Major geothermal bills pass House, widening path for clean energy drilling boom

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Two bills making it easier to tap the Earth’s heat for on-demand clean power have passed the House.

The CLEAN Act and HEATS Act remove many of the federal permitting regulations currently necessary to drill for geothermal power plants, which produce electricity by drawing on the boiling-hot rock miles below the earth’s surface.

As House energy bills go, the measures were notably bipartisan. All Republicans voted for them, with 18 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote with the GOP on the HEATS Act, and 31 on the CLEAN Act. 

If they make it through the Senate, the CLEAN Act and HEATS Act could allow a new boom in geothermal drilling — an expansion that could buttress the expanding clean power ecosystem currently built on more intermittent forms of energy such as wind and solar.

Research from the Biden Department of Energy has found that $25 billion in near-term geothermal investment could start a rolling snowball of geothermal innovation that could ultimately power hundreds of millions of U.S. homes.

“Geothermal has the potential to be a key contributor to providing reliable, clean energy for millions of Americans,” CLEAN Act sponsor Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) said in a statement Tuesday.

“This legislation is not only vital to reducing our reliance on foreign adversaries but meeting America’s growing energy demands.”

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Fulcher noted that the vast majority of American geothermal resources are located in the federal government’s sprawling holdings across the West. The CLEAN Act would require the Department of the Interior to hold a lease auction for geothermal drilling every year, and to get back to applicants within 30 days.

That act passed six days after California GOP Reps. Young Kim and John Duarte’s HEATS Act, which largely exempts new geothermal wells from existing federal permitting laws, provided that less than half of their footprint is on federal land.

In particular, it exempts them from the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act — likely reasons why so many Democrats voted the bill down.

In arguing for the bill last week, Kim pointed to a contradiction in federal policy: While geothermal uses ”a similar extraction process to that of oil and gas” to exploit a form of clean energy, it faces more stringent permitting requirements than the oil and gas sector does.

“My state of California is a major producer of geothermal energy and has ample energy resources below the Earth ready to be tapped into,” Kim said, “but the current federal permitting process and state regulations have hurt progress in harnessing this clean energy source.”

Such a buildout comes with risks, which is why the federal restrictions exist in the first place. A faster pace of drilling and a lower level of environmental regulation risks causing unintended damage to ecosystems and human communities alike — which is precisely what happened during the decades-long shale boom, which helped create the tool kit that modern geothermal energy relies on.

And for many on the left side of the climate movement, the heavy involvement of the oil and gas sector in geothermal development is a cause for concern. 

But geothermal proponents argue there are also risks in the direction of slow-rolling its buildout, or excluding fossil fuels — and that geothermal energy will get overly identified with either party.

But with both parties interested in reshoring, energy independence and reducing strain on the grid, there’s a bipartisan path, Jamie Beard of the nonpartisan geothermal advocacy group Project InnerSpace, told The Hill in April.

“We at long last may have reached an inflection point for geothermal where it will be thrust into the mainstream in the near term, and that is directly a result of its bipartisan appeal,” Beard said.

“It is in periods of upheaval and disruption that the biggest opportunities arise, and I believe alliances built over the coming months will be pivotal,” she added.

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