Story By Alexander C. Kaufman |Canary Media| Geothermal energy is undergoing a renaissance, thanks in large part to a crop of buzzy startups that aim to adapt fracking technology to generate power from hot rocks virtually anywhere.
Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom on conventional geothermal — the incumbent technology that has existed for more than a century to tap into the energy of volcanically heated underground reservoirs — is that all the good resources have already been mapped and tapped out.
Zanskar is setting itself apart from the roughly one dozen geothermal startups currently gathering steam by making a contrarian bet on conventional resources. Instead of gambling on new drilling technologies, the Salt Lake City–based company uses modern prospecting methods and artificial intelligence to help identify more conventional resources that can be tapped and turned into power plants using time-tested technology.
Recently, Zanskar unveiled its biggest proof point yet.
The company announced the discovery of Big Blind, a naturally occurring geothermal system in western Nevada with the potential to produce more than 100 megawatts of electricity. It’s the first “blind” geothermal system — meaning that the underground reservoir has no visible signs, such as vents or geysers, and no data history from past exploration — identified for commercial use in more than 30 years.
In total, the United States currently has an installed capacity of roughly 4 gigawatts of conventional geothermal, most of which is in California. That makes the U.S. the world’s No. 1 user of geothermal power, even though the energy source accounts for less than 0.5% of the country’s total electricity output.
The project is set to enter development, with a target to come online in three to five years. Once complete, it will be the nation’s first new conventional geothermal plant on a previously undeveloped site in nearly a decade. However, it may come online later than some next-generation projects.
“We plan to build a power plant there, and that means interconnection, permitting, construction, and drilling out the rest of the well field and the power plant itself. But that’s all pretty standard, almost cookie-cutter,” said Carl Hoiland, Zanskar’s cofounder and chief executive. “We know how to build power plants as an industry. We’ve just not been able to find the resources in the past.”
Prospecting is where Zanskar stands out. While surveying, the company’s geologists found a “geothermal anomaly” indicating the site’s “exceptionally high heat flow,” according to a press release. The team then ran the prospecting data through the company’s AI software to predict viable locations to drill wells to test the system’s temperature and permeability.
Zanskar drilled two test wells this summer. Roughly 2,700 feet down, the drills hit a porous layer of the resource with temperatures of approximately 250 degrees Fahrenheit. The company said those “conditions exceed minimum thresholds for utility-scale geothermal power” and “contrast greatly” with other areas in the region, which would require drilling as deep as 10,000 feet — potentially viable for the next-generation technologies Zanskar’s rivals are pitching.
The firm’s announcement comes as the U.S. clamors for more electricity, in large part because of shockingly high forecasts of power demand from data centers. Many of the tech companies developing data centers, like Google and Meta, are eager to pay big for “clean, firm” power — electricity that is carbon-free and available 24/7. Geothermal, whether advanced or conventional, is a tantalizing option for meeting those standards, and tech giants already anchor some next-generation projects.
Ultimately, Zanskar thinks it can convince data centers to colocate near the resources it finds.
If it can find additional untapped resources suitable for conventional technology, Zanskar could deliver new geothermal power faster and cheaper than the flashier startups on the scene. Those firms, including Fervo Energy and XGS Energy, are making significant progress in reducing the cost of their drilling techniques. However, they are still using new technologies that are more expensive than the traditional approach, which has been refined over time.
“The core reason we started the company is we came to believe that the Department of Energy’s estimates of hydrothermal potential were just orders of magnitude too low and were all based on studies that are over 20 years old,” Hoiland said. “We think that there’s 10 times more out there than they thought, and that every one of those sites can be 10 times more productive in terms of the number of megawatts they can generate.”
Among the notable cheerleaders of this same theory? The chief executive of the leading next-generation geothermal company. Responding to a post on X from Zanskar cofounder and chief technology officer Joel Edwards describing how much more conventional geothermal remains untapped, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer wrote, “Joel makes a great point about geothermal that you see all the time in resource development: when technology improves, turns out there’s a lot more of something than we thought.”
About the Author: Alexander C. Kaufman is an award-winning reporter and writer who has covered energy and climate change for more than a decade.
