The Next American Energy Success Story Is Already Underground
Fervo is building America’s next great energy industry, and it’s doing it the American way.
By Tom Erb, Government Affairs & Policy Manager at Fervo
It was 5:30 a.m. in rural Southwest Utah when I first saw what enhanced geothermal energy was really about.
I had just started my job at Fervo Energy in September 2025 and visited Cape Station, the company’s flagship project near Milford, Utah, about 200 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. I woke up early to catch the drilling crew’s shift change and meet some of the men and women bringing a new industry to life. Standing there in the unexpectedly cold, predawn quiet, watching workers rotate out under floodlights and listening to a morning safety briefing, I was captivated by the scene: hard hats, the rumble of heavy equipment, and the organized buzz of a well-run industrial site in the high desert.
It looked like an oil and gas operation, because in many ways, it is. But what I was witnessing was something new. Fervo is building America’s next great energy industry, and it’s doing it the American way: with proven technology, a homegrown workforce, and a domestic resource that can deliver for every American, no matter what your energy priorities may be.
Innovation Built on American Expertise
Cape Station is Fervo Energy’s first commercial-scale Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) project. EGS has the potential to elevate geothermal from a niche regional resource into a backbone of reliable electricity generation across the United States, by engineering the subsurface to harvest heat from the earth and convert it into clean, reliable, affordable, and abundant power.
This is possible because EGS is built on innovations from the U.S. oil and gas sector. Fervo uses the same horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies that powered the shale revolution to unlock heat stored miles beneath the Earth’s surface, bringing the same workforce and supply chain with it. More than 90 percent of on-site labor hours at Cape Station have come from oil and gas workers, and more than 60 percent of Fervo’s employees are former oil and gas professionals. The project is supplied by companies like Baker Hughes, Vallourec, and Halliburton (among others), giving Fervo confidence that equipment and resources will arrive on time via a proven domestic industrial base.
Just like with natural gas, progress is accelerating rapidly. Since 2022, Fervo has cut drilling time by approximately 75 percent and per-foot drilling costs by approximately 70 percent, mirroring the early shale revolution’s learning curve almost exactly. Cape Station is contracted to deliver first power to the grid later this year, reaching approximately 100 megawatts of operating capacity by early 2027, with permits in place to expand to 2 gigawatts. The geothermal resource beneath that single project alone exceeds 4 gigawatts, roughly equivalent to the entire traditional geothermal industry in the United States today. And Fervo’s existing lease holdings across the American West represent the potential to unlock 40 gigawatts, enough to power more than 30 million American homes.
The same domestic assets — the innovation, the workforce, the supply chain — that once unlocked an era of energy abundance through shale are now launching the next great American energy industry in geothermal.
Checking Every Box
What makes geothermal so compelling is that it checks every box, no matter what you care about most.
If you care about affordability: Americans want electricity that is both reliable and affordable. Geothermal delivers both. Cape Station’s power is already cost-competitive with other clean baseload sources, and costs are continuing to fall, driven by the same learning curve that made shale gas affordable. The market has noticed: traditional utilities and hyperscalers have signed long-term contracts to purchase geothermal power. When buyers of that caliber commit to long-term deals, it’s a signal that the economics are real and improving.
If you care about conservation and environmental impact: Geothermal produces electricity without combustion, with no fuel burned and no emissions at the source. And because the infrastructure primarily lives underground, the surface is minimally impacted. That means geothermal can deliver large-scale clean baseload power while leaving the landscape, along with the habitat, open space, and natural character that come with it, nearly untouched. Fervo’s projects run on a closed-loop water system using non-potable water sources that dramatically reduce consumption compared to conventional power plants. The projects are clean across every metric: emissions, land use, and water.
If you care about reliability: The United States faces an energy reliability crisis. Aging baseload plants are retiring faster than replacement capacity is being built, creating a potential 98-gigawatt shortfall by 2035, precisely as AI data centers, advanced manufacturing, and broad electrification are pushing demand to new heights. Geothermal produces power continuously, regardless of weather, filling the baseload gap where it’s needed most. Speed is another advantage. Fervo’s Cape Station is delivering first power in approximately three years from groundbreaking, and a modular, standardized approach is designed to shorten that timeline with every successive project.
If you care about national energy security: The heat beneath our feet cannot be embargoed, disrupted by a foreign adversary, or delayed by a pipeline failure. With EGS technology, this resource is no longer confined to Nevada and California. The Department of Energy projects geothermal opportunities in at least 18 states by 2050. True energy independence looks like an energy source secured under American land, built by American workers, and deployed with American technological expertise.
The Scale of the Opportunity
This is not a niche story. Across multiple reports and Presidential administrations, the DOE projects that the United States could deploy 90 to 300 gigawatts of geothermal power by 2050, a twentyfold increase from today. Three hundred gigawatts would make geothermal a cornerstone of American energy, representing roughly a quarter of the entire U.S. electric grid.
The Big Thing Standing in the Way
While the technology, workforce, capital, and supply chain are in a good place to scale geothermal, the single biggest bottleneck is our outdated system for permitting energy projects and building electric transmission infrastructure.
Geothermal projects on federal public lands currently face overlapping environmental reviews that the oil and gas industry is not subject to in the same way. And even after a project is permitted and built, transmission and interconnection backlogs can delay grid connection by several more years.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have taken meaningful steps through executive action, and bipartisan legislative momentum is building. The Geothermal Energy Advancement Act and the CLEAN Act, which recently passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support, would modernize leasing timelines, consolidate redundant reviews, and ensure agencies can keep pace with a growing industry. This is about modernizing, not eliminating, environmental review to ensure a clean, reliable, American-made energy technology isn’t unnecessarily delayed for years.
The Next Chapter
Standing at Cape Station that September morning, it’s clear I wasn’t witnessing a science experiment. I witnessed an industry being born, built by the same American workforce that built the last one, running on a resource that has been waiting underground since long before any of us were here.
The geothermal revolution can do what the shale revolution did: transform America’s energy position and provide a long-term solution to the nation’s energy affordability challenge. And it can do it while delivering for every constituency. Lower prices for ratepayers, pristine landscapes for conservationists, reliable power for grid operators, new opportunities for workers, and true energy independence for our national security. It checks every box.
What happens next depends on how many Americans are willing to put their skills, voices, and passion to work to accelerate the nation’s next great energy industry. Come join us.
Tom Erb leads Federal Affairs at Fervo Energy, a leading next-generation geothermal energy company.