Geothermal Rising Conference: Carbon-Free Energy to Meet the Moment?

I won’t belabor what we’ve all heard ad infinitum (ad nauseam?), but forgive me for setting the stage: electricity demand is growing dramatically due to i) gigawatt-scale data centers, ii) electrification of transport and legacy industries, iii) re-shoring and reindustrialization of industry for domestic supply chain needs, and iv) increased cooling demand caused by climate change. Interconnection queues for both electricity generators and users are long and getting longer. Transmission at scale is hard to build, due to complex financing, protracted timelines to aggregate and permit rights-of-way, and the overall scale of these megaprojects, further delaying electricity moving from low-cost areas saturated with renewables to high-cost, congested regions. And the politics… Yeah, let’s just leave that one alone; this is for a G-rated audience (definitely ad nauseam).

Enter Stage Left: Geothermal Energy

Geothermal resources offer incredible promise, either to generate electricity or shift load off of the electrical grid with low to ultra-low carbon footprints. While geothermal has been around for decades, deployment has been limited for various reasons. Solutions are characterized primarily by the temperature and depth (which change depending on the source, so I’ll give directional numbers). The Geothermal Rising Conference (GRC) organized talks and tracks based on the following groupings:

Direct Use

Digging wells to pull naturally occurring hot water from shallow-to-medium depth (i.e., mostly <1k meters and <100C) for direct use in something like district heating, as in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Geothermal Heat Pumps / Ground-Source Heating & Cooling

Similar to the above, but circulating a working fluid into shallow wells (typically <300 meters) to either reject heat into or pull heat from the ground’s constant temperatures of +/-20C, coupled with heat pumps (think: the ground as a thermal battery). System design is primarily driven by balancing heating and cooling loads, as available heating or cooling capacity is limited by the thermal conductivity of the ground.

Electricity-Generating Applications

Conventional Hydrothermal Systems

This is the geothermal most people think of. Developers look for hot (typically 150C - 200C), naturally permeable rock with water flow, then drill injection and production well pairs into the formation (typically <3000 meters). Water is extracted and run through a dry-steam, flash-steam, or binary-cycle power plant. “Dry hole risk” is the primary risk, where a well drilled into a promising surface structure (e.g., next to a spring) is not productive. Conventional is also operationally-intensive to limit the drawdown of the thermal resource.

Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS)

EGS is trying to take naturally occurring water out of the equation and allow for significantly larger-scale projects. Companies such as Fervo are drilling well pairs into hot, impermeable rock and creating their own network of cracks, then circulating water to move the heat to a power plant on the surface. To make the effort worth it, EGS companies want to dig deeper (> 3000 meters) into hotter rock (> 200C), because the energy density of super-critical water increases non-linearly above 200C. Significantly more electricity can therefore be generated for a given volume of hot water.

Advanced Geothermal Systems (AGS) / Closed-Loop

AGS aims to eliminate the subsurface risks that EGS and hydrothermal encounter, on top of potentially accessing hotter resources. Companies like Eavor are developing these systems for both district heating and cooling and electricity generation. The downside is more complex drilling with much higher costs that require new materials to seal wells, compared to traditional well casing and cement for vertical wells.

Superhot Rock / Deep Geothermal Resources

This encapsulates new drilling methods designed for hot (>300C) resources that tend to be very deep (10km+). At these temperatures, drill bits and sensitive electronics break down rapidly, extending drilling time painfully with the most expensive pieces of equipment (the drill rigs) on-site. Enter Quaise, Mazama, and PA Drilling, pioneering technologies such as millimeter-wave drilling and plasma drilling to reduce the amount of equipment down-hole and the problems that can arise. These are long-term projects at TRLs of < 7.

There is much more to the geothermal energy story, such as the testbed projects like Utah FORGE, where new drilling methods and technologies are tested with government support, but there you have it: a set stage.

Geothermal Rising… Rising

GRC is the top geothermal technical conference in the US. The energy amongst the ~1500 attendees this year was strong, though tempered by political volatility. New and legacy geothermal developers, startups, and service providers expressed optimism, while oil and gas service providers saw geothermal as a potential growth area. Three days of plenary sessions and rapid technical talks highlighted the policy, science, and engineering developments enabling the current wave of enthusiasm and deployment. Commercial/market developments were discussed, but far less so. (Geothermal Rising, the nonprofit behind the conference, is separately putting on a Geothermal Investment Forum in Houston in April 2026 to focus on the commercial side.)

Uniquely, GRC is “small” enough for a major conference that I was able to have great conversations. GRC also offers a great student track, largely supported by TLS Geothermics this year, a French geothermal exploration and subsurface characterization company.

I would highly recommend anyone interested in the technology and technical derisking necessary for geothermal to consider attending.