Federal agencies have geothermal energy in sight, and are injecting funds for projects in Utah. The U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday it is granting $99 million for 21 geothermal energy development projects throughout the country. Five of them are in Utah.
Five of the projects the department selected are working on conducting tests of enhanced geothermal systems “to validate technologies under real-world conditions,” the agency said in a news release. Projects from Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals, AlterG Resources, and the University of Utah, all based in Salt Lake City, made the cut.
“These projects will empower American innovators to unlock the tremendous geothermal resources beneath our feet,” Department of Energy undersecretary Kyle Haustveit said in the release.
The Utah companies and research institutions selected by the department are deploying their projects in different out-of-state sites, including locations in Hidalgo County, New Mexico; Pershing and Churchill Counties, Nevada, and the Dixie Valley West geothermal field, also in Nevada.
The remaining 16 projects are conducting exploration drilling to identify new geothermal and conventional hydrothermal geothermal generation. The University of Utah and Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals are also among those.
The University of Utah’s exploration drilling project is expected to study “a large thermal anomaly in Utah’s Cove Fort geothermal field.” And projects from out-of-state companies, like Nevada’s Raser Power System, will explore increased generation at a geothermal power plant in Utah’s Escalante Desert.
The technology can produce renewable energy, converting heat from under the surface of the earth into electricity. Amid a push to multiply energy sources, the development of geothermal has attracted bipartisan attention. Even recently, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico joined forces to create a Mountain West Geothermal Consortium to accelerate the technology’s development.
The data generated by these projects is expected to become publicly available through the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Data Repository to help “inform future technology development and geothermal exploration across the industry,” the release says.
This report was originally published at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
