A "limitless" energy source lies beneath us: the heat constantly emanating from our planet’s 9,000 degree core.
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Until very recently, we could only capture geothermal in the few places it rises as steam from natural hot springs, like the Geysers in the Mayacamas Mountains of Northern California, the world’s largest complex of geothermal stations.

Now, a series of wise government investments and scientific breakthroughs have dramatically lowered the costs of efficiently drilling way down to tap this 24/7 power source that’s available in pretty much every state in America.

This is a look at Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS.

A sparsely populated valley in Utah 200 miles south of Salt Lake City is becoming a hotbed of renewable energy development. Biofuel digesters turn the manure from the many pig farms into electricity. Hydrogen storage facilities lie among growing wind and solar arrays. But the most promising work is happening at FORGE, a firstofits kind geothermal laboratory. The team there is led by Dr. Joseph Moore.

Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy is a Department of Energy Project funded to generate electricity anywhere in the world. We can drill anywhere and find enough heat. But unfortunately those rocks don’t have the permeability the cracks that allow for water to circulate through them and extract the heat. So the goal of this project is to create a reservoir, a fractured volume that we can inject water into and then extract the water after it’s heated up. It’s the first time a project like this is being developed to learn how to make a reservoir where none existed naturally.

When we’re stimulating a well like this by injecting water and sand we’re trying to open fractures by doing just enough pressurization at that stage to where you propagate that fracture where you want it to go, but you don’t get fractures going in directions you don’t want to go. And you also know where your fractures are so you have sort of information about how you’ve changed this geothermal field with your activities.

This is the current state of the technology. Whereas conventional geothermal generation needs underground reservoirs in contact with hot rocks to send steam to the surface, Enhanced Geothermal Systems create their own by boring thousands of feet deep to their target: the rock layer that is constantly as hot as an oven, between 300 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Once at this target depth, engineers inject fluid at high pressure to create a network of fractures–which essentially act as a reservoir into which they inject a constant flow of water, which rapidly heats up and rises through the second well as steam, spinning a turbine and generating electricity.