A Grand Challenge Update: Geothermal Energy
Authors: Bailey Jeffrey R. , Mattie Taylor , Lines Tim , Merino-Garcia Daniel 
Published: April 2024

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This is the first of a series of six articles on SPE’s Grand Challenges in Energy, formulated as the output of a 2023 workshop held by the SPE Research and Development Technical Section in Austin, Texas.

Described in a JPT article last year, each of the challenges will be discussed separately in this series: geothermal energy; improving recovery from tight/shale resources; net-zero operations; carbon capture, storage, and utilization; digital transformation; and education and advocacy.

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SPE identified five technical “Grand Challenges” in 2023 which, if successfully developed, could advance the interests of the SPE community in a net-zero world and help ensure our longevity and contributions to a prosperous future (Halsey et al. 2023).

Access to the subsurface is a key skillset of the SPE community, including geology and geophysics, well construction and completion, reservoir engineering, production operations, and facilities. The challenges that geothermal faces to become a leading player in the net-zero world are well within the areas of expertise of the SPE community, ranging from rapid technology implementation and learning-by-doing to assure competitiveness, to establishing suitable funding mechanisms to secure access to capital.

The increasing presence of geothermal-related sessions in SPE workshops and conferences shows the interest to explore novel methods to harness geothermal energy for power supply, thermal-use applications, and energy storage, illustrated by the threefold increase in OnePetro references since 2020 (Fig. 1).

The Role of the Oil and Gas Industry Geothermal energy offers a path forward using business models that are well-suited to the oil and gas industry, which can apply its current technology and expertise to produce clean, reliable power and thermal energy at scale. Geothermal is also the only baseload renewable energy source that produces heat, presenting an avenue to mitigate the largest contribution humanity makes to carbon emissions: heating and cooling which account for 40% of all carbon emissions globally (Lund and Toth 2021).

Table 1 presents some of the current applications.

In 2023, the Energy Institute of The University of Texas at Austin released a comprehensive report, “The Future of Geothermal in Texas,” led by Project InnerSpace (Beard and Jones 2023). The report presented a challenge to leverage the technical capabilities and resources in the state.

It estimated that “should the industry drill 15,000 geothermal wells each year for four years, it would provide the energy equivalent of all oil and gas used for electricity and heat production in the State today, including industrial heat.” This initiative is part of a broader movement in Texas, the spiritual home of the US fossil fuel industry, where a new geothermal energy ecosystem is emerging with veterans of the oil and gas business playing pivotal roles.

Geothermal energy cannot only help to reduce the state’s emissions but also through its baseload and energy storage capabilities, it can support a power grid that has struggled to cope with severe weather events as demand has grown. Texas serves as a prime example of a location deeply tied to fossil fuels, where numerous oil and gas developers are announcing plans for geothermal expansion. This trend is not confined to Texas alone; similar developments are underway in other US states, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.