Utah’s hottest new power source is 15,000 feet below the ground

When my son, Rory, was younger, we used to love visiting power plants together. It was the perfect father-son activity (for us, anyway), and we always had a blast checking out the huge equipment and learning how it was used to generate electricity.

One of our more memorable trips was to a geothermal power plant that was close to the Þríhnúkagígur volcano in Iceland. I remember looking at the huge plumes of hot steam emerging from the ground and thinking about how amazing it was that people could harness heat thousands of feet below the surface to keep the lights on.

That feeling came back to me earlier this year during a visit to Cape Station, the future home of the world’s largest enhanced geothermal power plant, in Beaver County, Utah.

Few people associate geothermal energy with the United States, and for a good reason: Less than 1 percent of the energy generated in the U.S. is geothermal. A company called Fervo Energy is hoping to change that with an innovative new approach to turning the earth’s heat into power.

Breakthrough Energy and I are proud supporters of Fervo, and it was super cool to see firsthand how much progress has been made at Cape Station. The company’s pilot project in Nevada came online in 2023 with a capacity of 3.5 MW—enough to provide power to about 2,600 homes. Cape Station will be much bigger. Fervo has already drilled 20 of the 24 planned geothermal wells at the facility for Phase I, and the plant is expected to start generating 100 MW of power next year. An additional 400 MW will come online in 2028.

Geothermal is one of the most promising ways to deliver clean energy that’s reliable and affordable.  In order to meet the world’s growing energy needs, we are going to need lots of different ways of making energy. Intermittent power sources like wind and solar will play a key role, but we also need sources of energy that work around the clock without contributing to climate change, like geothermal and nuclear power.

The science behind geothermal energy is pretty simple. The interior of the Earth is incredibly hot, and the deeper you go, the hotter the ground becomes. If you pump fluid deep enough to be warmed by this heat and then pump it back to the surface, you can turn the hot liquid into steam and use it to spin turbines and generate electricity—just like many other types of power plants. 

The reality of harnessing that energy is a lot more difficult. In some places, you only need to go down a few hundred feet to reach the heat you need. In other places, you have to dig down a mile or more. Most wells at Cape Station are between 8,000 and 9,000 feet deep, and the deepest one extends a mind-blowing 15,000 feet below the surface. That is about the depth you'd get to if you stacked 50 Statues of Liberty on top of each other!

Most geothermal power plants today are located near the boundary between two tectonic plates, where you don’t have to drill as deep to find usable heat. That’s why you see them more often in geologically active places like Iceland or California. But Fervo’s approach will make geothermal energy an option in more places.

One of the company’s biggest innovations is the use of horizontal drilling. Instead of just digging straight down, Fervo extends its wells horizontally by as much as 5,000 feet at their deepest point.

This technique is often used by the oil and gas industry to increase contact with a reservoir. The same principle applies to geothermal power. By accessing more heat from the same depth, Fervo’s plants cost less and are viable in more places than traditional geothermal plants. They’re also easier to scale up, which is crucial for meeting the world’s energy needs.

Because these techniques are nearly identical to ones used by the oil and gas industry, Fervo is able to employ workers from that field with minimal retraining. Sixty percent of the company’s employees used to work in oil and gas, including its CEO.

Horizontal drilling isn’t the only thing that sets Fervo’s approach apart. When most people picture a geothermal power plant, they imagine clouds of steam emerging from the ground—like the kind Rory and I saw in Iceland. But if you visit the Cape Station plant when it comes online in 2026, you won’t see any steam at all.

That’s because the plant will use a closed system. Geothermal energy is one of the more climate-friendly sources of power, but one of its downsides is how much water it uses. (All of the steam you see escaping is water lost.) Fervo’s technology captures all the water that would’ve been lost and recirculates it underground to keep the system running.

It’s a truly innovative approach, and I am glad that it is being deployed here in the United States. I was honored to be joined by Senator John Curtis for our tour of Cape Station. We had a great conversation about the role companies like Fervo will play in maintaining America’s energy independence. I told him how great it was to see Utah leading by example—not just on energy innovation friendly policies but on actual deployment.

This is the kind of effort that will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. I used to think that geothermal would never be more than 5 percent of the global energy mix. But now I believe it could eventually supply up to 20 percent of the world’s electricity. Geothermal power will have a big role to play in our clean energy future, and it’s exciting to see companies like Fervo push the technology to new depths.