From Hot Rocks to Clean Power: Roland Horne on the Future of Geothermal

Guest

Roland Horne

Professor, Stanford University

Transcript

Roland Horne: EGS, enhanced geothermal systems, has always been kind of the next technology that we’ve been waiting for — since 1975 when it was first invented. You might think of it a bit like fusion energy. That is always 30 years in the future. And that’s kind of the way it’s been for EGS, as well. But the 30 years is up and now it’s actually here.

Bill Loveless: If it seems like you’re hearing the words “geothermal energy” a lot more now, that’s because this clean, firm energy source is enjoying a renaissance with roots in the 1970s.

Enhanced geothermal systems aren’t exactly new, but they’re finally hitting pay dirt—or rather, steam—thanks to improved drilling techniques. Those techniques, borrowed from the fracking boom, have also made geothermal energy production viable outside the Western states, where it’s long been a small but steady source of power.

So what is the state of geothermal energy, and what’s behind the current surge in innovation? How are falling costs and sustained policy support helping geothermal producers gain more traction right now? And what are the next technical frontiers that could lead to even more productive geothermal wells?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.

Today on the show, Roland Horne. Roland is the Thomas Davies Barrow Professor of Earth Sciences, professor of Energy Science and Engineering and director of the geothermal program at Stanford University. He’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy.

Over his career, he has made significant technical contributions to the field of geothermal energy production. I spoke with Roland about the technology behind enhanced geothermal systems and what the next generation of innovations could look like. We discussed the challenges of adding this baseload power to the grid and how those are being addressed. And we talked about how the recent success of Fervo Energy, founded by Stanford students, has blazed a new path for his current students and researchers. Here’s our conversation.

Roland Horne, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Roland Horne 02:34: Thank you very much.

Bill Loveless 02:35: Well, professor, you’ve been in the forefront of geothermal research for many years. It’s a topic that we look forward to addressing in somewhat of a fundamental way: What is this promising technology and what’s happening lately and what might be the outlook. But before we get into that, what inspired you to pursue a career in geothermal energy?

Roland Horne 03:01: That’s a good question. So I’m originally from New Zealand and when I was a student in New Zealand, geothermal was kind of the space program of New Zealand we’re a very small and not very technological country, but geothermal was to a large extent developed in New Zealand, or at least tried first in New Zealand on a particular type. At least it had been done in Italy before that. But New Zealand pioneered a liquid dominated geothermal field. So engineers in New Zealand followed the path towards geothermal as cutting edge technology at that time.

Bill Loveless 03:41: And in fact, it continues to be a prominent form of energy in New Zealand. Correct? I understand it maybe represents some 20% of the electricity production in that country.

Roland Horne 03:52: Yes, that’s correct. Even more now than before. So it’s gone through a renaissance in many countries, including New Zealand.

Bill Loveless 03:59: What’s kept you passionate about this technology over the years?

Roland Horne 04:02: Well, it’s kind of different. It’s remained cutting edge in a number of different ways. It’s gone through cycles for sure, in the seventies and the eighties, both in New Zealand but also in the United States. Geothermal became attractive to a lot of people because of the oil shocks. And then it kind of went into sort of a static period for a long time growing slowly but not very excitingly so. until about 10 years ago when renewable energy worldwide became a target for many governments and policymakers and geothermal was kind of quietly in the background, but once solar and wind started to max out in a lot of places, people began looking for clean, firm power, which geothermal happens to be. And so it’s kind of come from the back burner to the front burner in the most recent decade.

Bill Loveless 05:03: Yeah, I think as a reporter — and I covered energy for many years — I rarely did stories on geothermal energy and perhaps because much of my reporting career was at a point when this technology was, as you say, on the back burner, it wasn’t one that got a heck of a lot of attention for many, many years.

