How super-hot rocks miles under the earth’s surface could help combat climate change
The iconic Old Faithful Geyser springs to life (every 90 minutes) in Yellowstone National Park’s Upper Geyser Basin on September 18, 2022, in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Sitting atop an active volcanic caldera, Yellowstone, America’s first National Park, is home to more geological hydrothermal features (geysers, mud pots, hot springs, fumaroles) than are found in the rest of the world combined.
George Rose | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The future of clean, renewable energy is underneath our feet. Quite literally.
The core of the earth is very hot — somewhere between 7,952 degrees and 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit at the very center. If we can drill down from the surface into what’s called superhot rock, then we could access the heat of the earth and turn it into a massive source of zero-carbon, always available energy.
A new report out Friday from the Clean Air Task Force, a non-profit climate organization, finds that this category of clean, baseload superhot rock energy has the potential to be cost-competitive with other zero-carbon technologies — while also, very critically, having a small land footprint.
The Clean Air Task Force commissioned a non-profit geothermal organization, the Hot Rock Energy Research Organization, and an international clean energy consultancy, LucidCatalyst, to estimate the levelized cost of commercial-scale superhot rock electricity. They determined that it could eventually cost between $20 and $35 per megawatt hour, which is competitive with what energy from natural gas plants costs today.
This is not reality yet. Currently, there are no superhot rock geothermal energy systems operating and delivering energy, Bruce Hill, the chief geoscientist at Clean Air Task Force and the author of the report, told CNBC. But money is flowing into research projects and companies that are working to develop the technology.
The report posits that superhot rock energy can be commercialized in the 2030s, and argues that its unique set of features — it’s a clean source of inexhaustible baseload energy with a small footprint — make the investment worthwhile.
“It will take public and private investment similar to those being allocated to nuclear, carbon capture, and hydrogen fuels,” Hill told CNBC. “Geothermal programs receive far less funding from Congress and the U.S. Department of Energy than these other programs. Superhot rock geothermal isn’t even in the decarbonization debate — but given a decade or two of aggressive investment it could be producing baseload power — local, energy dense, clean-firm (baseload) and competitive,” from a price perspective.
The graphic here shows that if technology develops allowing the drilling into hot, dry rock, superhot rock geothermal energy can be available virtually anywhere.
Graphic courtesy Clear Air Task Force
Regular versus superhot geothermal
While energy from superhot rocks is not being used now, geothermal energy is being used in a few places where super-hot temperatures exist close to the surface of the earth. Currently, about 16 gigawatts of power come from geothermal globally, according to CATF — that’s less than 0.2% of the world’s total. For comparison, there is 2,100 terawatts of capacity for coal energy globally and 1 terawatt of capacity for energy generated from photovoltaics, or solar panels.
But accessing superhot rock energy involves tapping into hotter, dry rock — which is everywhere, but sometimes far beneath the surface.
The deepest borehole ever drilled in the earth went down almost 8 miles in the Kola Peninsula of Russia in the 1970s, but the rock there was not nearly as hot as 752 degrees Fahrenheit — the minimum required for this type of energy. (Rock starts melting at between 1,112 and 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit, so the functional window for superhot rock geothermal is roughly between 752 and 1022 degrees Fahrenheit, Hill said.)
How far you have to drill to get to 752 degrees depends on where you are. On the edges of the tectonic plate boundaries or near recent volcanic activity, it might be two miles down, Hill told CNBC, but in the middle of a continent you might have to go down 12 miles.
Water would be pumped down into the hole and returned to the earth in a super-heated state known as “supercritical,”, which has the properties of gas and liquid at the same time. That supercritical water would then be directed to power generators.
Conventional geothermal energy systems “have a very small but measurable carbon footprint,” Hill told CNBC. That is why the Hellisheiði ON Power plant in Iceland has a Carbfix crarbon capture plant attached to it. A superhot rock energy system would have some carbon emissions associated with the construction of the plants, but “because the working fluid, water, is injected into dry rock there are no such hydrothermal related carbon dioxide emissions,” Hill said.
To access superhot rock geothermal energy requires drilling down to rock that is 400 degrees Celsius, or 752 degrees Fahrenheit.
