Geothermal energy extracts heat from the Earth’s crust to generate electricity or supply heat, and the live question in the supplied sources is whether “advanced” versions that engineer their own permeability can be built cheaply enough, and in enough places, to matter at grid scale.
Summary
The frontier that the sources point at is “advanced” or “deep” geothermal: going after hot rock that lacks natural permeability, and creating the flow path by engineering it, so that the resource becomes a function of drilling capability and heat gradient rather than of local volcanic geology. A think tank assessment published in May 2026 frames the technology as widely available and clean, with cost the explicitly hedged variable ref. That hedge is the whole investment case in one word.
The parameters that decide it are: how temperature rises with depth at a given site, how much drilling costs as depth increases, how much fluid can be circulated through the engineered rock volume and for how long before the flow path degrades or short-circuits, and how accurately the subsurface can be predicted before capital is committed. The research awards in this source set attack precisely that last parameter. One project is building a three-dimensional predictive model of how folding and faulting fractures sandstone and thereby controls fluid flow, explicitly aimed at geothermal potential, petroleum production and groundwater. Another extends an open-source multiphysics simulation framework built for fission and fusion systems into geothermal applications. A third funds microstructural characterisation instrumentation that includes geothermal systems among its target uses.
The reader should know that the supplied evidence base is thin and indirect. There are no wells, no flow rates, no cost figures, no capacity numbers and no project outcomes in these sources. Most of what follows is therefore scored null rather than guessed at.
Evidence base
- May 2026: a think tank assessment characterises advanced geothermal as widely available and clean, but frames cost conditionally as “maybe cheap enough” to make a big impact ref.
- 17 June 2026: NSF awards $210,670 to build a predictive 3D model of how progressive folding fractures sandstone and controls fluid flow, explicitly to improve understanding of geothermal energy potential, and to train participants for geothermal exploration and production careers.
- 2 July 2026: NSF awards $1,500,000 to extend the Cardinal open-source multiphysics framework, built for fission and fusion systems, into geothermal energy among other areas, with verification and validation suites.
- 1 July 2026: NSF awards $234,089 for EBSD and EDS detectors whose enabled research explicitly includes studies of geothermal systems.
- May 2023: this publication listed deep geothermal among its three most underrated technologies ref, while listing nuclear fusion among the three most overrated the following week ref.
- June 2023: continued solicitation of contacts working in deep geothermal in the publication’s mailbag, indicating a sector with limited visible activity at that time ref.
Open questions
- What is the actual drilled and completed cost per well at the depths advanced geothermal requires, and how does it scale with depth and rock type?
- Can engineered flow paths sustain commercial circulation rates over a project lifetime without thermal short-circuiting, and is there any long-duration field data to show it?
- Do the predictive fracture models being funded in 2026 actually reduce subsurface risk enough to change project financing terms, or do they remain academic tools?
- Who is the buyer? The sources contain no demand-side evidence at all, so is there procurement, industrial heat or data centre offtake behind the enthusiasm?
Assessment drafted 2026-08-31 from up to 10 KB sources using the technology-scorecard framework; scores are a draft read pending review.