Roland Horne 05:24: That’s true. We referred to it as the underground energy source because that’s where it is and that’s where it is in people’s minds as well. You pointed out New Zealand, but California has produced 6% of its electricity from geothermal energy for the last 40 years. But I would say the majority of the population of the state of California don’t know that.

Bill Loveless 05:48: As I mentioned a moment ago, what we look forward to doing today is having a rather fundamental discussion of geothermal technology to understand not only what’s happening today, but basically what is this technology? So to be clear, what is geothermal technology?

Roland Horne 06:08: So geothermal heat, the heat of the earth and the basic idea is to bring heat to the surface and make use of it in society. It’s done in two different ways. One is to just bring hot water and steam to the surface and use the heat directly for space heating, industrial heat, things like that. And the other is to convert it to electricity. And worldwide total energy use is about 50-50. Between those two applications, electricity is probably the more exciting side of the industry because it’s more transportable, it’s more applicable in many places.

The general idea though, you bring hot water and steam to the surface and then run it through a turbo machinery to convert to electricity. It’s pretty much like a coal-fired plant or a gas fired plant, except the heat source is not a fossil fuel, it’s just the heat which is coming from the earth itself. It’s almost zero emissions, not completely zero. And once the power plant is built, basically there is zero fuel costs, so it has a large upfront capital expenditure, but to keep in operation it’s actually very attractive economically.

Bill Loveless 07:27: And how would you describe the current state of geothermal technology compared to where it was when you started working in this field?

Roland Horne 07:34: Well, geothermal energy has gone through phases. Conventional geothermal plants have remained more or less steady throughout the last 50 years. They’ve been continuously improving, but no kind of cutting edge breakthrough. There’s incremental improvements throughout that time, but that has changed quite a lot recently because of technologies which have crossed over from the oil and gas industry. And people are now looking at doing things in ways different than they did before.

Bill Loveless 08:08: And we’ve explored this to some extent here on this program. We had Tim Latimer from Fervo Energy on a couple of years ago, and I’m sure we can talk a bit more about some of what that company has done. But it’s interesting that transition that occurred: Taking advantage of the fracking technology from oil and gas and applying this to a geothermal. How did that come about professor so many years back, or maybe it was probably, what about 20 years ago?

Roland Horne 08:35: So actually even longer. So the idea of what we now call enhanced geothermal systems or EGS, which is what Tim Latimer and Fervo are doing, that was an idea invented actually by Los Alamos National Lab in the 1970s. After they finished inventing atomic bombs, they looked for other things to do and what they called hot dry rock was in fact this concept where you drill a couple of wells, you fracture between them and pass fluid from one to the other in order to bring the heat to the surface. An advantage in doing that is that you can do it in a place where there isn’t native permeability in the rock. And one of the reasons why we don’t have geothermal everywhere is because the three things required for a conventional geothermal system heat, water, and permeability. And there are plenty of places where you don’t have all three of those. You have to have the heat for sure. But in places where you don’t have the advantageous geology with natural fractures, then EGS can actually, which again is what Fervo is doing. That’s the technology that can be used to create a geothermal field where there wasn’t one naturally existing.

Bill Loveless 09:58: And what brought attention to this technology among those like yourself who study geothermal energy and geothermal technologies?

Roland Horne 10:09: So always been EGS has always been kind of the next technology that we’ve been waiting for since 1975 when it was first invented. You might think of it a bit like fusion energy, that it’s always 30 years in the future and that’s kind of the way it’s been for EGS as well. But the 30 years is up and now it’s actually here. So there have been to be complete, there have been EGS projects commercially operating in Europe for 20 years, but very small ones. So EGS technology, which has been proven and it has been implemented, but it hasn’t been implemented at scale. And what has been different in the last four or five years is that crossing over the fracturing technology for oil and gas and replacing the previous fracturing technology that had been used in EGS geothermal has allowed for a huge difference in the methodology and in fact, in the outcome, it’s a much more scalable process and it’s one which people are now succeeding in to bring into commercial operation.

