Huge Geothermal Power Project Gets the Go-Ahead

The other renewable energy is finally on its way.

The Bureau of Land Management on Thursday approved a massive geothermal power project in Utah, to be built by Fervo Energy. The Cape Geothermal Power Project will provide up to two gigawatts of emissions-free electricity, putting it on the scale of a two-reactor nuclear power plant, with enough juice to power two million homes.

“Geothermal energy is one of our greatest untapped clean energy resources on public lands,” Department of the Interior official Steve Feldgus said, according to a press release.

Fervo is out in front of a burgeoning geothermal startup field. Though the concept of using the abundant heat down below our feat to generate power is old — the first geothermal power plant came online in Italy in 1904, and the U.S. has about 30 working plants out West, including the Jersey Valley plant in Nevada pictured above — its economics have kept it largely on the sidelines as the need for carbon-free power has grown. Its savior, oddly enough, has come from the world of oil and gas: the enhanced drilling techniques that facilitated the shale gas boom beginning in the 2000s are now being transferred to the geothermal industry, where they can be used to bring that heat up from below at a much cheaper price point. One analysis of the power source’s potential in Texas found that oil and gas industry techniques could lower the cost of geothermal projects by as much as 43 percent.

The Fervo approval, then, might be just the start of something big. One expert told me in early 2023 that we are now in “the geothermal decade…. The interest in geothermal is exploding.”

Along with the new project approval, the Interior Department proposed a new “categorial exclusion” that would streamline the review and permitting process for exploration of new geothermal resources.

“We need all the tools in the toolbox to reach a clean energy future, and this proposed categorical exclusion will be helpful in accelerating the process of locating new geothermal resources,” said the BLM’s director Tracy Stone-Manning. Two similar categorial exclusions were adopted in April of this year, suggesting the Biden administration is looking for any routes to getting the industry off the ground.

There are still technological as well as logistical and political challenges to growing a field that historically has managed less than one percent of U.S. power production. But it’s a start.