Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 30, 2026
Making geothermal power work anywhere
Geothermal power has long depended on a geographic accident, fault lines bringing hot rock close to the surface, that makes it work well in Iceland and barely anywhere else. Companies including Quaise Energy are developing drilling deep enough into hot rock to remove that dependence, aiming to give any country access to steady, round-the-clock clean power. The open stakes are whether the drilling can be done affordably at industrial scale.
The story so far
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Jul 30, 2026 Latest
Zanskar revived Lightning Dock, a cooling geothermal plant in New Mexico, by drilling a new well to 8,000 feet after finding the original wells, at 2,500 feet, barely reached the edge of the underground reservoir. The deeper well came online in May 2025 and a year later was still pumping more than 4,000 gallons of hot water a minute, reversing a plant that had been losing 50 degrees Fahrenheit of water temperature over five years, five times the normal rate of decline.
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Jul 22, 2026
Quaise Energy and other companies are pursuing drilling deep enough into hot rock that the specific combination of heat, water and permeable rock that Iceland relies on for geothermal power would no longer be necessary. Quaise co-founder Matt Houde said the energy stored in the Earth's crust exceeds all hydrocarbons combined by orders of magnitude, and Iceland already gets more than a quarter of its electricity from geothermal.
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