A Startup Says It Has Found a Hidden Source of Geothermal Energy

A geothermal startup said Thursday he struck gold in Nevada, metaphorically speaking. Zanskar, which uses AI to find geothermal resources hidden deep underground, claims to have identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. According to the company, this discovery is the first of its kind made by the industry in decades.

The discovery is the culmination of years of research into how to find these resources and highlights the growing promise of geothermal energy.

“When we started this company, I think the most common message we heard was that geothermal was dead: it was a story of ruins, a graveyard of so many failures,” says Carl Hoiland, co-founder of Zanskar. “Getting to this point where, with these new tools and these new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically reduce them, we just think it’s the first large-scale signal that the tide has turned.”

In theory, geothermal energy is one of the simplest methods of producing renewable energy. Underground hot water reservoirs, heated by the Earth’s core, produce steam which can then be used to power turbines on the surface, without requiring excessive mining or complex fuel conversions. Geothermal resources are particularly accessible in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth’s crust is thinner, making the western United States an excellent candidate for power plants. The world’s largest developed geothermal field, in California, is built on the site of hot springs that humans have used for thousands of years; the first power plant was built there in the early 1920s.

But a big part of the geothermal puzzle is finding those resources. It is rare to find hot springs or vents on the surface that lead to a productive place to install a power plant. Most geothermal systems hot enough to produce electricity are found deep underground and there is no evidence on the surface. These systems are known as hidden or blind systems. It is surprisingly difficult to identify where they are. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built on systems accidentally discovered while drilling agricultural, mineral, or oil and gas exploration wells.

“It’s kind of a needle and haystack problem,” says Joel Edwards, Zanskar’s other co-founder. “A very small percentage of the land you will look at will be associated with a geothermal system.”

In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to try to increase geothermal energy production in the United States. As part of this effort, they traced a grid across Nevada to attempt to methodically drill blind systems.