Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy
When I arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, last March, a gravel barrier, almost thirty feet at its highest point, had been constructed to keep lava from the Reykjanes volcano from inundating a major geothermal power station not far from downtown. So far, it had worked, but daily volcano forecasts were being broadcast on a small television at the domestic airport where I was waiting to take a short flight to Akureyri, a town on the north coast about an hour’s drive from one of the country’s oldest geothermal plants, the Krafla Geothermal Station. Until the early nineteen-seventies, Iceland relied on imported fossil fuels for nearly three-quarters of its energy. The resources of the country—a landscape of hot springs, lava domes, and bubbling mud pots—were largely untapped. “In the past, people here in the valley lacked most things now considered essential to human life, except for a hundred thousand million tons of boiling-hot water,” the Icelandic Nobelist Halldór Laxness wrote in “A Parish Chronicle,” his 1970 novel. “For a hundred thousand years this water, more valuable than all coal mines, ran in torrents out to sea.” The oil crisis of 1973, when prices more than tripled, proved a useful emergency. Among other efforts to develop local energy, public-investment funds provided loans for geothermal projects, whose upfront costs were considerable. By the early eighties, almost all the country’s homes were heated geothermally; in Reykjavík, a subterranean geothermal-powered system is in place to melt snow and ice off sidewalks and roads. Today, more than a quarter of the country’s electricity comes from geothermal sources, a higher proportion than in almost any other nation. Most of the rest is from hydropower.
In some ways, the process of harnessing geothermal energy is simple. The deeper you dig, the hotter the temperatures get. For direct heating, you dig relatively shallow wells (typically several hundred metres deep), to access natural reservoirs of hot water or steam, which can be piped into a structure. For electricity, wells are dug farther down, to where temperatures are above a hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. (In Iceland, this temperature is reached at around one thousand to two thousand metres deep.) Pressurized steam spins a turbine that in turn spins a generator. Thermal energy (steam) is translated into mechanical energy (the spinning turbine), which is translated into electrical energy (via the generator). Geothermal energy is essentially carbon-free, it is available at any time of day and in any weather, and it leaves a small—albeit very deep—footprint on the landscape.
In 2008, Iceland’s three largest energy companies collaborated on a research project to drill down even farther, at a site near Krafla, for steam that was even hotter, some four hundred degrees Celsius. Such “supercritical” steam is water that is so hot and pressurized that it has passed into a fourth state, beyond gas. The hotter a well the better, typically: it will produce more energy more efficiently. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (I.D.D.P.) engineers had planned to dig down some four kilometres—but their drill got stuck at around two kilometres. Bits of black glass shot up from the well. After some disbelief, the team concluded that they had hit magma. This oops-ing into magma was at first received as “very bad news,” Bjarni Palsson, a chief project manager on the I.D.D.P. and now an executive vice-president of the energy company Landsvirkjun, told me. Many people thought that drilling into magma might trigger a volcanic eruption. “Then we started to see: What actually do we have here?” Palsson said. They put a wellhead on their work to measure the flow rates of steam. “What happened next was remarkable,” Palsson continued. The magma was about nine hundred degrees Celsius. The steam flow was such that it could produce ten times more energy than a regular well. They had created the hottest and most powerful geothermal well in the world.
There was no security check before boarding the plane. I was told by one of my companions, Hilmar Már Einarsson, a youthful project manager with Landsvirkjun, that people sometimes stowed their hunting rifles in the overhead luggage compartments. On the drive from Akureyri to Krafla, we passed Lake Mývatn, home to a kind of arctic char that lives only there. We also passed Icelandic horses, a diminutive breed famed for its distinctive gaits: in addition to walking, trotting, and galloping, it has a “flying pace” and a rhythmic four-beat gait known as tölt. Amid the expansive greens and yellows of northeast Iceland, we arrived at the Krafla Geothermal Station, where steam has been spinning two Mitsubishi turbines continuously for decades.