Bill Loveless 11:26: Bring us underground and explain to us how this technology works, both in terms of the drilling, the horizontal drilling, the well characterization that takes place, the permeability factors you have to take into consideration. How does this work?

Roland Horne 11:43: So the important thing to understand about fracturing in particular — either natural practice, the ones that are already there in the ground or ones which are created — is that in most parts of the world, not all, but almost all parts of the world, fractures are vertical. And that’s because of the stress state of the rock. They go in the direction that’s the least resistance for them. So fractures are vertical, and if you think about how you drill wells, you typically drill wells sort of vertically. Also then if you imagine trying to connect two vertical or near vertical wells with a vertical fracture, you don’t actually connect much rock. And that’s the total game that we are in. You have to get water in contact with a large volume of rock. So it works, but it works, as I mentioned before, at a small scale. What’s different with horizontal weld technology, which it brought over from oil and gas, you drill the welds horizontally, you make the fractures, which again are still vertical, but you just make a whole series of them in multi-stage fracturing, just again like they do in oil and gas. And they might do 30 or 40 fractures along the length of a well, which might be 5,000 feet long. So then you’ve got 40 fractures between the two wells instead of just one or two. And that of course is a completely game changing difference between what was done before.

Bill Loveless 13:11: Well, and when did the people start to come together on this and what were they looking at again? You’ve been involved in this sort of research for decades and not just geothermal, but previously or maybe to some extent on an ongoing basis, even oil and gas wells. Right. When did the experts like yourself start to get together and realize that there was this sort of potential here?

Roland Horne 13:34: Well, for geothermal or for EGS or both?

Bill Loveless 13:37: For both,

Roland Horne 13:38: Yeah. So in the 1970s, as I mentioned, the attraction of geothermal was as a substitution for oil and gas. People in the 1970s, believe it or not, thought the oil and gas was just about run out. So they were looking for alternatives. And interestingly, as we now see again today, many of the geothermal developments in the United States were actually driven by oil companies. So the largest geothermal producer on the planet actually was Unical. They were the largest producer in the United States as well as the largest producer in the Philippines, and also a very large producer in Indonesia too. They actually produced not only projects, but a lot of the technology. So once again, that was a crossover from oil and gas 50 years ago, and they were not the only one.

Chevron eventually bought Unical and became the world’s largest geothermal producer until 2015 actually. So they’ve been around for a long time. So these crossovers and the community of geothermal scientists and engineers and businesses have gone through stages over the period of energy environment, if you like.

Lots of things have changed. Oil price goes up and down when the oil price is low, geothermal doesn’t look very attractive in places that have oil. In places that don’t have oil like the Philippines and Kenya and New Zealand and places like that. Geothermal has always been front and center, but places like United States where gas became very cheap, geothermal has been quiet for a long time until quite recently when, although we like to think of it as such, it’s not really a substitute for oil and gas. It is a substitute for oil and gas and fossil fuels, but it’s a backup, if you like, for wind and solar because you can’t have a grid, which is completely variable power. You’ve got to have something which is solid behind it, and geothermal is very attractive from that point of view. It’s pretty much not completely, but largely the biggest renewable energy that we have, which is clean firm power. The other one is biofuel.

Bill Loveless 16:06: Yeah, and I’ve read where you’ve said that one of the challenges for enhanced geothermal technology when it comes to producing electricity is how it fits into a grid. That’s a combination of baseload plants, which geothermal is, and intermittent sources like wind and solar. What did you mean by that?

Roland Horne 16:26: Yeah, so that’s a very good point. So the fact that geothermal is base load, and we used to be very proud of that, but as it happens, that’s no longer as convenient as it used to be because the grid has so much variable power. So as certainly know in the middle of the day, solar here in California, we may have up to 80% solar, but by seven o’clock at night, it’s zero. What that means is that a large fraction of the grid has to be substituted between 3:00 PM and 7:00 PM. Geothermal is clean firm power. It’s not so good at that because it doesn’t like to be switched on and off. Geothermal plants don’t really work that way. Nuclear is the same. And so trying to intermarry a strongly variable power and one which doesn’t like to be switched on and off is the current technological challenge that people are working on. So how can we store geothermal power in the middle of the day is one of the issues that people are addressing trying to address.

