"Earth’s vast reserves of deep geothermal heat—experts estimate total accessible reserves of more than 1,000 GW in the United States alone—present a huge opportunity to provide large amounts of zero-carbon baseload power if we can only find a way to cost-effectively tap into this energy.
However, while we know the energy is there, major scientific and technical obstacles to accessing and controlling the subsurface inexpensively have so far prevented the successful commercial development of this resource, including challenges associated with high deep drilling costs, forming and controlling complex fracture networks for water and heat flow, and efficiently converting low temperature heat into electricity.
The development of transformational new technologies to solve these challenges holds great promise to allow us to finally tap into this vast zero-carbon energy resource."