Innovation has long been the cornerstone of U.S. economic success, and it can be an engine of clean economic growth and energy dominance. Yet increasing geopolitical fragmentation could encourage countries to turn inward and challenge innovation partnerships, even as a myriad of global challenges—from poverty to security—demand stronger ties and collaboration. Such changes in global architecture come despite an insatiable rise in energy demand from artificial intelligence, new manufacturing, and other sources that will create huge new markets for clean firm power technologies. Fragmentation demands a new model for international energy partnerships. The United States should seek mutually beneficial partnerships for energy innovations that can deliver a comparative advantage, particularly those narrow enough to ensure benefits outweigh costs and on technologies where the United States can solidify an existing advantage.
There is an opportunity to meet these needs while also strengthening economic competitiveness and geopolitical standing, and it lies below ground. The United States has a distinct edge in geothermal drilling technologies, catalyzed by oil and gas innovation that could create abundant new sources of energy and open entirely new markets. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Energy has begun backing next-generation geothermal technologies capable of expanding the technology’s potential resources. But these new advancements are only the beginning: Accessing deeper and hotter resources, referred to as superhot rock (SHR) geothermal energy, could unlock an even greater, nearly inexhaustible supply of clean heat and power. The United States, Iceland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand each has access to optimal low-depth heat resources to develop these technologies; by partnering with these and other close allies, the United States can accelerate its technology development and convert its edge into a durable competitive lead. The United States, currently on the cutting edge of these technological innovations, now has an opportunity to leverage and cement its unique advantages to lead an international alliance to access key development resources and unlock 24/7 heat and power.
The Case for Superhot Rock Geothermal
Superhot rock geothermal’s advantage is that it is an abundant, firm, and virtually ubiquitous potential source of energy. Available almost anywhere in the world and capable of providing constant heat and power, it is a uniquely global clean energy solution. This high heat gives it an exceptional energy density, which would allow for more efficient power generation at lower costs compared to traditional geothermal. With major efficiency advantages, a single SHR well could provide five to ten times the energy output of today’s conventional geothermal wells. It also yields some of the lowest land-use footprints among energy technologies, minimizing its environmental impact. With advancements in drilling and materials innovation, SHR could scale up as a power source globally, not just in distinct locations around the world. It would entail enormous energy security benefits and a near-unlimited potential market, enabling both novel and known technologies.
Yet more action is needed to develop and commercialize the technologies necessary to unlock superhot rock. While the United States has been a leader in developing drilling technologies that will be critical to unlocking SHR, the technology requires extending these drilling technologies to greater depths and higher temperatures. The United States should therefore welcome opportunities to work with allies that have historically relied on, and have shallow access to, geothermal from harsher, higher-temperature environments. Opportunities for field testing and shared learnings between international technology leaders would help bring superhot rock energy to a commercial scale. Key challenges that need to be tested in the field can be separated into four distinct categories:
- Drilling: Expanding the rate of penetration and ability for operations to penetrate harsher and deeper environments is critical for expanding access to superhot rock energy in locations where the Earth’s geothermal gradient is low and high temperatures are deep.
- Well construction: Materials testing for casing, casing connections, and cementing, as well as field testing for the end-to-end system, is critical. Historically, well construction is the most common point of failure for superhot rock demonstrations.
- Heat extraction: SHR requires creating the ability for water to circulate through hot rock, either through fracture enhancement or the creation of closed-loop systems. This is the technology area with the lowest level of maturity.
- Power production: Geothermal power plants have the same build as any thermoelectric plant, but it is important to understand existing capabilities to determine what equipment and design changes are needed to scale up superhot rock energy.
These topics converge into a single focus: the need for field testing opportunities and improved communication of insights among international partners. The United States leads in technological advancement but would greatly benefit from a better platform for collaborating with leaders in countries like Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, and Italy—countries that have different geological resources (such as shallower and easier to access, in the cases of Iceland and New Zealand) and innovation experiences. International collaboration thus far, through projects like DEEPEN, has made important advancements in modeling and site characterization for superhot geothermal environments, and the United States should continue to engage in those initiatives. However, modeling can only go so far in the advancement of new technology, and those initiatives leave out critical opportunities for field tests to de-risk commercial development in order to encourage private sector involvement across the technical fields mentioned above.
The United States’ Leadership
With increasing international competition across clean energy industries, the United States should look to capitalize in industries and technologies where it has an early lead and natural and competitive advantages. The country has massive geothermal resources and a history of leadership in drilling innovations, largely led by the expertise and technology seconded from the oil and gas industry. And while the geothermal workforce today is small, its potential is enviable due to the transferability of skills from conventional energy and power-producing industries. More than 300,000 workers in the U.S. oil and gas industry have skills that are directly transferable to the SHR geothermal industry (see figure 1). That workforce gives the United States an edge in scaling its geothermal industry and suggests that a fast transition would be smoother than for other countries.
