The latest example: The Point of the Mountain development, which will convert the former site of the Utah State Prison into a major mixed-use district in Draper.
American energy dominance isn’t just about oil and natural gas. It also means tapping into new sources of reliable and affordable energy whenever it makes sense to do so.
For this reason, the Trump administration is strongly in favor of advanced geothermal energy — a technology that leverages existing oil and gas drilling technologies to provide 24/7 heat and power with zero emissions.
This is great news for Utah because we are a national leader in this promising new technology that converts the heat in deep underground rock formations into energy that can be used at the surface.
We are already the third largest geothermal state in the nation and the level of interest in new projects is surging.
The latest example: The Point of the Mountain development, which will convert the former site of the Utah State Prison into a major mixed-use district in Draper.
The Utah Office of Energy Development is exploring how to upgrade an existing geothermal reservoir to heat and cool buildings at the new development. Pump testing and other feasibility work will take place over the coming months.
Geothermal’s potential — both here and across the nation — was a major theme of Utah Energy Week, which was recently held at the University of Utah.
During the event, I was part of a panel discussion on the topic that included experts from Utah State University, the Idaho National Laboratory and geothermal developer Zanskar.
The panel also featured one of the country’s top experts from FORGE, or the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, Dr. Joseph Moore. Dr. Moore is the managing principal investigator for FORGE, a technology accelerator for advanced geothermal located just outside Milford, about 200 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. This $300 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is managed by Dr. Moore and his team at the University of Utah’s Energy and Geoscience Institute. The DOE grant is the largest ever for geothermal research.
FORGE is a public-private partnership that’s breaking new records in geothermal efficiency and power output.
Those breakthroughs are already being used by tech giants like Google to power data centers, which are a massive source of new electricity demand — and essential to winning the race against China in the field of artificial intelligence.
Exporting Utah’s geothermal breakthroughs to the rest of the country could be a game changer for both energy and AI dominance.
America as a whole has an estimated 5,000 gigawatts of potential geothermal capacity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. For perspective, that’s roughly the same capacity as 5,000 nuclear power plants — or more than 10 times the number of nuclear plants currently operating across the world.
Imagine the possibilities for our country if just a fraction of this potential could be harnessed.
Geothermal is based on decades of American expertise in drilling and hydraulic fracturing and — unlike other renewables like wind and solar — geothermal energy is available at all hours of the day and night and does not rely on the weather to work.
So, how do we speed up the expansion of geothermal energy across Utah and the rest of the nation?
Just like many other energy sources, including oil and gas, geothermal developers face far too much red tape — especially on federal lands in the American West.
Geothermal projects need the same kind of comprehensive permitting reform as the mines that produce critical minerals, the power lines that move electricity across the country, and the pipelines that transport oil and natural gas from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed.
Federal policymakers also need to support continued investment in advanced geothermal technologies through public-private partnerships like FORGE and through favorable tax policies for new projects.
Likewise, state and local officials need to embrace the game-changing potential of advanced geothermal energy and do everything possible to encourage innovative projects, like the heating and cooling system being considered for The Point.
It’s hard to overstate the positive impact of the fracking revolution and the wave of domestic energy production it unleashed across the U.S.
But in geothermal energy, we could be looking at something just as big, if not bigger, than the fracking boom — and Utah is leading the way. Let’s keep it that way.
Source: Utah News