Bill Loveless 17:33: And there’s some potential technology fixes that are in the works.

Roland Horne 17:37: There are. So the same has always been true for nuclear. Nuclear plants want to run 24 7 2. And when they first built two big nuclear plants in California, they simultaneously built pumped hydro storage plants to go along with them knowing that they couldn’t switch the nuclear plant on, but if they couldn’t switch it off, but when they had excess power, they could pump water uphill and then let it run back down again to make use of the power and they wanted it. So pump hydro is actually one of the most attractive methods of doing that. Another of course is batteries. Batteries are now used a lot for backing up solar, mostly in California, but in many other places too. And they can do that for geothermal also.

Bill Loveless 18:26: So basically the geothermal plant remains online, but at some point some of its electricity is simply stored for use at some other point. Now we hear so much of what’s going on in Nevada and Utah these days. A lot of it does involve Fervo Energy. Other companies are involved as well. But when you look to those states adjacent to your home state of California there, what are you seeing and what are you most excited about these days?

Roland Horne 18:50: So Nevada is a very good, very interesting example. Nevada actually gets 10% of its electricity currently from geothermal. So Nevada’s kind of the Saudi Arabia, if you like, for geothermal in the United States, but they have many operating plants in Nevada. They tend to be rather smaller ones, but there are many of them. And many of the US geothermal companies actually are based in Nevada. They have a favorable tax situation. They have a legislation which is very receptive to geothermal. So Nevada is kind of central, at least at the moment for geothermal in the United States, although California has more production. So we are seeing a movement away from the center that was once in California into the other states.

Oregon, interestingly enough, also has only one operating geothermal plant currently, but some very attractive locations for high temperature, so-called super hot geothermal, which is sort of another frontier in addition to enhanced geothermal systems that is now in development by multiple companies actually working in that place. (20:10): Same in Utah. Utah has operating conventional geothermal plants also and has for some time, But because of Fervo, and also we should not forget FORGE, which is the US Department of Energy, which is not a commercial geothermal operation, but was kind of the stimulus for many people’s interests in EGS. They have a project which set up in southern Utah, and Fervo is right next to them, and Fervo is quite upfront about that. They chose actually to place their operation right next to FORGE, to capitalize on the information of the geology that FORGE had already actually developed. So right around there, there’s a whole general area that has been attracting multiple investors,

Bill Loveless 21:01: Of course Fervo has the Cape Station in Utah. It’s planned to be a 500 megawatt project. This follows, of course, their pilot project in Nevada, much smaller project, but one that demonstrated, as I understand it was the first demonstration, wasn’t it, of enhanced geothermal technology?

Roland Horne 21:21: It’s the first in the methodology that they proposed and successfully deployed. There have been actually about 10 EGS projects in the United States, starting with the first one in Fenton Hill, which was right next to Los Alamos in the 1970s. But what they called Project Red, what Fervo calls Project Red is on the outskirts on the side of an existing conventional geothermal plant called Blue Mountain, which was in operation but was kind of a little bit short of steam and hot water. So Fervo stepped in, leased the land next to them, did their horizontal well pair proving the technology, and then basically supplied steam and hot water to the Blue Mountain plant, which allowed them to increase their capacity or their production by three megawatts, something like that. And so they’ve been in commercial operations since October, 2023. So from that point of view, they’re the first commercially-operating EGS project in the United States.

Bill Loveless 22:30: Right. And one that’s feeding a data center, or maybe it’s more than one data center operated by Google.

Roland Horne 22:36: Yes. That’s my understanding.

