The U.S. Department of Energy has announced more than $99 million for 21 projects selected to advance geothermal energy development in the United States. Five of those projects are in Utah.
The projects will conduct field-scale tests of next-generation geothermal technologies and exploration drilling to characterize and potentially confirm promising geothermal resources.
Utah’s five projects include two for Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals in Salt Lake City, two for the University of Utah, and one for AlterG Resources in Salt Lake City.
“These projects will empower American innovators to unlock the tremendous geothermal resources beneath our feet,” said DOE Under Secretary of Energy Kyle Haustveit in a department release. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re advancing next-generation geothermal technologies that can lower costs, strengthen American energy dominance, and turn more of our vast domestic geothermal resources into reliable and affordable power.”
He said the 21 projects will focus on two key areas. Five projects will conduct field-scale enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) tests to validate technologies under real-world conditions, while 16 additional projects will conduct exploration drilling to identify and characterize promising next-generation geothermal resources. Together, he said, these efforts will help reduce technical and development risk and provide the information needed to support future commercial projects and investment.
Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals will design, drill and hydraulically stimulate a short-lateral horizontal injection well at Lightning Dock Geothermal field in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, to deliver engineered pressure support to an actively producing hydrothermal reservoir and capture heat from impermeable, hot rock in the vicinity of the hydrothermal system. It will also test and document a confirmation methodology of directionally drilled deep wells from a single pad, using near-real-time stochastic model updates and logging-while-drilling to reduce the anomaly-to-discovery timeline, and confirm a commercially viable hydrothermal resource at a basin-and-range site that has never been drilled to reservoir depth.
AlterG Resources will do field testing to validate technical performance of EGS at commercially relevant depths in Pershing and Churchill counties, Nevada, using a deep horizontal EGS well pair and a comparative hydraulic stimulation program testing plug-and-perf and sliding-sleeve completions.
Projects to be conducted by the University of Utah will include to design, drill, stimulate, operate and validate a high‑performance EGS doublet at the Dixie Valley West geothermal field in Nevada, with the aim to demonstrate that engineered reservoirs developed adjacent to existing hydrothermal systems can deliver sustained circulation, enhanced permeability and commercially relevant thermal output and geothermal exploration across the industry, and conduct targeted drilling and subsurface characterization of a large thermal anomaly in Utah’s Cove Fort geothermal field and use modern drilling, logging and data integration techniques to better understand how heat and fluids are distributed in carbonate rock formations.
