...AND CHEAPER...:

The reason that oil and gas fracking is all but doomed is that wind and solar are now beating all other technologies for new generation capacity on price in most places across the country -- nuclear, coal, oil, and even natural gas -- and they will only get cheaper. With even modest climate policy, superior zero-carbon technology will soon out-compete most carbon-based electricity and transportation. With aggressive policy, that process will happen much faster. Furthermore, the coronavirus pandemic has walloped the fracking industry, as oil demand has cratered with the collapse of travel. Indeed, the government will probably have to spend billions of dollars over the coming years capping wells that bankrupt fracking outfits have (as usual) abandoned because they didn't have enough insurance.

The good news is that, as David Roberts writes in an extensive article for Vox, geothermal power technology is finally reaching the liftoff stage. This is one of those technologies that is theoretically very promising but an engineering nightmare. Essentially, the molten core of the earth is very hot thanks to the decay of radioactive isotopes inside it, and you can use that (virtually inexhaustible) heat to generate electricity. In certain volcanically active places you can access the heat easily, but to really get at the potential, you've got to build geothermal stations all over the place. That means drilling down hundreds or thousands of feet to get to the hot zone, and transporting that heat back up somehow to run a turbine.

Geothermal would be an excellent complement for wind and solar, because it can be switched on and off at will -- providing either baseload or quick-deployment power to compensate for changing wind and sun conditions, but until now it hasn't been feasible at a large scale.

For years the drilling technology to do this kind of thing did not exist. Ironically, the fracking revolution has created exactly the innovations needed. One method is to find a natural reservoir of hot water trapped relatively close to the surface, pump it out through a well, and then pump it back down again once it has run the turbine. Or you can create a new reservoir by pumping down some water to crack apart the rock layers, and then pumping it back out again. Further along the engineering frontier, you can drill down very far to get water hot enough that it becomes "supercritical" and hence able to hold dramatically more energy, or heat the water through an entirely closed loop with deep horizontal pipes.

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