The station provides power to commercial buildings and heating to homes in the district. A rust-red building in the shape of a giant barn stood across from silvery cooling towers capped by cloud-white steam. Construction began in 1974 but took four years to finish, working around the Krafla fires, a series of volcanic eruptions that went on for years. (In Icelandic folklore, the region is where the Devil landed after being expelled from Heaven.) Around the station is a volcanic valley of green vegetation and basalt rock, with patches of snow. The wellhouses appeared as igloo-size aluminum geodesic domes; like the main power station, they were rust red. Einarsson opened one for me. Visible within was a thick horizontal pipe joined to a vertical one, with what looked like a ship’s steering wheel attached. Not visible was the well itself, which extended belowground like a long metal straw. (Krafla’s geothermal wells are about seven inches across, notably narrower than many oil and gas wells.) “Some wells last twenty years, some last two—you can’t know for certain,” Einarsson explained. The temperature and permeability of the rock, as well as the amount of fluid flowing across it, affect a well’s performance. Also, Iceland has myths about “hidden people”—huldufólk. It is said that building on their land brings bad luck, so there’s that, too.
We stopped by the station’s canteen, taking our shoes off before entering. Lunch had ended, but there was homemade apple cake, dried apricots, and skyr available. Workmen in neon-yellow suits, who had traded their boots for slippers, were having tea. Einarsson then took me to the I.D.D.P. site, not far from the Krafla plant, where a sign marked a snow-covered depression about the size of a modest pond. Compared with the turbines and steam towers and the idyllic orderliness of the canteen, the site was underwhelming. Two years after the well was dug, the extreme pressure and heat began to corrode the metal casing of the well itself. Black smoke poured out each time the well was reopened. Soon, it had to be shut down permanently. In 2017, another research well, I.D.D.P.-2, was drilled down four and a half kilometres, where temperatures reached at least four hundred and twenty-six degrees Celsius—but this time the well failed after only six months. “One thing we learned is that you don’t open and close and open and close the well—you just leave it open,” Palsson had told me, explaining that such actions made the well more brittle.
Landsvirkjun, which had paid for most of the I.D.D.P. work, decided that it needed financial support to drill more exploratory wells. “We said, ‘We’re just a small energy company in Iceland,’ ” Palsson told me. But it made its research available to the international scientific community, and there has been intermittent interest from the U.K., Germany, Canada, and New Zealand. “That’s where we are now, trying to fund it as a science project that can also benefit the energy industry,” Palsson said.
Driving back to the airport, we saw snow ptarmigans and cairns of black stones marking trails that stretched beyond view. Iceland’s transition into a country powered nearly completely by renewables can seem fantastical, and the landscape furthers this impression. Because Iceland is singular in so many ways—that lonely arctic-char species! those small horses with their tölt!—you can get the feeling that geothermal energy is a niche endeavor, as opposed to one that is technically and economically feasible in places where volcanic eruptions aren’t part of the daily forecast. But that feeling is outdated and misleading.
Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s always on and, once it’s set up, it is cheap and enduring. The dream of geothermal energy is to meet humanity’s energy demands affordably, without harnessing horses for horsepower, slaughtering whales for their oil, or burning fossil fuels. The planet’s heat could be used to pasteurize milk or heat dorm rooms or light up a baseball stadium for a night game.
At more than five thousand degrees Celsius, the Earth’s core is roughly as hot as the surface of the sun. At the Earth’s surface, the temperature is about fourteen degrees. But in some places, like Iceland, the ground underfoot is much warmer. Hot springs, geysers, and volcanoes are surface-level signs of the Earth’s inferno. Dante’s description of Hell is said by some to have been inspired by the landscape of sulfurous steam plumes found in Devil’s Valley in Tuscany.
Snow monkeys and humans have been using Earth-heated waters as baths for ages. In the Azores, a local dish, cozido de las furnas, is cooked by burying a clay pot in hot volcanic soil; in Iceland, bread is still sometimes baked this way. The first geothermal power generator was built in Devil’s Valley, in 1904, by Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Trevignano, who had been extracting borax from the area and thought to make use of the steam emerging from the mining borehole. The generator initially powered five light bulbs. Not long afterward, it powered central Italy’s railway system and a few villages. The geothermal complex is still in operation today, providing one to two per cent of Italy’s energy. In the United States, the first geothermal plant was built in 1921, in Northern California, in a geyser-filled area that a surveyor described as the gates of Hell. That plant powered a nearby resort hotel and is also still in use.