Over the past decade, U.S. industry has led the development of new geothermal techniques that have altered the sector’s outlook—with even more revolutionary innovation on the horizon. Recently, firms have pioneered new ways to exploit dry rock (which is typically not used for geothermal) through closed-loop systems and through fracturing artificial reservoirs. These new techniques have enormous potential—enough to increase U.S. geothermal power 140-fold—and new processes could significantly decrease the cost. Other U.S. firms, while at an earlier stage of development, are at the forefront of cutting-edge geothermal drilling solutions to access deep, superhot rock, which can also unlock vast geothermal potential at unprecedented depths. Different approaches are being taken: Some firms are developing breakthrough millimeter-wave drive technology (essentially drilling precise holes in the earth’s crust with a laser), while others are utilizing electrical currents to stimulate the earth and create geothermal wells.
Joining an international collaboration to bring superhot rock to commercial viability is good for all global partners but could be particularly advantageous for the United States. As a leader in the subsurface energy space, the United States has the opportunity to rapidly leverage its existing supply chains, infrastructure, workforce, and expertise to scale up quickly, simultaneously addressing the need for climate solutions along with the growing electricity demands from new sectors such as AI and transitioning sectors like transportation. Accessing shallow resources abroad and sharing data with ally industries can reduce failure risk and greatly accelerate the commercialization timeline for U.S. industry.
Unlocking SHR in the next decade will require collaboration with other countries to test, demonstrate, and commercialize technologies.
An International Alliance
By working closely with allies that are exploring SHR development, the United States can minimize risk and give its industry access to best practices and developments across a range of geologies. The critical partners for the alliance include Iceland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, all of whom are exploring superhot geothermal resources and face a range of challenges to commercialize the technology (see figure 2). The United States has already executed memoranda of cooperation or agreements to collaborate on geothermal with Japan, Iceland, and New Zealand, the latter of which was reached during Donald Trump’s first administration, and maintains a close relationship with Italy. Iceland has also issued joint statements with both Japan and Italy on geothermal collaboration. Formalizing collaboration as a consortium would strengthen research and development capacities for each country. The newly launched SHR task group under the International Energy Agency (IEA) Geothermal Technology Collaboration Program—now led by representatives of Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, and Italy—is a fantastic step and opportunity for deeper collaboration, and one in which the United States should seek a leadership role.
The private sectors in each country, for their part, have already established links and are pursuing development of next-generation geothermal systems. A Japanese energy company, for example, has collaborated with American energy and geothermal firms on a pilot project for advanced closed-loop geothermal in Hokkaido, Japan. Other U.S. energy and oil field service companies have been closely involved in past iterations of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, which aims to demonstrate the economic viability of supercritical geothermal resources. The SHR alliance could engage in tiers of public-private cooperation across countries, depending upon resources. Each tier would involve further investment from member countries but may multiply impact.
- Tier 1: Share R&D and best practices. First, the countries should establish a forum through which industries and governments can share research and best practices as they pursue SHR development and first-of-a-kind pilot facilities, which can help accelerate development in every country while also avoiding redundant risks. Collaborative research and development has been one of the core pathways through which countries historically have partnered in the energy industry and has been responsible for accelerating innovation and technology diffusion. Such a forum could be housed as an IEA working group or as a stand-alone system for collaboration under existing or new intergovernmental memorandums of understanding, and it would require investment only for administrative and data management costs. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory is currently tasked with managing the Geothermal Data Repository, which now uses AI to help users navigate its data, and would be well-positioned to oversee this effort, if given adequate resources. Data and research collaboration, as always, will require careful management to protect intellectual property and ensure equal compliance across partners. But open-source and shared data have been staples of highly competitive industries in the past. In the artificial intelligence race, for instance, open-source platforms have had an innovation advantage over their peers.
- Tier 2: Joint, stepwise test beds to advance SHR to more difficult geologies. Each of the five countries faces different geological conditions that will impact the ease of testing SHR technologies, and together they can represent a large proportion of the Earth’s surface and geological conditions. Test beds, where multiple teams can test designs in a shared location, can bring innovations into the field more quickly; this would mirror the Department of Energy’s Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE). To minimize risk, testing should begin in the easiest conditions possible—such as in Iceland or New Zealand, where the superhot resource is accessible at shallow depths—and advance to more difficult geologies and deeper resources as the technology improves. To do so, the countries should jointly establish test beds to give industry leaders access to these various geologies, providing a huge benefit to mitigating each country’s individual technology failure risk. These test beds can be used to pioneer the innovations necessary for rapidly advancing the energy potential, cost reduction, and scale of geothermal in each member country. This tier would require significant investment but would give U.S. industry readier access to key resources and geologies, greatly ameliorate risk for technology development and demonstration, and accelerate development and the partner countries’ advantages. The host country for each test bed may take on a larger share of the investment than other members but would accrue benefits in the form of reduced risk and long-term access to the wells drilled as part of the development process, whether for heat, power, or further development.
- For joint test beds in Tier 2 to be successful, shared access to laboratory facilities will be important to allow for detailed material testing, equipment validation, and iterative improvements based on field and modeled results. Contributors to the test beds should have access to lab resources across member countries, either through direct partnerships or a centralized system that ensures equitable use. This system could involve reciprocal agreements, such as where participating countries’ labs prioritize work related to the test beds or where an entity is jointly funded to coordinate lab access, ensuring efficient collaboration and reducing duplication of efforts.
