U.S. approves mega geothermal energy project in Utah

The Biden administration just approved a massive geothermal energy project in Utah, marking a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States, the White House confirmed to The Washington Post on Thursday.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management gave final approval to Fervo Energy’s Cape Geothermal Power Project in Beaver County, Utah, the White House said. Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity – enough to power more than 2 million homes.

In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for proposed geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years.

While not as widely understood as wind turbines or solar panels, geothermal energy can play a crucial role in meeting the nation’s climate goals, experts say. Geothermal plants work by harnessing the heat trapped deep beneath the Earth’s surface to generate electricity. In the process, they produce far fewer planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions than coal or natural gas plants.

A new generation of the technology, known as enhanced geothermal, traces its origins to the fossil fuel industry it hopes to eventually replace. Enhanced geothermal plants rely on a technique pioneered in the shale fields: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. But they drill deep underground to release heat, rather than oil and gas.

“This is not your grandpa’s geothermal,” White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday. “Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes’ worth of clean power – power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit.”

The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first plant up and running in the northern Nevada desert. The cash infusion from the tech giant was key to making the project pencil out.

Fervo, a seven-year-old start-up, has ties to the fossil fuel sector. Co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer previously worked as a drilling engineer, including at mining giant BHP, before coming to a climate realization.

“Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference,” Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. “And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked … even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs.”

The administration has taken other steps to boost geothermal’s foothold in the United States. The BLM on Thursday proposed to exempt many geothermal projects from lengthy environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act – part of a broader, controversial push to accelerate the permitting process for energy projects nationwide.

On Oct. 8, the BLM Nevada State Office held its largest geothermal lease sale since 2008. The agency auctioned off nearly 218,000 acres of public lands to geothermal developers, netting more than $7.8 million in high bids. That marked a sharp increase from last year’s lease sale of 96,600 acres for just more than $1 million.

The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up rapidly is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need.

The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough. Latimer is optimistic that his company will ultimately be producing large volumes of electricity, enough to compete with nuclear plants. But he said in an interview earlier this year that that kind of output is not likely until well into the 2030s. The next Fervo plant, in Utah, is expected to be fully operational in 2028.

Evan Halper contributed to this report.