The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 21 projects to receive up to $99 million in funding aimed at advancing geothermal energy development across the country, with the money split between exploration drilling and field tests of next-generation technologies. Sixteen of the projects will focus on exploration drilling, while five will test enhanced geothermal systems technologies designed to tap heat from underground rock formations that were once considered too difficult or too remote to reach.
The funding decision, reported by the Miami Herald, comes as geothermal energy has emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas of the U.S. power sector, attracting growing interest from investors and energy companies. According to the Herald's reporting, the Department of Energy's selections lean on developers adapting oil-and-gas drilling techniques, including horizontal wells, to pull consistent heat from the ground and convert it into electricity around the clock.
Fervo Energy was selected for two of the 21 projects, one involving exploration drilling in Nevada and another built around an enhanced geothermal systems demonstration in Idaho, per the Herald. The company describes its underlying approach — borrowing horizontal drilling and distributed fiber-optic sensing from the oil and gas industry — as a way to make geothermal a 24/7 carbon-free energy resource that is no longer confined to a handful of geologically lucky regions.
What Two Years of Nevada Data Actually Show
Fervo's clearest evidence for those claims comes from Project Red, its commercial enhanced geothermal pilot that came online in Nevada in 2023 and achieved commercial operations on October 30 of that year. The company reports the system operated for more than 614 days without downhole workovers, remediations or chemical treatments, averaging 2.1 megawatts of gross power and roughly 1.4 megawatts of net output, with 98.4% uptime outside of outages tied to surface facilities and grid infrastructure, according to the company's own production-data summary.
Independent research posted on eartharxiv.org backs up parts of that track record. The Fervo project used a first-of-its-kind horizontal doublet well system — an injection well and a production well pair — drilled into a high-temperature, hard-rock formation adjacent to an existing geothermal power station in north-central Nevada. During a 37-day production test in April and May 2023, the system reached flow rates up to 63 liters per second, temperatures up to 336 degrees Fahrenheit, and peak power equivalent to 3.5 megawatts, the same research notes.
Bigger Bets Underway in Utah
Drilling has continued at Fervo's Cape Station geothermal project in Milford, Utah, according to the Herald's reporting. Estimates of the project's ultimate scale vary depending on the source: a report from everycrsreport.com describes a phased development plan targeting 500 megawatts of electricity by 2028, with permitting approval for as much as 2 gigawatts, while a separate account from spectra.mhi.com describes Cape Station as a 400-megawatt project that launched in June 2023. Fervo says its drilling improvements have cut well-construction time by 70% and lowered the cost per well from $9.4 million to $4.8 million, per Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' Spectra publication.
That scale is drawing tech-sector attention. Google has agreed to purchase 115 megawatts from Fervo's new Corsac Station, and in March the two companies signed a broader framework agreement covering up to 3 gigawatts of power for Google's data centers through 2033, according to a Congressional Research Service report. The same report notes that as of July, only one enhanced geothermal systems plant was actually operational in the United States, underscoring how early-stage the technology remains even as commercial interest accelerates.
DOE Officials Frame Awards as an Energy Dominance Play
Selected companies named in the DOE program include Quaise Energy, Zanskar Geothermal, XGS Energy and Invenergy, according to the Herald's account of the announcement. Kyle Haustveit said the projects can lower costs, strengthen American energy dominance, and turn domestic geothermal resources into reliable and affordable power, adding that the awards will empower American innovators to unlock the geothermal resources beneath their feet, the Herald reported.
The Department of Energy plans to make project-generated data publicly available through its geothermal data repository, which officials say will help guide future technology development and resource exploration, per the Herald. That repository push follows record commercial interest in the sector: geothermal developers invested record amounts in federal lease sales in 2025 and 2026, and a June 2026 Bureau of Land Management sale of 152,381 acres in New Mexico generated $16.6 million, a new single-sale record, according to the Congressional Research Service report. The same report counts 27 new geothermal power purchase agreements signed between 2021 and June 2025, including 12 tied to enhanced or closed-loop systems.
A Different Approach to Reaching the Heat
Not every company chasing geothermal breakthroughs is drilling in the conventional sense. Quaise Energy, one of the companies named among DOE's selected recipients, is developing a millimeter-wave technique that uses direct energy to melt and vaporize rock rather than mechanically grinding through it, the company says on its site describing its path from lab to field testing. Quaise reached a 100x drilling milestone in 2023 by boring a 1-inch-diameter hole 100 inches deep, then followed up in 2024 with a 4-inch hole 40 inches deep, and the company says its next step is a larger-scale field trial elsewhere in Texas.
Quaise recently closed a $180 million Series B financing round that brought its total funding to $280 million, including a $35 million investment from Nabors Industries as part of a strategic framework agreement, according to a company announcement dated August 27. Whether millimeter-wave drilling or horizontal oil-and-gas-style wells prove more commercially durable remains an open question, but both approaches are now backed by federal dollars and private capital chasing the same prize: a source of power available every hour of the day, regardless of wind or sunlight.
