Stanford Geothermal WorkshopFebruary 9-11, 2026

Interest in geothermal power production has increased substantially over the past five years as technology transfer from the oil and gas industry has driven down the cost of extracting heat from the Earth’s crust, established geothermal industry participants have developed both a better understanding of the nature of geothermal systems and better exploration tools, and the data center building boom has resulted in premium pricing for clean, firm power. While this has generated a modest amount of additional investment in geothermal power projects, further performance improvements are needed for geothermal to secure a significant percentage of the U.S. and international power production markets. That rapid growth in market share could be achieved is suggested by the pace of growth realized over the past twenty-five years from both Canadian Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) oil sands projects and U.S. unconventional reservoirs. These two segments of the oil and gas industry had been technically and economically challenged, but after having received government support in the latter parts of the twentieth century, grew quickly thereafter as operating companies took the lead in driving innovation forward. The growth in U.S. unconventional production to over twenty-five million barrels of oil equivalent per day by YE 2024 is a particularly compelling example for the geothermal industry to learn from. One of the principal factors that enabled this outcome was the transfer of technical knowledge between operators. This was crucial because it allowed companies to learn from each other’s mistakes, difficulties, experiments, and successes, thereby vastly reducing the time and funding required to make progress in driving down development costs and increasing per well production rates. Although much of this sharing of knowledge was at first unintentional, resulting from a pseudo-open-source ecosystem wherein knowledge disseminated mostly through back-channels at a modest pace, the late 2014 collapse in oil prices encouraged companies to recognize that creating formal open-source knowledge sharing structures would benefit not only the industry as a whole but their company in particular. Examples of the types of structures that were put in place include joint operator/government funded hydraulic fracturing test sites, company-to-company and multi-company data trades, publication of cutting-edge technical papers, operator involvement with technology start-ups, and industry-wide adoption of standards for the disclosure of certain types of technical data. While the geothermal community has already embraced some of these methods for sharing technical knowledge and the cost of technology demonstration projects, because the geothermal industry is tiny compared to other better established energy production industries, companies within the geothermal industry would benefit considerably from increasing the amount of knowledge and cost sharing taking place. This would allow established companies to improve their profitability by learning faster than they could on their own, leading to the capture of untold millions of dollars of profit margin that would otherwise be lost. Sharing would also encourage new participants to invest in geothermal power production, which is necessary to encourage the establishment of a service industry capable of supporting rapid growth in power output. It is therefore hoped that geothermal developers ignore those who promote restrictive approaches to managing technical knowledge not directly related to exploration activities (which should be closely guarded) and embrace an open-source paradigm consistent with the reality that for geothermal to scale quickly and economically, it must become one of the lowest cost, most reliable forms of power generation, which is, as the U.S. unconventional industry has demonstrated, a result best achieved by adopting an open-source ethos.

Topic: General