The focus of this work should be to establish a pathway to achieving commercialization of superhot rock geothermal by focusing on geothermal technology advancements greater than 300 degrees Celsius, with a pathway to achieving the lowest possible cost and highest possible market penetration of clean energy production. This may occur when extracting heat from formations at temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius, but the applicable research may extend in either direction.
There is significant precedent for collaborative R&D across countries (such as the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and Iceland Deep Drilling Project), some of which the national labs in the United States have overseen for decades and which are critical to technological advancement, but joint test beds would be a more novel approach. Nonetheless, that novelty is well worth the benefits that joint test beds and pilots could provide. This is an ultra-low-cost, high-reward approach. It would allow governments not to choose technology winners but instead to simply offer the space and infrastructure for bold drillers to make mistakes and change history in the process. Even as eventual competitors, every country would benefit from sharing risks and lessons and from expanding the range of test conditions available to their industry.
Though it only involved domestic partners, one useful model is the Hydraulic Fracture Test Site (HFTS), a test site that was jointly funded and managed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. oil and gas industry to gather data to improve hydraulic fracturing technologies. The work performed at HFTS has helped shape drilling best practices and improved the efficiency of U.S. producers. A similar model—expanded through international collaboration to include access to unique subsurface formations and supported by joint funding from participating governments and industries—could enable first-of-a-kind geothermal demonstrations at a scale and pace otherwise unattainable. Such a funding model may work well for a SHR research alliance or joint test bed, as public-private co-funding would ensure that the test bed would be a jointly executed, durable collaboration. In this case, where the cost to coordinate a test bed and put the steel in the ground will be far higher, local partners and industry may have to contribute a higher share of the total cost. The United States would also need to ensure that the knowledge gained from collaboration is readily available to domestic industry to avoid losing out on a competitive advantage, which should be more manageable in a collaboration with close allies.
While the United States, Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, and Italy are the countries best placed to participate in such a collaboration, several other countries are on deck as potential future contributors, funders, or priority markets for early deployment. These include Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Brazil, countries where the SHR resources are significant, the subsurface knowledge base is complementary, and such clean firm power can make a major impact.
Geopolitical and Economic Benefits
Unlike other clean technologies that have commoditized rapidly and in which the United States has fallen behind, next-generation geothermal and SHR is a new arena with new opportunities. In fact, next-generation geothermal energy is one of the few low-carbon technologies on which the United States is primed to compete and lead. First, developing SHR can open international markets, including in high-growth regions such as Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, which all have massive potential SHR resources. At home, SHR’s ability to provide abundant clean firm power and advanced heat streams will enhance U.S. competitiveness in energy-intensive industries that are critical to economic security—heavy industries, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and data, direct air capture, and more—as the economy decarbonizes.
Building an alliance around SHR can demonstrate a new model for international cooperation even as geopolitics continue to fragment, strengthening key relationships and U.S. standing in the world. As multilateral collaboration becomes more difficult, smaller alliances can become more important and powerful. Building such an alliance with Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, and Italy can bolster U.S. alliances in Europe and the Pacific while also demonstrating to the world that the United States continues to lead on the international stage and is open to mutually beneficial partnerships. And in the longer term, providing SHR technology to new markets can build U.S. relationships across regions.
Energy, and energy security in particular, has long been central to geopolitical relationships and conflict. The United States has used its vast energy resources to strengthen its energy security and that of its allies, while also weakening the leverage of coercive energy suppliers abroad. SHR offers an opportunity to continue that role and further enhance energy security globally: As an abundant, land-efficient, renewable resource, SHR can help diversify allies’ energy supplies and reduce the leverage conferred by fuel supply relationships. The leverage conferred by fuel supply has been a key pillar of U.S. energy foreign policy, but its role is already threatened by China and other countries’ dominance of clean energy technologies. The United States needs to offer and compete on alternatives in those markets—much as its gas exports have been critical in diluting Russia’s gas dominance—and next-generation geothermal can be the key alternative. Early leadership gives the United States an opportunity to develop a clean energy technology that has not yet been captured by supply chain concentration and commoditization.
Conclusion
Leadership on superhot rock energy—and an international alliance to advance its development—presents an opportunity for the United States to convert global momentum behind decarbonization into industrial growth and geopolitical strength. Cooperation with international allies can help U.S. industry build upon its technological edge; access key resources and new markets for industry; directly strengthen relationships with allies; and enhance the energy security of the United States and key allies. Global economic competition and a fragmenting geopolitical context demand a new paradigm for international collaboration—one that creates mutually beneficial mechanisms and is durable to geopolitical and political change. An SHR alliance could serve as a model, with the United States and key allies coming together to advance their industrial competitiveness, energy security, and partnerships. Tapping into this competitive advantage could offer a path forward for energy leadership and cooperation while positioning the United States to lead a new frontier for the energy system.
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