There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development. This partly explains why, in the field of clean energy, geothermal is often either not on the list or mentioned under the rubric of “other.” For decades, both private and government investment in geothermal energy was all but negligible.
That has now changed. In the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have gone into geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it’s also an exponential increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with the Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for one in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a billion-dollar geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating at its newly built fulfillment center in Japan. (Geothermal energy enables companies to avoid the uncertainties of the electrical grid.) Under the Biden Administration, the geothermal industry finally received the same kind of tax credits given to wind and solar, and under the current Trump Administration it has received the same kind of fast-track permitting given to oil and gas. Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, spoke at a geothermal conference and declared, in front of a MAGA-like sign that read “MAGMA (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances),” that although geothermal hasn’t achieved “liftoff yet, it should and it can.” Depending on whom you speak with, either it’s weird that suddenly everyone is talking about geothermal or it’s weird that there is a cost-competitive energy source with bipartisan appeal that no one is talking about.
Scientific work that has been discarded or forgotten can return—sometimes through unknowing repetition, at other times through deliberate recovery. In the early nineteen-seventies, the U.S. government funded a program at Los Alamos that looked into developing geothermal energy systems that didn’t require proximity to geysers or volcanoes. Two connected wells were built: in one, water was sent down into fractured hot, dry rock; from the other, the steam that resulted from the water meeting the rock emerged. In 1973, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which aimed to develop energy sources outside of fossil fuels. “But when Reagan came into office, he changed things,” Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University, who was involved in the Los Alamos project, told me. The price of oil had come down, and support for geothermal dissipated. “People got this impression that it was a failure,” Tester said. “I think if they looked a little closer, they would see that a lot of the knowledge gained in those first years could have been used to leverage what is happening now.”
Tester went on to help establish the M.I.T. Energy Lab (now called the Energy Initiative), which focusses on advancing clean-energy solutions. He and his colleagues felt that students needed to know the history of the research into diverse energy sources, so they put together a course and a textbook called “Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options.” In 2005, the Department of Energy, under George W. Bush, commissioned a group consisting of Tester and some seventeen other experts and researchers—including drilling engineers, energy economists, and power-plant builders—to investigate what it would take for the U.S. to produce a hundred thousand megawatts of geothermal energy, a bit more than one-fifth of the energy the U.S. had consumed that year. (Geothermal energy production in the U.S. at that time was around three or four thousand megawatts.) The experts avoided framing their support for geothermal in environmental terms. “The feeling was that you weren’t supposed to talk about carbon, because then it would be perceived as about climate change,” Tester said.
In 2006, Tester and his colleagues published their report, “The Future of Geothermal Energy.” One finding was that new drilling technology employed by the oil-and-gas industry was changing the economics of geothermal power generation. Latent ideas—like those from the Los Alamos project—had met their moment. “I was called to testify a few times before Congress. It was a relatively modest investment that was needed, and people were excited,” Tester told me. “But then we submitted the report to the Department of Energy. And they did nothing. It was crazy.” He was still visibly dismayed.
One explanation for the lack of action is that, around that time, the U.S. went from being an oil importer to an oil exporter. This turnaround was largely due to the innovations of George Mitchell, a second-generation Greek American in Galveston, Texas, who spent years trying to extract oil and gas from the Barnett Shale formation, in North Texas, in an economically viable way. His approach synthesized hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, with horizontal drilling. Fracking involves injecting fluid down a well at high pressures, which cracks the subsurface, and the horizontal drilling augments the area of cracking. Eventually, Mitchell’s company, helped by generous tax incentives, made the economics work. Vast oil reserves became accessible. Fortunes were made. Fracking overwhelmed the renewed interest in geothermal power. But a couple of decades later there was a reversal: fracking accelerated geothermal power.
Tim Latimer, the thirty-five-year-old C.E.O. of Fervo Energy, a geothermal company founded in 2017, grew up in Riesel, Texas, a small town about fifteen miles outside Waco. After graduating from the University of Tulsa with a degree in mechanical engineering, Latimer wanted a well-paid engineering job close to home. “My adviser was just, like, ‘Have you ever heard of the oil-and-gas industry?’ ” he said, smiling.
