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BROCK: To be in the drilling industry, you have to be creative. You have to be crazy. You have to be a little risky.
That's Brock Yordy. You could say drilling is in his blood. He's a third-generation driller from the US Upper Midwest.
BROCK: I am based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo…
He was introduced to the industry early – as a boy drilling water wells with his dad and grandfather in their family business.
BROCK: I've been in it my entire life. And the entire time I was growing up, it was great to be part of and providing water for families across the Great Lakes states…
… And so, it's pretty cool, even as a kid to be at the coffee shop and somebody says, what are you doing this summer? You go, well, I'm going to go drill water wells. And Michigan just happens to be one of the states that has the most private water wells in the United States at like 1.4 million. And so it's, sexy. You know, it's, you know, you're doing something positive.
Brock was fascinated by the layers beneath his feet. And how drilling into the ground could make a real difference, bringing water to people's homes.
BROCK: There's something unique about getting to discover the unknown. So like drilling for water or rare earth minerals or energy or harnessing the earth's potential is just, is neat.
You see some excavations that go, 2, 3 meters, but suddenly you're 10 and 15 and 20 meters into the ground and you're seeing wood and different rocks…
…and then you go from muddy water to less debris to clear water that is life. And there's something quite beautiful about knowing that this home or this community has like one of our critical resources … And as I got to become a professional and travel the world and be part of some water projects, in developing countries and other places, people fall down and cry and start dancing and singing. Like Mother Nature gave us water and we helped bring it to a life sustaining point.
Fast-forward a few decades… Brock's now 45 years old and has kids of his own… he's still in the drilling business. Only today his focus isn't water wells. It's the heat in the earth's crust – and how it can be harnessed to make energy.
BROCK: The earth has been a constant temperature. We don't know how much the sun will shine or the wind will blow, but we know that the earth is a constant temperature.
Geothermal energy is clean and it's stable. Unlike wind and solar, it doesn't depend on the weather – it's there day and night, all year round.
That's why Brock believes geothermal should play a much bigger role in the transition away from fossil fuels.
BROCK: Now there's a whole new generation that can be the geothermal revolution. And so do it. Come join us.
Geothermal currently meets less than 1% of global energy demand, and many people still think of it as a niche option – something you only find in very special places, with natural hot water underground.
But that's changing. New technologies mean geothermal could potentially be harnessed just about anywhere in the world.
TERRA: There needs to be a new wave of education around what geothermal can do.
BROCK: We're just on the cusp of what this entire industry will look like.
As with many of the topics we cover on Living Planet, there's a lot more to this story.
I'm Neil King. In this episode: the promise of geothermal.
What could this quiet, constant source of heat really do for the climate? What's holding it back? Does it make economic sense? And why teaming up with the fossil fuel industry could make all the difference.
As far as Brock Yordy is concerned, geothermal is the future.
He's the president of the Geothermal Drillers Association, a non-profit he co-founded a few years back. He wants to spread awareness about what he sees as the tremendous potential of geothermal. He also podcasts about it.
Given how passionate he is about this renewable energy source, it might come as a surprise where he landed his first real job outside his family's drilling business.
BROCK: Wild story...
It was with oil and gas giant Halliburton.
He started interning there as a student, while studying water, environmental sciences, and theatre at Western Michigan University.
BROCK: ...and suddenly I went from a farming community and, a water well driller's son ...and it was a whirlwind to go from being part of a tribal self-taught drilling industry where the solution often was get a bigger hammer. We can just smash this in… to being in Houston, Texas in one of the most sophisticated facilities in the world that is focusing on harnessing resources around the world.
They offered him a job and he began working full time as a drilling fluids engineer.
BROCK: And it was like, Wizard of Oz, when it transitions from black and white to color, and your eyes are like, whoa…
… what the heck just happened? Like sitting down in a class and like understanding the science and physics and the like raw energy to harness deep energy resources was mind-blowing versus getting out a rig that was from the 1950s and, simply putting casing in and making water come out at, 30, 40 meters. It was just, you know, your mind's opened.
The pay was good. He says he got to travel around the world, learned about drilling down to hot rocks in Chile and rare earth minerals in the US.
But after almost 10 years, he decided it was time for a change.
BROCK: It was necessary to get out of the old culture and into an opportunity that had innovation and future.
That opportunity, as he tells it, was geothermal.
BROCK: As drilling professionals or as we look at how we harness our resources, we can do it very responsibly. And we have all the technology that has been very focused on efficiencies and safety and getting it up at the least amount of risk possible. But then to be on the side of it, knowing that we can reduce carbon emissions, that we can conserve water, that we can provide stable energy anywhere in the world is quite divine versus being part of just pumping black gold out of the ground until that area is empty and we'll go to the next one.
