cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/33763

Mike Fleming was always interested in geothermal energy — how it works, how sustainable it is, and how efficiently it can heat homes and businesses. But Fleming, who has a decade of experience drilling wells in New England, didn’t see it as a career path.

That changed when his boss recommended him for a position at Phoenix Foundation Company in late 2024. Part of the job involved overseeing drilling for geothermal projects. There were some differences between the roles, but there were plenty of commonalities, too. “You’re making a hole in the ground, you’re putting some plastic pipe down there, and you’re sealing the hole,” said Fleming, who made clear he was speaking for himself, not his employer.

What felt routine at first is part of an emerging frontier in energy. Fleming’s work focuses on what’s called conventional geothermal, which requires drilling some 200 to 500 feet into the ground in search of subsurface earth that hovers between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature millions of residential heat pumps nationwide use to warm or cool homes year-round.

Geothermal provided about 0.36 percent of the country’s energy in 2024, by one estimate, but there are extraordinary amounts of it to be accessed at greater depths. Companies boring thousands of feet into the earth, a technique called enhanced geothermal, can reach rock as hot as 750 degrees F — hot enough to power buildings, factories, even communities. That creates tremendous opportunities for oil and gas workers and others with drilling experience. As many as 300,000 people already possess the required skills, according to a 2024 U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, report.

The Trump administration has looked favorably upon this renewable energy even as it has smothered wind and solar. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved its tax credits through 2033, and the DOE recently announced $171.5 million for next-generation geothermal field tests.

It’s still too early to see a massive workforce transition, experts said, but they’ve seen evidence of growth. Another DOE report released in 2024 showed the domestic geothermal workforce inching up to 8,870 people. Globally, the industry employs around 145,000 workers. Many of those people simply go where the work is, fulfilling, say, a contract for an oil company before landing one with a clean energy outfit, said Cindy Taff, CEO of geothermal start-up Sage Geosystems. “Drilling rig companies recognize this growth,” she said.

Taff spent 35 years at Shell. Frustrated that the oil behemoth wasn’t investing in geothermal, she co-founded Sage Geosystem in 2020. She sees a broad range of fossil fuel workers, from drillers to geologists, who will fit right into the renewables sector, arguing that the same industry that evolved from simple land wells to offshore operations in water thousands of feet deep has a vast pool of technical expertise. “What people tend to overlook is that the oil and gas industry over the last 100 years has really done a lot of innovative stuff,” she said.

One promising way to reach exceedingly deep rocks is by hydraulically fracturing them, running water through the path that eventually heats up and can be flashed into steam for power. Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, a geophysicist and professor at Rice University, said that there should be very little need to re-inject large volumes of wastewater into the ground as a part of the geothermal fracking process. The oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma and West Texas.

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Ajo-Franklin has worked with start-ups like Fervo to conduct research on enhanced geothermal. He said that major oil companies “haven’t made big investments” in this area while they wait for the technology to be proven out. Nonetheless, he sees a lot of skill overlap between the fields.

Much of the U.S. oil industry focuses on extracting oil from rock that doesn’t naturally let it flow, he said. They’ve spent decades developing the technology and refining the complex techniques needed to maximize production — expertise readily transferable to drilling for heat.

Jamie Beard, executive director of the advocacy group Project InnerSpace, sees that potential and wants the Trump administration to back early-stage pilots. To build support, her organization hosted an event called MAGMA — short for Make American Geothermal More Abundant — last year to bring together industry leaders, policymakers and Energy Secretary Chris Wright to make the case for next-generation geothermal. Wright expressed support for the industry.

In Beard’s view, there are a plethora of opportunities for geothermal, including powering data centers. “Oil and gas looks at that opportunity and says, ‘Well, hell, if we’re cranking out these projects and they’re natural gas, why can’t we crank out these projects and they could also be geothermal?’” she said.

Brock Yordy, founder of the Geothermal Drillers Association and a third-generation driller who started at 16, compares the transferability of drilling skills to hanging a painting. Walls made of brick, drywall, or wood might require a different bit, but “the base fundamentals are the same,” he said.

He sees this moment as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new line of work. “There’s not many jobs where you’re going to, by 500 feet, be drilling a piece of the subsurface that hasn’t been touched in 25,000- to 100,000-plus years,” he said. “It’s like being Indiana Jones. It’s exciting to think about.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The future of geothermal energy may depend on fossil fuel workers on Mar 9, 2026.

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China has become a major partner, providing financial support and expertise for large-scale projects like the La Herradura 1 wind farm and a plan to develop 92 solar parks by 2028, but the transition still faces major hurdles in funding (estimated at $8-10 billion) and a lack of skilled technical workers.

Daan Walter, principal with Ember Energy, discusses how high and volatile prices spur consumers to buy lower-priced competitive products. In the energy world, that means investing in renewables (supply side) and electrotech (demand side) to replace oil and gas.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Yaghi describes how his childhood as a refugee and his early days as an immigrant in the U.S. shaped his relentless work ethic. He recounts the “failure” of a yearlong graduate school experiment that actually resulted in his first major discovery: a ball-shaped molecule that paved the way for his career. Today, his research on reticular chemistry continues to push toward real-world solutions to the climate crisis.

For Yaghi, science is not only about discovery, but about transforming access to life’s most basic resource. “My dream,” he says, is “for everyone to have water independence — where your water is yours, independent of everything else.”

If any of you host a Sharkey or Misskey instance, make sure to apply this update when it lands. If you use either, or are friends with someone who hosts one, pester your admins.

I feel like I just need somewhere to run right now and I don't have anywhere really. I've started this new job about a month ago and the whole schtick was that we'd be rewriting this old app to meet a tight deadline and immediately putting it on a code freeze to make something better to replace it.

fine, I get it, tight deadlines and lots to do of course you going to tempted to use AI. when youre architecting a complex application on top of APIs that you've not worked with before you're going to miss stuff anyway. But honestly, out of the four of us, two of the mobile devs are some of the biggest pig shits I've ever had to work with. fundamentally having to explain that this guy can't just merge his changes into the main branch, or not to leave file spanning comments spat out by Gemini to explain the code that he's not even bothered to read, A shit that goes beyond being in a rush to not being competent to do the job you've been given.

again, fine, I can get around some of this with the promise of slowing down and picking up The new projects and enforcing some higher quality standards which everyone supposedly wishes for. fine.

nope. whilst me and the other competent dev are trying to sort out the slop that has been dumped on the app in question over the last month, the deadline has passed us (something which I said was going to happen but was ignored), and the two vibe coders have complained that they "don't have any work to do" And on now architecting the next fucking project with senior team members whilst I'm getting grilled over "why is XYZ taking so long?" because the fucking vibe code is vibe coded that you fucking hacks and you rewarded them with this new project.

it's disheartening, because I said all of this upfront, but because I wasn't the first person in the team out of the gate my opinions are basically worth as much as this rant will (understandably) be worth to most of you: pittance.

I'm not the best programmer on earth, not even the most experienced, but it does my fucking head in to have imposter syndrome every time I log into work every morning because there are two sodding imposters in front of me getting the credit!!! absolute dog shit.

I don't know. round time. free Palestine and free Iran and death 2 America xxx

Yay?