Geothermal’s Moment—and Its Messengers, Mirages, and Models

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Last Updated on: 29th March 2025, 04:51 pm

The geothermal series is done, and if you’ve been following along, you’ll know it’s been a mix of cautious optimism, heavy sighs, and the occasional full-body cringe at some of the more outlandish claims. Geothermal is, at long last, getting a bit of attention—but, as always, when something is “having a moment,” we have to ask: is it real, or is it PR-driven nonsense inflated by investor money and tech bros who just discovered heat moves through rock?

Let’s walk through the series, one heat gradient at a time.

Geothermal Is Having A Moment In The Sun, But Black Swans Are Casting Shade

This opener was the temperature check—literally and metaphorically. Geothermal’s back in the headlines, but before we uncork the champagne, it’s worth noting just how many black swans are flapping overhead. From drilling risk to scalability fantasies, the piece laid out the core theme of the series: geothermal has promise, but most of what’s being hyped right now sits somewhere between hopeful engineering extrapolation and venture-funded fiction. You can almost hear the drill bits shattering against 10 km deep rock formations and the investors praying they never do.

Conventional Geothermal’s Untapped Potential: What’s Holding It Back?

This article dug into the obvious: the stuff that already works for generating electricity. Conventional geothermal, the kind you can actually count on to deliver electrons without fantasy-level breakthroughs, isn’t a huge part of electric generation globally and doesn’t get mentioned much—not because it doesn’t work, but because it depends on having high heats very close to the surface. Think of the clusters of temporarily inactive volcanos we call Iceland and New Zealand. It’s growing where it has the right conditions, but most places don’t have the right conditions.

Is Closed-Loop Geothermal The Future Of Heat & Power Or Just A Niche Play?

This one took on the shiny new toy in geothermal circles—closed-loop systems. No fracking, no aquifers, just sealed pipes circulating fluid through deep boreholes like an underground radiator. Sounds great on paper, and yes, it sidesteps a lot of the risk tied to enhanced geothermal. But as the article lays out, the physics aren’t magic and the economics are still wobbly. Heat transfer efficiency drops fast unless the system’s huge, and that means lots of drilling—aka lots of money. It’s tidy and modular, but for now, more like boutique energy infrastructure than a global game changer. Like a fancy espresso machine in a world that still runs on kettles.

Enhanced Geothermal Has A Flock Of Black Swans

Ah, enhanced geothermal systems—where we try to fracture hot, dry rock to create fake aquifers and call it scalable. This piece was a guided tour through the dreamscape of EGS, with enough black swans to make a Hitchcock film. Induced seismicity, uncertain economics, and wildly inconsistent flow rates? Check, check, and check. Capital expenditures that mean it would have to run at 90%+ capacity factors to be remotely low-cost, but low cost would still be multiples of the cost of firmed wind and solar? Check. Still, people keep funding it because, the pitches sound good, fracking worked for oil and gas, and in theory the applicability is there. Too bad the best case economics for the use cases they envision don’t add up.

Ultra Deep Geothermal Drilling: The Rise Of Black Swan Risks

If you thought EGS was a risky bet, welcome to the Mariana Trench of geothermal dreams. This installment explored the idea of drilling 10 to 20 km into the Earth to reach ultra-high temperatures. The technology needed is sci-fi level, the economics are … creative, and the odds of success make fusion look like a safe investment. The main takeaway? If you’re putting money into this, I hope it’s not your retirement fund. But it makes for great PowerPoint slides at energy conferences.

Why Does Geothermal’s Messaging Sound Like Fossil Fuel & Nuclear’s?

This one struck a nerve. The language around geothermal—base load, firm power, energy security—is carbon copy PR from the fossil and nuclear lobbies. And that’s no accident. Many of the firms pushing geothermal are staffed by ex-oil execs, drilling engineers, and lobbyists who know how to play the “energy reliability” game. The irony? Geothermal’s real strength might be in distributed heat and hybrid flexibility, not some half-baked resurrection of the base load myth. But old habits—and bad analogies—die hard.

China Is Scaling Geothermal District Heating—The World Should Pay Attention

The first glimmer of grounded optimism in the series came from, of all places, China. While the West dreams about 20 km drill holes and has nightmares about bankrupt startups, China’s just quietly building gigawatts of district heating using shallow and medium-depth geothermal. It’s boring, effective, and actually reduces emissions. Imagine that. This is the kind of geothermal we should be learning from—not because it’s flashy, but because it works.

Can Underground Thermal Batteries Warm Northern Cities In Deep Winter?

Thermal energy storage might be the most underappreciated trick in geothermal’s bag. This article explored how underground heat reservoirs—think of them as seasonal thermal banks—could provide heating in northern climates without needing constant input. Paired with wind and solar, they offer real flexibility. No miracle required, just planning and patience. You know, that thing utilities used to be good at.

Full disclosure: before I started the research on this series, I thought seasonal heat storage underground was nonsense, but thankfully didn’t write an article saying so, just said it a couple of times in what I think were private comments and conversations. Anybody I misled on this, my apologies.

Geothermal Heat Pumps Are Quietly Undermining Fossil Industrial Heat

Beneath the hype, this is where geothermal is quietly winning. Industrial-scale ground-source heat pumps are already replacing fossil heat in factories, greenhouses, and other thermal-intensive sectors. No fanfare, no wild claims—just engineers doing the math and switching out gas lines for pipes. This is the stealth revolution: replacing the heat sector from below, one loop at a time.

How China’s Sinopec Is Escaping The Gas Utility Death Spiral—And Why The West Should Follow

This one was a bit of a shocker for anyone who still thinks of China’s oil and gas major Sinopec as just another fossil dinosaur. The company’s pivot toward geothermal district heating is both strategic and existential. It’s realizing, ahead of most Western gas utilities, that the death spiral isn’t theoretical—it’s already here. While American and European firms double down on gas pipelines and nonsensical hydrogen and renewable natural gas fantasies, Sinopec is digging up streets for heat networks, turning itself into the heat-as-a-service utility of the future. Some European gas utilities are doing this at much smaller scale, and North American utilities are even further behind. As is so often the case these days, the future has arrived in China before the West.

Can Geothermal Cooling Tame Data Centers’ Energy Appetite?

To wrap things up, we went where most of your internet lives—inside massive data centers. Their appetite for cooling is obscene, and geothermal could offer a sustainable, quiet, and efficient alternative to chiller farms and evaporative towers. It’s not universal, but in the right geographies, geothermal cooling might be the secret weapon that keeps AI models from boiling themselves while also decarbonizing another piece of our digital infrastructure.

So, where does that leave us?

Geothermal isn’t a silver bullet, and all of the big electrical generation promises are black-swan encrusted long shots. But it is a viable, scalable part of a net-zero future—if we stop trying to sell it as the second coming of fossil power and instead embrace what it’s actually good at. District heat, industrial applications, thermal storage, and cooling—these are boring, reliable, and effective—the kind of infrastructure that doesn’t make headlines, but does keep cities warm, factories humming, and data flowing.

In the end, maybe that’s the biggest compliment we can give geothermal. When done right, it doesn’t feel revolutionary. It just works. Let’s hope more people start noticing.