Graphic courtesy Clear Air Task Force
Iceland is a leader in investigating superhot rock geothermal energy with its Iceland Deep Drilling Project. A test there suggests one well could produce 36 megawatts of energy, which is five to ten times more than the typical three to five megawatts of energy a conventional geothermal well could generate.
Iceland is well suited to study geothermal energy because of it’s located where the American and Eurasian crustal plates are pulling apart from each other.
“We are replenished with constant supplies of magma energy to feed our geothermal systems,” Guðmundur Ó. Friðleifsson, who served as a coordinator and principal investigator in the IDDP effort for over 20 years, told CNBC. “Magma energy is also at relatively shallow depths and relatively easily accessed, and Icelanders by nature are explorers of Celtic and Norse origin who love to sail into or out to the unknown,” Friðleifsson said.
Beyond Iceland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the United States are leaders in superhot rock geothermal, according to Friðleifsson. Other areas on the edges of tectonic plates, including Central America, Indonesia, Kenya and the Philippines, also have some development.
For superhot rock geothermal energy to be commercialized and deployed broadly will require new technology, including rapid ultra-deep drilling methods, heat-resistant well materials and tools, and ways to develop deep-heat reservoirs in hot dry rock.
These are not insignificant, but they are “engineering challenges, not needed scientific breakthroughs,” the CATF report says.
For example, drilling into hard crystalline rock takes a long time with current rotation drill techniques and the drill bits have to be replaced frequently. One potential solution is using energy instead of a mechanical drill.
Quaise Energy is develoing such a drill, building on research from Paul Woskov at MIT. The Quaise drill is being tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to CATF.
“The solution to drilling is to replace the mechanical grinding process with a pure energy-matter interaction. Sufficient energy intensity will always melt-vaporize rock without need for physical tools,” Woskov told CNBC.
“Directed energy drilling has been considered since the laser was invented in the 1960s, but so far unsuccessfully because the infrared wavelengths are scattered in a drilling environment, the laser sources are of too low average power, and lasers sources are not efficient. We now have gyrotron sources since the 1990s that operate at millimeter-wavelengths that are more robust in a drilling environment, more powerful, and more efficient.”
It will take innovation and investment over coming decades to be able to commercialize terawatts of superhot rock geothermal energy.
Graphic courtesy Clear Air Task Force
‘Very small’ investment so far
So far, private investment in the superhot rock space is “very small,” according to Hill. CATF didn’t have an exact number, but they estimate it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the most, and this includes investments by the Newberry Geothermal Energy consortium for work done 10 or 15 years ago, Hill said.
But it’s getting easier to raise money in the space, according to Carlos Araque, the CEO of Quaise, which has raised $75 million so far, including $70 million in venture capital.
“The first 10 [million] took a lot longer than the other 65 because it was done in the 2018-20 period; things accelerated significantly in the 2021-22 period probably pushed by many investors realizing the need for new tech in this space,” Araque told CNBC. “Investors are increasingly aware that we need to invest now on the technologies that will enable full decarbonization towards 2050.”
Investor Vinod Khosla, the first backer of Quaise, recently talked to CNBC about his belief in backing potentially revolutionary technologies to fight climate change, and pointed to super hot rock geothermal as an example.
“A superhot rock well, like 500 degrees, will produce 10 times the power of a 200-degree well. And that’s what we need,” Khosla told CNBC. “If we can drill deep enough we can get to those temperatures — many, many — all of Western United States could be powered with just geothermal wells, because there’s geothermal everywhere if you go 15 kilometers, 10 miles deep.”
The CATF report said that big tech companies, and their associated deep pockets, could have “an important role” in funding the early development and commercialization of superhot rock energy by buying power purchase agreements or investment dollars to power “rapidly expanding energy intensive operations like data centers,” the report said.
Indeed, Microsoft President Brad Smith spoke in Seattle about how vital it is for Microsoft to expand access to clean sources of energy to be able to continue to expand its business.
Oil and gas companies could use their resources to help spur development in the superhot rock industry, the CATF report said. “Drilling deep into the Earth to produce energy is the oil and gas industry’s core expertise, which provided innovations that drove a rapid transformation of shale fossil energy resources previously considered impossible.”
