Geothermal: Clean Energy for People Who Like to Drill: With AI creating insatiable demand for electricity, an old but clean source is getting a second look thanks to favorable politics and new extraction technology. It’s Landman for environmentalists. (Markos Kounalakis and Theo Jan Snoey, March 12, 2026, Washington Monthly)
This renewable energy technology, once considered a niche, has been revitalized by bipartisan politics, financial backing, and, especially, new drilling technology: Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS. The technology is controversial because it involves fracking. EGS uses techniques from shale extraction—high-skill drilling, subsurface mapping, and controlled stimulation—to create permeability in hot, dry rock. This fluid circulation brings usable heat to the surface as electricity. It’s “fracking” for steam, not oil.
EGS is one of the few ways to harness the existing drilling economy—rigs, crews, geologists, completion services, everything you see on Landman—toward a clean product. To a polity split on renewables and Donald Trump’s administration fetishizing fossil fuels like coal and oil, geothermal’s politics are refreshingly weird: clean energy for people who like to drill. California’s oil-rich Kern County and the state’s Central Valley would gain from a geothermal buildout—in part, by using tapped-out oil wells to store thermal energy and in part by pivoting phased-out oil drilling labor and expertise.
Trump’s Department of the Interior has announced emergency permitting procedures to accelerate geothermal reviews on federal lands, tied to the president’s national energy emergency declaration. Whatever you think of MAGA, the administration’s backing of EGS is a win.
The purveyors of AI should pay for expanding geothermal—and increasingly they are. President Trump’s State of the Union address announced a “ratepayer protection pledge” that major tech players and hyperscalers are expected to sign. That could lower consumer prices, shift demand, and alter funding for other power projects. Unfortunately, there are scant details about the “pledge.” The administration’s plans often have, shall we say, an inability-to-execute problem. But the idea is right: User pays.