It is practically impossible to get politicians from either side of the aisle to agree on what day of the week it is, but next-generation geothermal energy has somehow pulled off the impossible. Democrats love it because it has low emissions, and Republicans love it because it represents absolute energy independence while using the exact same drilling technology that the oil and gas industry perfected. It is a rare moment of sanity in Washington.

Back in April, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Next-Generation Geothermal Research and Development Act. The bill tells the Department of Energy to stop dragging its feet and start funding the commercialization of these advanced geothermal systems. Meanwhile, local state governments are trying to bypass the bureaucratic red tape by expediting permits so companies can actually start digging.

The main tech being pushed right now is called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). This process involves pumping high-pressure fluid underground to fracture rock and retrieve steam—which is literally just hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. The climate lobby spent years trying to ban fracking, but now that it's being used to harvest clean steam instead of natural gas, the narrative has shifted.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, put it bluntly: "It's the same techniques and up to a point it's the same industry as well." While there are some hand-wringing concerns about minor earthquakes caused by fracturing underground rock, Wagner argues the reward of having an always-on, high-capacity, renewable energy source easily outweighs the risks. In his words, moving faster toward geothermal is "all good news."

But to get to the really hot stuff, companies have to drill deeper than ever before. Standard drills are useless here; physical drill bits disintegrate when they hit super-hard rock at extreme temperatures, making the process incredibly slow and expensive. To fix this, some tech companies are developing sci-fi solutions, like firing kinetic projectiles at several times the speed of sound to shatter the rock.

Then there is Quaise, an MIT spin-off that is literally building microwave blasters to melt the Earth's crust. They use "millimeter-wave drilling" to blast electromagnetic waves into the ground, vaporizing the rock instead of grinding it physically. Harry Kelso, Quaise’s communications manager, explains that traditional geothermal only works near active tectonic hotspots, but melting rock with electromagnetic waves lets you access super-hot energy basically anywhere on the planet.

Quaise is currently testing this setup at a site in Oregon. They plan to use old-school drills for the easy parts, then switch to the millimeter-wave tech when they hit the brutal, hard rock layers deep down. This keeps them from having to constantly stop the rig to replace broken drill bits, saving massive amounts of cash and time.

Naturally, the water police are already complaining because fracking-style geothermal requires a lot of water to start up, sparking fears of contamination. Kelso acknowledged that Quaise's system needs a ton of water at first, but claims that careful system design can easily handle the risks. If these companies can successfully scale this tech, the US might just secure its energy grid using the most metal drilling methods imaginable.

Sources: * U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (senate.gov) * Columbia Business School (business.columbia.edu) * Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu) * U.S. Department of Energy (energy.gov)