As a greenhorn drilling engineer with the international mining company BHP Billiton, Latimer was put on a fracking project in the Eagle Ford Shale, in South Texas. The shale, which is a Cretaceous-era formation dense with marine fossils from when the area was an inland sea, is relatively hard and hot. “The motors in our drill systems were failing early,” Latimer said. His supervisors suspected that this was because of the wells’ unusually high temperatures, around a hundred and seventy-five degrees Celsius. “They said, ‘Can you research what tools we could use to deal with the fact that these drilling temperatures are really high?’ ” Latimer told me.
Much of the relevant work Latimer came across turned up in papers about geothermal energy. “I’d never heard of geothermal before,” he said. “I was, like, ‘Well, this seems pretty cool.’ ” When Latimer read the 2006 “Future of Geothermal Energy” report, including its description of the Los Alamos geothermal project, he saw parallels to his work in oil and gas. The report described two big technical challenges that were standing in the way of affordable, bountiful clean energy. One was getting drilling costs down—an area that oil and gas had made great progress in. The other was getting water flowing through hot rock that isn’t sufficiently permeable, like shale, so that you can generate steam. “And I’m just looking at the rig, being, like, ‘This is a solved problem.’ ” Generating flow where there isn’t much naturally—that’s what hydraulic fracturing does.
Latimer reported what he had found to BHP. The shale drilling started working again, but Latimer’s imagination had shifted. In 2014, he applied to Stanford Business School with the goal of using fracking technology in geothermal wells. “Geothermal is an industry that, frankly, at that point in time, people had given up on as forgotten,” he said. “I didn’t think that was right. I was, like, ‘I’m a drilling engineer. I actually have a skill that can make a direct impact on this.’ ”
In 2017, Latimer and his Stanford colleague Jack Norbeck co-founded Fervo Energy. “Fracking” is an unpopular word. Fervo describes itself as a “next-generation geothermal energy developer.” Just as the fusion-energy industry avoids the phrase “nuclear fusion,” and the term “natural gas” is now used for what is mostly methane, geothermal systems involving hydraulic fracturing tend to be referred to as “enhanced” geothermal systems, or E.G.S.
In 2023, Fervo drilled a pair of demonstration wells in Nevada, proving its ideas in anticipation of scaling them up. The goal is to begin operating a five-hundred-megawatt geothermal power plant in Cape Station, Utah, with a hundred megawatts going online in 2026. This past June, Fervo drilled a four-and-a-half-kilometre appraisal well—a well for confirming predicted subsurface conditions before going all in on a site—that reached temperatures of two hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. The well was drilled in sixteen days, remarkably fast, and faster drill times mean lowered costs. Fervo’s well design and drilling technologies are central to its hopes, and have helped it raise more than eight hundred million dollars in investment capital. Most everyone I spoke to seems to be rooting for Fervo, albeit with some skepticism. The Utah site is far away from a source for the large amounts of water that will be required, for instance. There are more technical points of concern, too. Fracking can induce seismic activity, so the siting of wells is an important consideration. Enthusiasts see these as solvable problems. And Fervo is not alone in showing promise in the use of fracking to access geothermal power. At the end of October, Mazama Energy demonstrated a pilot E.G.S. in Newberry, Oregon, that works at an even higher temperature: above three hundred degrees Celsius. For now, though, E.G.S. is still a kind of wildcat proposition. “I think the big question is: Who are the next nine Fervos?” Roland Horne, a professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford, who has studied geothermal energy for about fifty years, said. “Fervo has expanded tremendously, they’re a nearly two-hundred-person company, but they don’t have the wherewithal to do a gigawatt project yet.”
Fervo pitches itself as a landing place for oil-and-gas workers. “I’ve spent a lot of my life and career in small towns where the largest economic driver is oil and gas,” Latimer said. Geothermal means jobs in drilling: engineers, geologists, project managers. Barry Smitherman, who has worked as an oil-and-gas regulator in Texas and as the head of a utility company, told me, “We’ve been drilling oil and gas wells in Texas for over a hundred years. We’ve drilled over a million wells. We know what the world looks like below the surface in Texas.”
