Texas is facing a growing energy challenge as AI, data centers, and crypto mining drive electricity demand to new highs. Most new generation on the grid comes from solar, battery storage, or natural gas, leaving the state short of round-the-clock power.
Barry Smitherman, chairman and co-founder of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance, says geothermal energy provides “a firm, dispatchable, 24/7 energy resource.” He calls it a “dispatchable, inexhaustible, zero carbon resource” that can keep power flowing when other sources falter.
Smitherman returned to Texas after a Wall Street career in Chicago and was appointed to the Public Utility Commission in 2004 by Governor Rick Perry. “It was felt that my financial background would be important in trying to lead us forward in this brand new, deregulated, competitive market,” he says.
After seven years, he became chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, where he oversaw the start of the shale revolution. “Using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—landmark breakthrough technologies—really changed the world,” he says. “It changed America from being an energy importer to being an energy exporter.”
Geothermal energy production entered the picture after Winter Storm Uri. Smitherman’s TexGeo formed in the summer of 2021. “Some folks came together, including the Mitchell Foundation, to see if we couldn’t advocate on behalf of geothermal energy, thinking that what Texas really needs is a firm, dispatchable, 24/7 energy resource,” he explains. “The fact that it’s low carbon is important to some people, but the dispatchability, the on-off switch part of this is the most important.”
Smitherman describes geothermal as “the heat beneath our feet.” “If you drill deep enough on planet Earth, you’re going to hit hot rock. The middle of the Earth is magma… so if we can get down to that heat, we can turn it into steam and drive a turbine just like we do when we boil water.”
He says the goal is to “bring the water to the heat instead of bringing the heat to the water” using advanced drilling technology. “We’re going to drill down four or five miles until we hit hot rock, and we’re going to bring water down to the hot rock,” he says. “We’re going to capture it through an outlet well, so we’ll drill another well… flow it over hot rock, it’ll come back up as steam, and we’ll drive a turbine to make electricity.”
Texas, he says, has the right geology and workforce for geothermal energy. “We’ve been drilling wells for oil and gas for over 100 years,” he says. “We’ve punched a million holes in the ground since Spindletop.”
Companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger already have the equipment and skills. “We actually happen to have great geothermal resources relatively close to the surface,” he says. “Mainly that’s a band along the coast—going from McAllen, up around Corpus Christi, between Corpus and San Antonio, up around the west side of Houston, up to the east side of Dallas and into East Texas, and then along the border all the way to El Paso.” That geography matters, he says, because “that’s close to where a lot of people live… so we can capture that heat, turn it into electricity, and get it to people without having to build a lot of transmission lines.”
According to him, geothermal projects use little land. “Let’s say, for example, for 15 megawatts, we take a 15-acre footprint,” he says. “By comparison to solar, which takes acres and acres to put a big array out, this is pretty compact.” A closed water system minimizes resource use. “We’re going to recycle the water,” he says. “We’ll reclaim the output, condense it down, and put it back downhole again.”
Cost, he says, has been the main obstacle. “It has been too expensive,” Smitherman says. “The last time anyone seriously talked about geothermal was in the mid-70s when OPEC decided to cut off supply of oil to Western countries.”
A new well was finally permitted this year—Texas’s first in 50 years. Technology advances are helping. “Whereas in the past it would take three weeks to drill a well, now it takes five days,” he says. “One of the companies… just estimated that they think a project they’re going to do in Oregon will give us five-cent per kilowatt-hour power. That’s still a little high for ERCOT… but it’s getting close.”
Sage Geosystems, a TexGeo member, is developing a three-megawatt project south of San Antonio. “They’re going to drill down, they’re going to find the heat, and San Miguel Electric Co-op is going to buy the production from them,” he says. “If we prove that to be successful, then we can take that and do it in another place.”
He wants geothermal to qualify directly for state incentives. “We think there ought to be something specific for geothermal that would allow it to be economic, right there when we need it,” he says with an “on-off switch 24/7.”