VOX | October 21, 2020
Recent oil and gas technology innovations are going to turbocharge geothermal, especially if policymakers can get their act together and offer some support. There’s a steep learning curve ahead and they’re just now accelerating into it, but the next decade is likely to be more active for geothermal than the past four. With an inexhaustible, dispatchable, flexible renewable energy source so close to breaking through, the vision of a fully renewably powered world seems less and less utopian, more and more tantalizingly within reach. [GEO's Jamie Beard] stresses that there are no insuperable barriers if enough technical know-how and capital are brought to bear. The problem of extracting geothermal from deep, dry, hot rock, she says, “is largely an incremental engineering problem that, when solved, solves energy.”