In February, 2021, Winter Storm Uri left most of Texas without power for days. Not long afterward, Smitherman was asked to speak to state legislators about what went wrong and what needed to change. Soon he got a call from a foundation set up by George Mitchell and his wife, Cynthia. (George, who died in 2013, is known as the “father of fracking.”) The Mitchell Foundation wanted Smitherman to help start a local organization that would advocate on behalf of geothermal energy. He co-founded the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance in 2022. During his long career in energy, Smitherman said, “we never had a conversation about geothermal. No one had brought it to my attention.” Smitherman had a series of meetings with people from geothermal startups, oil-and-gas companies, the Sierra Club, and utility companies. “What we’ve always said around energy is that you need three legs—reliable, clean, and cheap. Those are the three legs of the stool. The old saying was ‘I can give you two of three, but I can’t give you all three,’ ” he said. “But, as we began to look at geothermal, it really began to look like it had all three—low to no carbon, 24/7, and, as the cost curve comes down, eventually, cheap. It really began to look like this unicorn resource.”
Tester now teaches at Cornell, near the Finger Lakes, where in the winter Buttermilk and Taughannock Falls turn to blue ribbons of ice. “If we look at the country and say our goal is ultimately to be much more sustainable with respect to our carbon footprint, you can’t ignore heating,” Tester said. Around thirty per cent of New York State’s carbon footprint can be attributed to heating and cooling buildings, a figure that is not far from the worldwide average. “A lot of it is for space heating and water heating, but also for low-temperature food processing, things like that,” Tester added. The excitement about geothermally generated electricity can obscure the thing that geothermal technology is, arguably, best suited to provide. “It’s a little bit apples and oranges, and we need both electricity and heating,” Tester told me. But he went on to explain that using electricity for heating is not nearly as efficient as using heat for heating. And geothermal wells for heating, which can be relatively shallow, can work in places with no hot springs or volcanoes.
Midtown Manhattan, for example: as part of a major renovation completed in 2017, ten geothermal wells were dug beneath St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Some of the wells are less than a hundred metres deep, while others extend more than six hundred and fifty metres, more than ten times deeper than Manhattan’s deepest subway tunnel—and yet much shallower than the wells needed for a geothermal power plant. These wells carry warmth into the cathedral in winter, and out of the cathedral in summer, and do so with less noise and vibration than typical HVAC systems. The main issue is the upfront cost. When the cathedral’s system was built, it felt radical. One of the lead engineers on the project, Paul Boyce, of P. W. Grosser Consulting, told me that the demand for geothermal heating systems has grown dramatically since then. P.W.G.C.’s current geothermal projects include the Mastercard headquarters, in Purchase, New York, and the Obama Presidential Center, in Chicago. In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, an eight-hundred-and-thirty-four-unit apartment complex that’s under construction has its heating and cooling provided through three hundred boreholes, none much deeper than about a hundred and fifty metres. The system was put in by Geosource Energy, a geothermal company started in 2004.
But those projects provide geothermal energy building by building, not district by district. “I wish we were looking at how we plan our cities,” Tester said. “It’s crazy that heating, electricity, cable, water—these are all managed separately.” He is now in the midst of a research project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of an ambitious geothermal system to serve Cornell’s seven-hundred-and-forty-five-acre campus, something close to what downtown Reykjavík has—but without the aid of close-to-the-surface magma. In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago. This created the Cornell University Borehole Observatory (CUBO). In Iceland, if you dig down this deep, the temperatures could easily be four hundred degrees Celsius; in New York, the rocks are cooler, but the Cornell project needs to reach only eighty to ninety degrees Celsius. As CUBO was drilled, rock samples from each depth were analyzed, and the surrounding natural fracture systems were mapped. If CUBO secures more funding, the next stage will be to drill a pair of wells, with one for injecting water to make an underground reservoir and the other to bring the heated water up.