Brock is, of course, a true believer in geothermal. But the questions he’s grappling with – how to cut emissions, how to use existing drilling skills in a different way – are shared far beyond his industry.
So what is this resource he’s talking about – and why has it been so hard to scale? Before we go any further, we need to say what we mean when we talk about geothermal.
Geothermal is a clean, renewable energy that's been around for a long time.
In its traditional form, geothermal involves drilling wells down to hot water underground. It gets piped to the surface - for heating and cooling systems, or for generating electricity with a steam turbine.
The first geothermal power plant was built in Italy in 1904.
And further back - the Romans used hot springs to heat their homes and their public baths.
Today, it's an important energy source for countries in volcanic areas or along tectonic plate boundaries, like Iceland, Indonesia, New Zealand and Turkey.
Geothermal makes economic sense in these places because the heat is close to the surface and easier to reach – something many other countries don't have. That’s one big reason it hasn’t yet been a major player in global efforts to move away from fossil fuels.
The US is the world's top geothermal energy producer. Well, really the western part of the US. It currently has about 4 gigawatts of installed capacity ... less than one percent of the total energy mix.
That's something Brock is trying to change.
After leaving Halliburton, one of the first projects he worked on was a rural university in Indiana that wanted to replace their coal-fired boilers with a closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system for 50 buildings. For the $83-million-dollar project they drilled more than 3,000 boreholes across the campus, with each one serving as a connected system using the heat in the ground. The university says it now saves them $2 million in energy costs each year.
BROCK: And so it used to be there was a high reward for making that black gold come out of the ground and everybody got paid fast. And now they're seeing if we treat this like an energy infrastructure, it's something that continues to pay over time and time and time. It's a stronger investment. It's just the cost to get there.
Brock says simple system of looped pipes harnessing the temperature underground can provide heating and cooling for homes. That's low-emission, reliable energy that can make the grid more resilient, especially during peak periods.
BROCK: We can decrease the peak demand load on a power generation by 30%... If you look at the demand across the world, 50 plus percent is heating and cooling demand. So if we want geothermal power generation to be successful and we want to slow down the amount of greenhouse gases it has to be sustainable. Heating and cooling works in full circle with power generation. And everybody that goes, I'd rather burn that fossil fuel. It's more reliable. But when it comes to cooling, geothermal is the only one that's giving us an equitable cooling aspect... So heating and cooling for geothermal is equitable for everybody. But on top of it, decreases the load we need so that we can sustain the grid.
He says geothermal power generation could also step in at a time when artificial intelligence and data centers are causing energy demand to surge.
BROCK: For 5,000 years, drilling has been for water and natural resources and some sort of mineral or crude that's going to heat a home. And now natural resources are being consumed by data... we have no choice. We have to cool data centers with geothermal. We have to power data centers with geothermal.
Trailer break
SFX US Energy Secretary Chris Wright
That's US Energy Secretary Chris Wright talking about the potential of geothermal.
The Department of Energy says geothermal power could be expanded by a factor of 20 by 2050 – providing 90 gigawatts or more to the US grid. Remember, today it only supplies 4.
And globally, the International Energy Agency has said geothermal could become a QUOTE "cornerstone" of tomorrow's electricity and heat systems.
The reason for this optimism?
A new generation of technologies that could dramatically boost geothermal capacity.
Those are big numbers – and they depend on technology, politics and finance all moving quickly in the same direction. History suggests energy transitions are seldom that straightforward. But they do give a sense of the scale some planners now envisage.
So in this next part, we’re leaving the world of natural hot springs and shallow wells behind – and going deeper. Much deeper.
So what is so-called "next generation geothermal"?
Unlike conventional geothermal operations, next generation geothermal doesn't rely on underground reservoirs being nearby.
TERRA: In effect, unlocking nearly anywhere on the earth's surface to be able to create a geothermal power or heating system...
Terra Rogers is the program director for superhot rock geothermal at the NGO Clean Air Task Force.
TERRA: ... So that is really what has changed, is our ability to create these systems in dry rock conditions. And that's sort of more generically referred to as next generation geothermal.
To tap into more of the earth's heat, operators could drill even deeper down to reach much higher temperatures in the rock – we're talking 400 degrees Celsius. They're also borrowing heavily from techniques used by the oil and gas industry during the shale boom in the mid-2000s. So fracking and drilling horizontally, instead of just straight down to get to hot rocks.
Fracking is a controversial technique where high-pressure fluid is injected into rock to crack it open – a method that helps unlock huge oil and gas reserves, but also raises concerns about water use and earthquakes.
Brock Yordy has seen it before, because that's when he was working for Halliburton:
BROCK: I hadn't realized because I was a kid at the time, but when they decided to figure out how to frack shale and pull oil and gas out of it, is when you can see the big transition of geothermal, like the big players put all their money in what they call the unconventional natural gas. And so we had this big shift of oil and gas wouldn't be proper forever to, oh, we found a new resource and we have it everywhere. So deep geothermal and oil and gas have been married for a very long time. It was just the fact that one became much more lucrative.
