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Penn Sophomore gains an Insight Into Geothermal Energy (Penn News)

"Geothermal energy experts and the oil industry could work together"

Elizabeth Dresselhaus

Geothermal energy has proven to be a reliable, sustainable and eco-friendly means of providing power. It is said to be capable of meeting the world’s energy demands, in theory. But can it break our potentially catastrophic dependence on fossil fuels in practice? For University of Pennsylvania sophomore Elizabeth Dresselhaus, the answer lies buried deep below Iceland, so that’s where she spent the summer trying to find it.

Based on her research, Dresselhaus concluded that “significant technological advances in the geothermal drilling process are required to achieve widespread use of supercritical geothermal power.”

This finding led her to a second conclusion, which she says was “one of the most interesting insights I gleaned from studying and researching in Iceland,” that geothermal energy experts and the oil industry could work together to make this happen.

Dresselhaus says that such a partnership “could have positive impacts economically as well, giving jobs to petroleum engineers and finding an avenue to apply the plethora of knowledge gathered from oil drilling over the centuries. Perhaps our investment in fossil fuels could come full circle to ultimately benefit renewable energy and global sustainability.”

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