Geothermal energy is one of those rare win-win solutions

It’s hard to be a climate optimist these days. With Trumpism ascendant in the United States, Pierre Poilievre well on his way to axing the carbon tax in Canada, and climate policy turning into a political wedge in Europe, there aren’t many silver linings in all these climate clouds. But just when things might seem darkest, a new dawn is promising to emerge with geothermal energy. If it does, it will deliver the final (and, until now, missing) piece in the energy transition puzzle: clean baseload electricity. 

Geothermal isn’t a new technology, of course. The idea of tapping into the heat trapped inside deeper reaches of the earth has been around for decades, and has been exploited in places like Iceland where it’s particularly close to the surface. But for most parts of the world, that heat — a free and potentially limitless source of energy — has remained out of reach until now. 

While geothermal currently makes up less than one per cent of the world’s clean energy and a significantly smaller fraction of its overall energy consumption, the International Energy Agency thinks it could meet as much as 15 per cent of global demand growth out to 2050. “This would mean the cost-effective deployment of as much as 800 GW of geothermal power capacity worldwide,” it said in a recent report, “producing almost 6,000 terawatt-hours per year, equivalent to the current electricity demand today of the United States and India combined.”

Ironically, geothermal advocates can thank recent advances by the oil and gas industry that unlocked billions of barrels of oil through the so-called “shale revolution” for improving their prospects. John Redfern, the CEO of Alberta-based Eavor Technologies, knows all about that. After starting in the nuclear industry, he moved into oil and gas, where he worked for years until founding Eavor in 2017. “We’re always riding the coattails,” he told me, “not just of the oil and gas industry’s technologies, but the market impact of wind and solar. So the time was right.” 

Now, he thinks we’re on the verge of what he calls a “geothermal decade,” one that will see it emerge as the go-to source of baseload zero-carbon energy. “In terms of scalability, not just technically but politically, it’s us,” he says. “At the end of the day, all we’re doing is drilling holes in rocks and filling them with clean water and letting it circulate. What could be simpler? What could last longer? What could have fewer environmental implications?”

What makes it even more attractive, he says, is the fact that his company’s patented closed-loop system is a made-in-Alberta solution. Unlike wind and solar, which are manufactured in China and leave a much smaller economic footprint than oil and gas, geothermal would keep far more of the investment and economic activity right here at home. Oil and gas employees wouldn’t even need to retrain to work in geothermal, given that the job remains largely the same: drilling holes in the ground as safely and inexpensively as possible. “We’re the thing that solves the problem,” Redfern says. “We’re the missing puzzle piece.”

Eavor is hardly the only game in this fledgling geothermal town. In America, Fervo Energy has captured both headlines and hearts in the clean energy sector with its recent series of demonstration projects. Its own CEO, Tim Latimer, also cut his teeth in the oil and gas industry, and says the parallels between shale’s recent revolution and geothermal’s own improving prospects are impossible to miss. “I was right in the middle of the ‘shale revolution,’” he told the University of Tulsa’s alumni magazine. “It just seemed to me very obvious that we could take some of these major technology breakthroughs from oil and gas and apply them to geothermal.”

The goal of both companies is to develop geothermal energy in a wider variety of places — as Redfern says, going from “geothermal anywhere to geothermal everywhere.” But there’s no better place for that to happen than Alberta, where the favourable geography and obvious need to remediate old oil wells is met with an existing workforce that knows how to drill deep. Now, Redfern says, the challenge is straightforward: learn how to go “hotter, deeper, faster, cheaper.” 

The biggest thing standing in his way, it seems, are incumbent interests that don’t want to be disrupted. “It’s not just big oil,” he says. “It’s big oil, big wind, big solar, big nuclear. They all have existing people employed in those industries who are going to be resistant to change.” But, he says, geothermal companies have an edge here that other clean energy competitors might not. “It’s a one-for-one career transition opportunity for people wanting to get out of oil and gas, and take those same skills and same lifestyle but take on a mission to make the planet a little greener and their country a little more secure. That’s a huge advantage.”

The other edge geothermal companies have is their unusual ability to appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. Pro-fossil-fuel governments like the one in Alberta don’t necessarily need to treat geothermal as a threat, since it supports the sorts of jobs and investments they’re increasingly desperate to protect. But geothermal also works for climate-friendly governments, since it can help firm up wind and solar resources and enable greater deployment of zero carbon electricity. It is that rarest of birds in the energy space: a win-win proposition. 

Now, it’s time to catch it. China, Redfern says, is already pushing ahead with geothermal the way it did with wind and solar, and it already has more geothermal heating than anywhere on earth. But when it comes to drilling, North America is still the top dog — for now. “We’ve got the technological lead, but we have to grab it.” If we do, we might just find a way to cross the ever-widening divide on climate and energy — and one that’s built right here in Canada.