The International Energy Agency predicts geothermal could meet 15% of global energy demand by 2050 if technological advances continue.
BROCK: ... So I think we're going to see massive scale and we're seeing it with everybody coming back on board and being able to drill deeper to have super hot rock power generation or drill deeper so that we can do less holes in a community for heating and cooling.
That 15% figure is a scenario, not a guarantee. It assumes rapid progress on drilling technology, supportive policy – and little in the way of major setbacks or public pushback.
SFX Fervo
A number of projects are making headway – and closing deals with major tech companies. Take US-based Fervo Energy. Google teamed up with the startup to build a geothermal power plant in Nevada to power its data center there.
They drilled down two and a half kilometers and then horizontally before pumping cold water down at high pressure to crack the rock. Water sent down a well then absorbs the heat from the cracked rock before being pushed to the surface to convert the heat to electricity.
Fervo is building a second plant in Utah that's expected to be the largest next-generation geothermal project in the world, producing 500 megawatts by 2028.
One family of next-generation projects, so-called closed-loop systems, doesn’t rely on cracking the rock at all. Instead, they use a network of wells filled with fluid that act as a kind of underground radiator.
Canadian company Eavor did that in the town of Geretsried in southern Germany and started producing energy for the grid in late 2025. Water is pumped through the underground pipes at almost 5,000 meters, absorbing heat from the hot rocks and bringing it back to the surface.
And it’s not just Europe and North America. Countries like Indonesia, Kenya and Iceland are also looking at how these new approaches can build on their existing geothermal experience – turning local heat into reliable, clean power. It all sounds very promising – but there’s a catch. Or rather, several.
It remains to be seen whether geothermal energy produced this way can be scalable in the long term. A big hurdle is the huge upfront cost – and that it can take years before projects see returns.
TERRA: It is important to sort of posit this as a fast-changing technology suite where we are getting better at it every day and demonstrating it more every day.
The cost of next generation geothermal has already fallen quite a bit as drilling becomes more efficient.
But Terra Rogers says for it to become an affordable climate solution, there's a need for more government funding, supporting policies and less red tape.
TERRA: We need a form of power that competes in an open market with all of the other forms, including the fossil fuels.
Besides funding, there’s also competition. Even if next-gen geothermal gets cheaper, it will be competing with rapidly falling costs for solar and wind, plus battery storage – technologies that are already being built at much larger scale in many countries.
And there are other potential challenges. Depending on the technology, geothermal power plants can use a lot of water – so that could become an issue in arid areas.
BROCK: You know, we right now are looking for equitable, stable energy across the world. And so we see power generation as being able to increase facilities load demands to support wind and solar and to stop burning coal or to stop burning natural gases. And so we see that. What we don't realize is the amount of water we consume in there. And so that's a big perspective to have as, you know, we're pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and trying to figure out how to do that balance, we're also consuming a resource that we need for agriculture and we need for the public and we need for sanitation.
Closed loop systems use less water than fracturing rock. They also don't disturb the ground as much as fracking, which has caused earthquakes in some areas.
In some places, those small, induced earthquakes have led to strong local opposition – and to some projects being slowed, redesigned or cancelled. Engineers say they’re learning from these experiences and trying to design quieter, lower impact systems. But the social licence to operate can’t be taken for granted.
And even when communities are on board, drilling down several kilometers to access hot rocks is still very pricey.
The International Energy Agency says India, China and the US have the biggest market potential for next generation geothermal electricity, accounting for three-quarters of the global total.
It also says that, with the right support, the costs for next generation geothermal could fall by 80% by 2035. At that point, new projects could deliver electricity for around US$ 50 per megawatt hour, making geothermal one of the cheapest dispatchable forms of low-emissions electricity.
In other words, if big markets like India, China and the US decide to back it, geothermal could go from niche to normal – providing a kind of clean baseload power that can back up wind and solar when the weather doesn’t cooperate. But that 80% cost drop is still a projection, not a promise. It would take years of sustained investment, policy support and a lot of trial and error.
In the US, geothermal has bipartisan support – unlike other forms of clean energy that have seen their subsidies cut under President Donald Trump.
In Europe, the European Commission has committed to speeding up the decarbonization of heating and cooling and is expected to prepare an action plan on geothermal energy in 2026.
And here in Germany, the Geothermal Energy Acceleration Act, which came into force at the start of 2026, aims to speed up the expansion of geothermal plants, heat pumps, heat pipelines and thermal storage systems.
But Terra Rogers says there's something else that could make a real difference to the expansion of next generation geothermal.