Bill Loveless 22:38: And then of course, as we mentioned, the Cape Station in Utah, and it’s getting a lot of attention, deservedly so, it’s got a lot of backing from Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy among others. That seems to be one of the leading projects to keep an eye on these days. I’m sure Tim Latimer, of course, and the co-founder, he co-founded Fervo along with Jack Norbeck. They were at Stanford some 10, 12 years ago.

Roland Horne 23:07: Correct. We’re very proud of them. So Jack Norbeck was a graduate of the Stanford geothermal program, which is the one that I direct. Tim Latimer was an MBA student. He actually had an interesting background in that he was formally a drilling engineer in West Texas drilling shale wells. And he decided that he wanted to start a geothermal company and came back to do his MBA with a specific purpose of figuring out what it took to not drill wells, but start companies. So the two of them got together at Stanford and formed further.

Bill Loveless 23:49: Yeah, I’ve read where development costs are enhanced. Geothermal systems have declined significantly. A 2024 liftoff report by the US Department of Energy said those costs fell nearly 50% in recent years. Why is it so, and what will it take to bring down those costs even more?

Roland Horne 24:07: Yeah, so that’s a very important point. Geothermal is a very attractive energy source, but it’s on the expensive side. It’s a large upfront capital costs. And one of the challenges has always been that unlike oil and gas where you drill a well, produce a barrel of oil, you just go ahead and sell it. You can’t do that with geothermal. You’ve got to drill a whole field full of wells, you’ve got to build a power plant, a couple hundred million dollars, and you don’t start making money until it’s all in place. So that is a big risk. It’s harder to finance. The banks don’t like to lend money for that. So that’s a challenge for geothermal. One of the biggest costs is drilling the wells. Roughly speaking, half of the project costs is drilling the wells.

So by reducing the drilling costs, which is what first happened with FORGE, and then subsequently soon after with Fervo… Fervo… I dunno what probably they’ve halved their drilling costs. So if you halve the drilling costs, you’ve instantly removed one quarter of the capital cost of the project, which is huge. I mean, it makes a tremendous difference. But there are other things to do as well. Drilling the pattern that again, Fervo is doing. They’re drilling from pads with eight wells, which is sufficient to geothermal production for one power plant. And then they put the power plant basically on or next to the drill pad. So unlike typical geothermal systems, which have miles of pipes going across the countryside, gathering up the steam and hot water from all of the wells required to run the plant, all of that surface equipment costs is gone too, because the power plant’s sitting right there at the wellhead and you remove all or most, at least of the pipeline costs.

And yet, another way that they are saving money to is to basically use a standardized plant. So because of geological variations around the world, every geothermal plant is a little different. It’s kind of bespoke for the reservoir that it’s made for. But with EGS, you could basically design the temperature that you want. You can drill the wells, so the depth that you want, and then basically standardize on a specific size of plant. So if you want one plant pad, well pad, I think Fervo’s standardized on 50 megawatts or something like that, they’re going after 500 megawatts. They just order 10 of them. And that’s like going down to Walmart instead of having each one custom made,

Bill Loveless 26:58: Geothermal energy enjoys broad support in the United States. How important are tax credits and other forms of government support to advance this technology?

Roland Horne 27:09: So that’s changed over time, and it’s done differently in different countries too. Tax support is often useful because of the reason I mentioned before is that the large upfront costs, so the risks, the financing risk is a concern for a lot of people. One of the most attractive methods that was used during the 1980s to encourage geothermal development was so-called loan guarantees. So effectively the government, the US government took the risk of the project by guaranteeing the loan. So if the project didn’t work out, the banks didn’t lose out. And so that actually accelerated the development quite a lot. That process is not currently in place as far as I understood anyway, that they stopped doing it a long time ago. But there are other mechanisms that have been used like production tax credit, which had applied to wind and solar throughout the nineties and the two thousands. And in 2009 was also applied to geothermal. And that actually kind of resulted in a bit of a renaissance for geothermal, conventional geothermal 2009, 2010, that brought in a lot of new conventional geothermal fields at that time. And it will apply again as I’m an engineer. So I don’t totally up on this, but I understand it will also apply to EGS projects.

