How Texas oil workers, technology are helping build a new renewable boom

quote:

---

On any other day, David Rodriguez’s truck would have been helping extract oil, and as he sucked mud from a well beneath a towering drilling rig, any passersby might have assumed he was doing just that.

“Compared to oil and gas, it’s the same thing, man,” Rodriguez shouted over the motor.

But he was working to produce something entirely different. Rather than pulling oil out of the earth, the hole he was helping drill would be used to store clean, transient power from south Texas wind and solar farms.

Rodriguez, who was helping drill the hole for geothermal energy company Sage Geosystems, is one of a growing number of workers across Texas employing some of the same skills and technology used to extract fossil fuels for the production of renewable energy.

Those efforts come at the height of the largest oil and gas boom in American history, which centers on an expansive oil-producing region extending across western Texas and eastern New Mexico known as the Permian Basin and has been driven by the increasing use of novel technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling.

That boom has seen oil and gas output consistently hit record levels in recent years. At the same time, however, due to the pace of drilling and the declining need for workers amid the rise of high-tech forms of extraction, the expansion in production has come with a sharp and protracted decline in both the number of rigs and rig workers.

---

quote:

---

Over the past decade, however, hundreds of millions in investor capital have flowed into largely Texas-based firms seeking to develop methods that could be used to generate geothermal power virtually anywhere in the country.

---

quote:

---

The political support for drilling appears poised to help bolster the burgeoning geothermal industry, however, as does soaring demand for electricity in Texas driven by population growth, data centers and crypto mines. Geothermal is one of the few renewables that Trump supported in his executive order declaring a national energy emergency, and in March Energy Secretary Chris Wright threw his support behind a geothermal boom.

So did Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), whose district includes much of the Permian. Introducing Wright at a geothermal event, Pfluger portrayed geothermal as the logical continuation of the fracking boom. For the Permian, he said, “it’s going to be the same people, the same firms, the same technology that is going to help scale geothermal.”

Pfluger was referring to the host of new technologies that have made it possible over the past decade for firms to extract oil and gas reliably and efficiently: fiber optics, monitoring driven by artificial intelligence (AI), fracking and horizontal drilling. These technologies have also played a key role in the recent resurgence of geothermal through “enhanced geothermal” startups like Fervo, Sage, Eavor, Bedrock and XGS.

---

quote:

---

Geothermal isn’t risk free. A rushed drilling job in India’s Himalayas, for instance, caused a blowout that dumped hot water and clay into local water supplies.

The greater concern hanging over the geothermal industry, however, is that the data centers it hopes will be at the center of a growing market for its energy will instead stick to gas.

The risk, Beard said, is that geothermal could lose that AI-driven energy market to fossil fuels unless it proves itself right now.

So far, the industry is choosing gas. Current data centers demand 24/7 power, which geothermal promises but only fossil fuels can currently supply. Gas demand has flatlined in recent years, but that dynamic is projected to drive it up by another 6 billion cubic feet per day by decade’s end, per S&P Global.

---

quote:

---

But supply chain bottlenecks mean that new gas plants must often wait years for parts — which XGS’s Izadi argued gives geothermal “a good opportunity to win the race. We need to win it.”

To do that, she said, geothermal would have to develop at a far greater pace. The industry had moved past the need for more research and test wells, she said. “Geothermal is not moving with one or two wells or three wells per year” — each company, ultimately, needs to reach a point where it is drilling hundreds or thousands of wells per year.

To move forward, she said, “We just need to drill.”

---