What the team found, however, was that the flow actually increased in the area where they drilled the new well. “That fundamentally changes how you think about not just Lightning Dock but all hydrothermal assets in America and what the potential can be for all of them,” says Ben Brenner, director of federal affairs at Zanskar. 

Over the past year of operation, Lightning Dock generated over twice the electricity it would have with the old wells. This is a relatively small power plant, with a capacity of 15 megawatts going to the local grid (about enough to power 11,000 US homes).

Oil and gas developers have chased resources deeper underground over the past few decades. Operations started relatively close to the surface, but oil and gas production can stretch down 20,000 feet or more today. “I think that arc is going to play out in geothermal,” Edwards says. While typical geothermal well fields range from 3,000 to 5,000 feet deep, it could become more common to go deeper in the future, he adds.  

The company plans to do further development at the Lightning Dock site: with a few years of development and an upgrade to the power plant, it could get even more electricity out of this area, Edwards says.

There’s been a lot of buzz and investment in enhanced geothermal systems—projects that aim to expand where geothermal resources can be used. Fervo Energy, for example, uses fracking techniques to open up rock that would otherwise be too closed off for traditional geothermal energy.

But there’s still plenty of “low-hanging fruit” in the geothermal world, Edwards says. Many of these conventional resources have plenty of potential—they just need a second look.

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