Bill Loveless 28:33: Yeah, I mean, it continues to enjoy support. Even under the budget bill that was passed by Congress recently. You referred earlier to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory some years back. What is the US Department of Energy doing these days to advance this technology? And is that support sufficient compared to what’s spent on other types of energy technologies? The last time I looked at the numbers, and this goes back some time ago, but the money spent by the government on geothermal research paled in comparison to what it spends on other energy technologies.

Roland Horne 29:11: Yes, that’s true. And in fact, the US government support for research into geothermal energy has been really crucial in making things happen. We’ve talked about FORGE and FORGE was the kind of catalyst for interest in EGS, not only spiritual interests, but technological interests. And they developed technologies and they supported the development of techniques and tools that were necessary to carry over the technology from oil and gas into geothermal. So we had, for example, we’re talking about fracturing plugs, which are used routinely a hundred times a day in the oil industry. Those have been available for a long time, but not for 200 degrees centigrade, which is what they’re being used for EGS. So the development of high temperature frack plugs was something that the US government supported. It wasn’t a massive amount of money actually to do that, but it turned the corner on making these things available.

The FORGE project itself demonstrated how drilling could be speeded up and done at lower costs. And there are many other examples of technologies that came out of DOE-funded, US government funded research, and for that matter, overseas government funded research as well. Point being that in spite of the fact I mentioned before, oil companies were big in geothermal back at the beginning, they kind of lost interest for quite a long time. And the companies that did develop geothermal, relatively modest in size, they’re not the ones that have the wherewithal to do expensive cutting edge research. And that’s been something of a hindrance. But you’re also right, in spite of the fact that the Department of Energy has recently in the current administration actually increased its budget for geothermal research quite a lot, it’s still very, very small compared to some of the other energy sources that you mentioned.

Bill Loveless 31:20: What will it take to make geothermal a viable option for electricity and other applications in states that aren’t traditionally geothermal rich?

Roland Horne 31:33: EGS technology that we would like to hope would one day provide geothermal anywhere is basically that door that can be opened in many places, not completely all. But again, once you cut off half of the drilling costs cost, that reduces the price, the ultimate price of the electricity. And that means that it becomes competitive in very many places. And we actually did a study here at Stanford looking at the potential cost of enhanced geothermal systems nationwide. You can do it anywhere, but the question is, can you do it competitively anywhere? And the answer to that is basically yes. So the average cost of electricity in the United States is around $70 per megawatt hour, and that is a price which is achievable with EGS in our estimate in probably 90% of the nation I, including the Eastern states.

Bill Loveless 32:34: Really? That’s surprising to me. I had no idea that there was that much potential across the country.

Roland Horne 32:39: Well, that was not true in 2022. So if drilling costs to 2022, that was simply not competitive in most of the country, but you cut the drilling costs in half, then you basically light up most of the nation. So

Bill Loveless 32:54: That’s how quickly the technology is evolving then, right. I mean, just several years ago you would have said, well, there’s places throughout the country where this could be applied, but it’s still a long way to go. Now you’re saying throughout most of the country, all of the country, virtually this technology could be feasible in the not too distant future?

Roland Horne 33:14: Yes, that’s correct. It used to be just the Western states that were attractive for geothermal because the temperatures are hotter closer to the surface. So in the midcontinent and in the Eastern states, you’d have to drill deeper, which costs more money, but now you can drill deeper, cheaper. Then that makes them feasible as well.

Bill Loveless 33:36: Are you seeing any projects taking place in the eastern United States or elsewhere outside of the Western United States right now that sort of illustrate that potential?