In other geographies, geothermal energy for district heating and cooling has been accomplished with shallower wells. Mieres, Spain, a historic mining town, uses warm water from the now closed mines to supply heat to the region. Nijar, also in Spain but closer to a volcano, uses an underground fluid reservoir to heat its greenhouses. Hayden, Colorado, a former coal town, is working with Bedrock Energy, a Texas-based company started in 2022, to construct a municipal geothermal district, in the hope that reduced energy bills will attract businesses. In Framingham, Massachusetts, activists and a local energy company collaborated on a geothermal heating-and-cooling network, and near Austin, Texas, the neighborhood of Whisper Valley is putting in a similar grid. Several companies, including Bedrock and Dig Energy, are aiming to bring drilling costs down by half or more. Geothermal systems for heating and cooling individual homes remain somewhat pricey to install, but they last for decades, reduce energy bills by twenty-five to fifty per cent, and avoid reliance on the ever more burdened electrical grid. Most people I spoke with in the geothermal industry make their case for it by focussing on cost savings; the unspoken climate benefits are known to those disposed to care, and potentially off-putting to those who are not.
Some environmentalists argue that the resources given to geothermal—or to small modular nuclear plants, or to fusion—would be better spent elsewhere. Why not just go all in on solar, wind, and batteries, which are proven, scalable technologies? To invest in more speculative solutions, the argument goes, is a moral hazard, and a cynical or naïve distraction that obscures the solutions available now. But this line of thinking rests on the assumption that the people or nations or agencies that would fund one kind of energy would equally fund some other kind. This tends not to be true—funding is rarely fungible, and always capricious. One geothermal-startup founder spoke of receiving a call from a potential investor’s adviser, who said, Sorry, the managing partner wants to invest in a blimp company instead. “Geothermal is the least moral hazard-y of the clean-energy technologies,” Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said. “And we are still subsidizing nuclear a thousand times more than geothermal.”
An energy future without hydrocarbons will require working flexibly with the many variables of resources, geography, and politics. “We can get maybe ninety per cent of the way with solar, batteries, wind,” Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. “But geothermal is one of the things that can fill that gap.” Investment follows fashion—and geothermal has become fashionable—but it’s not only investors who appear confident about geothermal. Wagner called this “the moment when Ph.D.s meet M.B.A.s.”
The role of geothermal becomes easier to see when looking beyond the local noise of discussions in America. “You know, there’s this thing called the curse of abundance,” Agnelli Kafuwe, the principal energy officer for the Zambian government, told me. Typically, the phrase refers to countries driven into corruption and misery by their oil endowments, but Kafuwe was referring to Zambia’s seemingly boundless supply of hydroelectric energy, from power stations such as one at the Zambezi River’s Mosi-oa-Tunya, the natural feature known to most Americans as Victoria Falls. For many years, hydropower met practically all of Zambia’s energy needs, even powering its lucrative copper mines.
But the country’s population grew rapidly, and in 2015 a severe drought hit, forcing Zambia to turn to diesel to make up the shortfall in hydropower. Mosi-oa-Tunya looked less like a world-renowned cataract than like dry, rocky cliffs. There wasn’t enough water to keep the hydropower plants running properly. Lengthy blackouts became common. In 2024, a new drought arrived—the worst in at least a century—and power was cut off for eighteen to twenty hours a day. As in many countries, the leadership had thought about geothermal in the nineteen-seventies but had lost interest; Zambia hadn’t needed it enough then.
In addition to copper mining, extensive salt mining occurs in northern Zambia. “These mining companies, they would drill down maybe fifty metres, and guess what comes up?” Kafuwe said. “Geothermal steam, of a very high, very good temperature.” The country’s mining history also meant that subsurface maps of its territory already existed—useful for planning geothermal wells. One former mining-company head, Peter Vivian-Neal, now heads Kalahari GeoEnergy, a company he founded after seeing an egg being boiled in a natural hot spring while he was on safari. The company has drilled exploratory wells, done flow tests, well tests, and modelling—it aims to have a demonstration power plant running soon. Vivian-Neal is optimistic that a successful demonstration will bring in more investment. “We could not have got to where we got today if my family hadn’t put in the money to start with,” he told me. “But I’m quite sure that the next person will find it easier. They’ll say, ‘Oh, yes, look, Kalahari has made this a success, therefore we’re going to make it a success, and we’ll do it even faster.’ ” ♦
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