The geothermal industry has a potential ally in Chris Wright

On Sunday, Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as the next Secretary of Energy. The fracking veteran’s likely role in the administration is being heralded as a boon for oil and gas. But is it also a boon for enhanced geothermal?

Liberty Energy is an oilfield services company based in Colorado, and one of the country’s biggest fracking companies. Earlier in Wright’s career, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which played a key role in the boom in commercial shale gas production in the early-aughts. (Wright is also on the board of advanced nuclear fission startup Oklo.)

Liberty Energy is an investor in Fervo Energy, a leading enhanced geothermal company. The link is a natural one, given that Fervo uses fracking methods native to oil and gas; it reaches hot rocks deep underground using some of the technologies that Wright has championed for decades, and pumps water to create steam that it uses for energy.

And Fervo isn’t alone — the company is one of several geothermal startups using new technologies that are pulling in venture capital, even though more traditional methods have long been a harder sell.

Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems, considers geothermal — and especially enhanced geothermal — as a natural evolution of fracking technology. Sage Geosystems also uses technology from the oil and gas sector, but the company also incorporates storage. It uses curtailed renewables to inject water into fractures, holds it underground until electricity is needed, and then it reopens the well to power a turbine. 

“I see geothermal as that next segue of utilizing all of the learnings from the oil and gas industry, but now, of course, we're going after a different resource,” she said. “I just couldn’t see how [Wright] wouldn’t be supportive of geothermal.”

Sage’s pitch for enhanced geothermal: It leverages oil and gas infrastructure and talent; it’s insulated from geopolitical tensions because the resource is based in the U.S.; and geothermal-based storage can complement wind and solar to stabilize the grid. The first two points could be particularly appealing to a Trump administration that has made “energy dominance” a key part of its platform. 

The four-year-old Sage has focused primarily on Texas (“we can get permits pretty quickly in Texas”), and so far the reception has been warm from both political parties at the state and federal level. “It’s just one of those unique clean energy technologies that, you know, both the blue side of the red side see as beneficial,” Taff said.

However, Taff isn’t convinced that Wright’s background in fracking inevitably gives him technical insights into the range of enhanced geothermal technologies that companies like Sage are developing. Fervo’s approach maps pretty closely to how fracking uses the technology — which is a key part of their sell — but what Sage is doing is “very different,” Taff said, and “very complex.”

Beyond geothermal, though, there are many who are deeply concerned about Wright’s track record.

Unlike other oil and gas executives that acknowledge climate change’s threat and have talked about investing in the energy transition, Wright has loudly opposed calls to shift away from fossil energy. He has described the scientific consensus on climate change as a conspiracy theory, and has advocated for expanding fossil fuel production to solve “energy poverty,” among many other problems — even though solar and wind are now the lowest-cost resources in many areas of the world, even without government support.

But considering that Wright’s nomination came days after Trump selected Rep. Matt Gaetz — who was at one point under investigation for sex crimes by the Department of Justice — as attorney general, there is a sense that things could be worse.

“In this rogue's gallery, I'd prefer someone [like Wright] who doesn't appear motivated to tear down the DOE,” wrote Jesse Jenkins, head of Princeton’s ZERO Lab, on Bluesky. “His views on climate are inconsistent with the science of course. But that's not particularly relevant to the DOE's mission.” 

That mission includes improving energy technologies, funding science via the national labs, and managing the country’s nuclear waste. The next Secretary of Energy will have to grapple with how departments have changed under the Biden administration. For instance, director Jigar Shah describes the DOE now as a “commercialization engine.”

What geothermal wants

Assuming geothermal has an ally in Wright, the industry is hoping for a few things. According to Vanessa Robertson, director of policy and education for the trade association Geothermal Rising, the industry is “very optimistic” because of bipartisan support in recent years — and because Wright is the “first DOE appointee with firsthand geothermal experience.” 

“He knows firsthand the challenges and opportunities, for research and development, and demonstration deployment,” she told Latitude Media.

Specifically, the association — which is not a registered lobbyist group, but rather a forum for the industry’s interests — is angling for increased funding for the Geothermal Technologies Office.

“In the past, GTO has been overlooked quite a bit…in appropriations and funding,” Robertson said. “And so we really hope to see an increased allocation of funding to that office to help support both traditional hydrothermal [and] the next generation technologies out there.” 

Compared to nuclear or hydrogen, she added, geothermal has received “just a sliver” of the funding; she cited DOE’s liftoff report on next-generation geothermal, which compared the industry’s funding for large-scale demonstrations specifically to those of other technologies.

Additional budget for geothermal could support demonstrations or loan programs for derisking new technologies, she added, as well as help the U.S. Geological Survey to do more research to identify geothermal resources.

Meanwhile, Geothermal Rising is pushing for the Trump administration and GOP-led Congress to preserve the existing IRA tax credits for market stability. Trump has said he will gut the landmark legislation as soon as he takes office, but experts say that certain credits are more vulnerable to repeal than others; one analysis suggested that the technology-neutral production tax credit is more likely to endure than the investment tax credit.

Taff confirmed that both Sage’s geothermal production and its storage approaches qualify for the tech-neutral ITC; the company is still looking into whether both will qualify for the PTC, which takes effect in January 2025.

However, Sage isn’t counting on them to stick around. “Every time some tax credit is put into place, there's always a risk that it won't be there at some point in time,” Taff said. “So if you rely on it for your business, then your business isn't going to be around forever.”

Absent help from DOE, though, both Taff and Robertson noted that the industry has another source of support to lean on: tech companies in search of clean firm power for data centers. 

Sage Geosystems, for instance, has partnered with Facebook parent Meta, which will purchase up to 150 megawatts of baseload power for its data center infrastructure. And Google has partnered with Fervo for a pilot to send electricity to the grid that serves its Nevada data centers, which went live a year ago. And in summer 2024, Google unveiled a “clean transition tariff” to fund clean baseload options like geothermal, which was modeled on its Fervo partnership.

Taff, for one, doesn’t actually think it matters very much to the geothermal industry who’s in the White House — or by extension who is Secretary of Energy. 

“I don't see a huge impact over the next four years, because I think that the general need for energy will just continue to increase,” she said. “It'll be important for cheap and new forms of energy to be brought online.”