Roland Horne 33:44: So last year, the Department of Energy called for proposals for EGS developments in the Eastern states. And actually, I don’t myself know of any projects that have yet started, but anyway, it would be early stages, anyway. So the door has been opened for EGS developments in the Eastern states, and there’s now support available to initiate those kind of projects. There’s also importantly projects in Texas, which is something that we never saw before. We never got quite that far east until very recently, Utah and one in New Mexico were as far east as we got.

Bill Loveless 34:27: Interesting. Something to keep an eye on going forward. What about outside the United States? Which regions of the world are currently leading in geothermal development and why?

Roland Horne 34:36: So there are many countries in the world which are attractive geologically for conventional geothermal. Iceland is probably number one. They have more geothermal power plants than they have people, more or less. But there are other places around the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire. We talked about New Zealand, but there’s also Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, which have really rich resources for geothermal. Mexico, Costa Rica on the American continent, Chile also, and some in Europe, Italy, and East African Rift. Kenya has resources too. Ethiopia, but nobody, well, several people have tried EGS in other countries, actually, Europe, France, and Germany, which don’t have conventional volcanic hum other places where they actually have made small commercial EGS projects. But full scale EGS projects are the type that we were talking about in Utah have yet to be actually launched in other countries. But clearly everybody’s paying attention to what’s going on here. So I’m sure we’re going to see it.

Both Japan and New Zealand and Iceland have all initiated so-called super hot projects where they’re looking to drill deeper to higher temperature and get more energy basically. Well, so that may or may not be EGS. It could be conventional, geothermal that is super hot, but people are paying attention to the fact that drilling costs can be lower. The technology is available for capitalizing on technology from oil and gas, and I think you’ll see that crossover in many other countries too.

Bill Loveless 36:28: Professor, before we go, I want to ask you, given your long and ongoing career at Stanford University, what advice do you give to young scientists or engineers who are interested in pursuing a career in geothermal research?

Roland Horne 36:44: I would say be courageous. So we talked about Tim Latimer and Jack Norbeck who graduated from here at Stanford. These are two guys in their early thirties who created a billion dollar company. But more than that, they actually created a whole different path for EGS that was different than people that had done before and to very good effect. So they have changed the geothermal industry completely, those two guys by themselves with the company that they created, and many talented people who work with them. So geothermal is kind of not the conventional path, maybe, that people think of leaving universities. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. So I would just say be ambitious and give it a try.

Bill Loveless 37:38: Well, it’s good advice and in a field that’s so exciting and deservedly receiving so much attention today. Roland Horne, thank you again for joining us today on Columbia Energy Exchange.

Roland Horne 37:50: Thank you.

Bill Loveless 37:57: Thank you again to Roland Horne, and thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. Mary Catherine O’Connor produced the show. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. Gregory Vilfranc engineered the show.

For more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, it really helps us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

If it seems like you’re hearing a lot more about geothermal energy lately, that’s because this clean, firm energy source is at a technological turning point.

With roots in the 1970s, enhanced geothermal systems aren’t exactly new. But they’re finally hitting paydirt — or rather, steam — thanks to improved drilling techniques borrowed from the fracking boom.

These advances have made geothermal energy production potentially viable outside of the Western states in the US, where it’s long been a small but steady source of power.

So what is the state of geothermal energy and what’s behind the current surge in innovation? How are falling costs and sustained policy support helping geothermal producers gain more traction right now? And what are the next technical frontiers that could lead to even more productive geothermal wells?

This week, Bill Loveless speaks to Roland Horne about the state of geothermal technology, particularly enhanced geothermal systems.

Roland is the Thomas Davies Barrow professor of earth sciences, professor of energy science and engineering, and director of the geothermal program at Stanford University. He’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy. Over his career, he has made significant technical contributions to the field of geothermal energy production.

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From Hot Rocks to Clean Power: Roland Horne on the Future of Geothermal

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Roland Horne

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From Hot Rocks to Clean Power: Roland Horne on the Future of Geothermal

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Roland Horne

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