for oil and gas than it is for heat,” Curtis said in his opening keynote. Geothermal is “not as reliant as the other energy sources are on subsidies. [It’s] not as reliant as the other energy sources are on forcing the market. The market is ready to go.”

The fact that states are now competing to be industry leaders is another sign of the technology’s growth and acceptance.

Speaking at a recent webinar on geothermal hosted by the Atlantic Council, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) boasted of new permitting processes in his state that provide “one of the most expedited, reliable permitting regimes for geothermal in the country.” (See With Demand Growth Across US, Geothermal is Poised for its Moment.)

Weber pointed to his state’s recent approval of its first geothermal well, a 3-MW project that Houston-based Sage Geosystems is developing to provide power to San Miguel Electric Cooperative.

The Texas Railroad Commission’s approval “is a major step forward, and it underscores Texas’ commitment and Texas’ potential to lead in this space,” he said. “We have the infrastructure; we have the workforce and the experience from the oil and gas people.

“We can drill, baby, drill … especially on geothermal,” Weber said.

Backing up the lawmakers, Simon Seaton, CEO of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, said the oil and gas industry is “taking geothermal seriously.”

The technical overlap between the two technologies “is huge,” he said. “Only the oil and gas industry actually has the track record to develop and scale geothermal and bring it quickly into the energy mix to address challenges like energy security, increased demand for AI and data centers, as well as carbon-emission reductions.”

Historically, geothermal energy has been limited to areas with active or volcanic geology, like Iceland and California’s Salton Sea.

But an online map developed by InnerSpace shows that every congressional district in the country has geothermal potential, at the very least for residential and commercial heating and cooling, while in the West, the heat beneath the surface could be tapped to produce power, Beard said.

State of Play

In February 2024, the Department of Energy awarded $60 million in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for three pilot projects, each using different enhanced geothermal technologies.  A second round of funding  for $14.2 million was announced in June. (See DOE to Fund Enhanced Geothermal Demo on Oregon Volcano.)

Wright did not mention the pilot projects in his remarks March 4, and DOE has not responded to NetZero Insider’s questions on the status of the funding, and whether the $60 million for the first-round projects has been paused or frozen.

In March 2024, DOE also released one of its Pathways to Commercial Liftoff reports on next-generation geothermal, which estimated that the U.S. could add between 90 and 300 GW of new geothermal generation by 2050.

Despite its apparent advantages in geothermal, the U.S. will likely face strong competition from China in next-gen geothermal development, some speakers at Geothermal House said. Chris Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a nonprofit focused on building a conservative climate movement, called for the government to “identify key things that we want to focus on, and then actually go and do them.”

“That’s one of the problems that we’ve seen with the federal government here in America … there’s just so much duplication, so many things just fall through the cracks,” Barnard said.  “And when we want to compete with China, the reality is, when they want to go do something, they just go and do it. We need to have a bit of that mentality in our federal government as well.”