TERRA: I think now that we can see the potential size of the prize when it comes to the market of geothermal, we do expect to see some of the major the international oil and gas companies engage in this space.
Yep - help from the fossil fuel industry. Because a lot of the techniques, tools and expertise required to drill deep down come from big oil and gas. There's a lot of overlap that can be transferred to tap into this clean energy source.
TERRA: And candidly, from a climate perspective, we need that size of player in order to meet our expectations with climate. They are the ones that can move this fastest and deploy and a timeline that really matters… for climate. And that is dominantly through their ability to deploy their very unique set of rigs, and sheet people, subsurface expertise jobs.
The International Energy Agency says up to 80% of the investment required in a geothermal project involves capacity and skills that are common in the oil and gas sector.
BROCK: Oil and gas's role right now is we've spent a lot of money and time into being able to drill, you know, faster, more efficient. than ever before. And so now where it used to take several weeks and we were exploring this crude, we have to maximize our efficiencies and our safety and how we use, utilize our people. And so we're seeing an uptick in research and development for rigs and for tooling. And now that we've decided to go back to deep power generation, geothermal, we need tools that are resistant to high temperatures. And we need downhole diagnostic and analytic tools that are resistant to these high temperatures. And so we are seeing labs refocus on some of this.
Many people working in geothermal today come from the oil and gas industry.
One example: Fervo says 90% of the labor at its Utah plant is covered by former fossil fuel workers. It's the same at Eavor – more than 90% of the company's staff are former oil and gas engineers who have found a second career in geothermal.
And of course another example is Brock Yordy. He says he has no regrets about leaving the fossil fuel industry:
BROCK: As I got into a place where I felt really confident as a, you know, drilling professional... we had that big spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon... and then we pumped crude oil into the Gulf for months and months. And to know that, like, I don't have to be part of that end of the industry anymore...
So I have a 7 and 9 year old and in short, shortest form possible in 2100 when they're 84 years old, I'll be long gone and we'll either have figured this out or the polar ice caps are going to be gone and, you know, sea level rise and all of these things. And so part of it has to be for humanity, as crazy as that is. But I feel like I'm on the right side of the industry... It's everybody's responsibility for us to get there.
Today, around 145,000 people work in the geothermal industry. According to the International Energy Agency, this could rise to one million by the end of the decade… Here's Terra again:
TERRA: When we are looking toward an energy transition, an opportunity to deploy new projects, these next generation geothermal projects will not only provide a profile of electricity that is very unique, this 24 by 7 firm, clean profile, but it also simultaneously provides quality jobs. These are paid well-paid, full-time jobs that look exactly like those that were previously needed or currently needed in a lot of the subsurface recovery of fossil fuels, as well as in the power plants of today that look like electricians, mechanics, and control room operators. So remembering that this has that the growth of this industry also brings along a strong economy that can continue to see investment throughout the community.
That could also be an obstacle for scaling up geothermal: having enough trained workers.
Terra says there's a real danger of a skills shortfall - because enrollments in degree programs associated with the fossil fuel industry are dropping.
TERRA: If we were to put on our lens call it a couple decades from now, maybe even just one decade from now. Many of the developed nations are struggling to entice students into their subsurface sciences, mainly their petroleum engineering type sciences. And if this pipeline were to completely dry up or drop significantly, the future workforce for geothermal is also directly tied to this. And so we should be paying close attention to how we are messaging the energy opportunities in our subsurface in a way that keeps our younger generations excited.
That's what Brock is trying to do. As part of his work with the Geothermal Drillers Association, he's recruiting a new generation of drillers.
BROCK: From my career standpoint, it's fun. And it's, we're just on the cusp of what this entire industry will look like. And right now, if you're 20, I'm 45, if you're 25 years old, you know, when I'm ready to retire in 20 years, you're going to be in the prime of your career and being able to influence this and take it from where it is right now to 2100, to beyond that, to where we look back and we go, we had smokestacks pumping stuff into the air.
Next general geothermal has the potential to boost the transition to clean, renewable energy. It has a lot going for it – it has a small land footprint, and because it's available all the time, it can support the growth of less stable power sources like wind and solar. The technology is developing fast and shows a lot of promise.
But the track record so far is mixed: some projects have performed well, others have been delayed, downsized or shelved. Whether next-generation geothermal becomes a cornerstone of the future energy system – or stays a specialised tool in just a few places – will depend on what happens over the next couple of decades.
And one of the big deciding factors will be cost. The technology may be promising, but right now it’s still expensive.
Brock admits the costs are high. But he's convinced, in the long game, the returns will be as well.
BROCK: So in oil and gas… when you punch through that shale or cap rock and that crude oil starts pumping out of the ground, they instantly know that they have profitability for a time being. And now it's how long is that resource going to last. Whereas geothermal and water is a long game. it's a resource. If we treat it properly, it will last a very long time.
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