The government is also chipping in. The U.S. Department of Energy also has up to $20 million available in funding to develop better and faster geothermal drilling. Also, President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocates $84 million for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office to build four pilot demonstration sites of what it calls enhanced geothermal systems, including superhot rock geothermal. Similarly, the Department of Energy recently announced Enhanced Geothermal Shot in an effort to reduce the cost of enhanced geothermal systems by 90%, to $45 per megawatt hour, by 2035.
The Delaware Supreme Court made its ruling in the fight over Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $55 billion pay package from 2018, reversing the Court of Chancery’s decision and reinstating the pay package.
But the Court still penalized Musk $1 plus attorney’s fees due to the award’s unfairness.
The ruling is the latest and likely last step in the long story behind Musk’s excessive pay package, tied to company performance milestones, which was first approved by shareholders in 2018 and worth approximately $55 billion if all milestones were met. At current share prices, the award is worth more like $139 billion.
For a short recap, TSLA shareholders approved a compensation package in 2018 which would award Musk, and dilute all other shareholders by around 8%, if the company reached financial targets the company claimed were difficult to achieve.
That package ended up being subject to a lawsuit, which alleged that Tesla misled investors when campaigning for the compensation package and that the board was too cozy with Musk himself, such that they did his bidding rather than acting in an independent manner.
The Delaware Court of Chancery, where Tesla used to be legally domiciled, found that argument persuasive, and ruled to rescind Musk’s entire pay package.
Delaware has long been known to be one of the most business friendly places for companies to host their legal domiciles. But after the ruling, Musk encouraged companies to leave the state, and moved his own companies out of it as well.
Later, Tesla held another vote on the same package, but Tesla’s captured board used the same misleading tactics in marketing it, and the court did not accept the new vote and again denied Musk’s pay package.
Tesla appealed that decision to bring it to the Delaware Supreme Court.
In the interim, the board gave Musk $26 billion in stock without asking shareholders first, draining the employee stock reserve and giving all of it to Musk. This award was meant to be a partial restoration of the 2018 award, but would be forfeited if the Supreme Court ruled in Musk’s favor.
Finally, TSLA shareholders once again voted for an even more ridiculous pay package last month, awarding Musk with stock worth a potential $1 trillion (and diluting all other shareholders by up to 12%) if all milestones of the award are met.
And one important note: each of these numbers are individually larger than any award ever given to any employee in the history of the world, by at least an order of magnitude, and are targeted towards a man who is currently doing his best to trash the company.
Now this week, we finally got the ruling from the Delaware Supreme Court, and it’s… an interesting one.
Court rules Musk gets his billions, but still has to pay a one dollar penalty (yes, really)
The Delaware Supreme Court ruled late Friday afternoon that the Court of Chancery was wrong in its decision to rescind all of Musk’s pay package, though it still accepted that some sort of penalty (“nominal damages”) is warranted.
It set that penalty in the amount of $1. In addition, the attorneys who sued Tesla (the plaintiffs) will be able to recoup attorneys fees (which will end up amounting in the hundreds of millions).
The court stated that while it may have accepted an argument that Musk should be entitled to part of the package – in recognition of how excessive the final package ended up being – the plaintiffs didn’t actually make that argument. The plaintiffs only offered complete rescission as a remedy, which the court decided was too “extreme.”
The court said that Musk deserves to be compensated for his time, and denied the plaintiffs’ argument that the significant appreciation of his own existing stock should be considered sufficient compensation. It called the decision “inequitable” (though it should be noted that despite this “lack of compensation,” Musk remained the richest man in the world prior to the court’s decision, largely due to the aforementioned stock).
And so, because plaintiffs didn’t make an offer for partial rescission of the pay package, and because the Court of Chancery didn’t itself craft a decision that partially rescinds the package (which it is allowed to do), the Supreme Court had to choose between giving Musk everything or nothing, and it chose to give him everything. Well, minus the attorney’s fees.
Electrek’s Take
I’m not a lawyer, but I did take time to read through the ruling before writing this, and to do my best to figure out the court’s reasoning here.
And, frankly, it seems like an odd decision to me from either perspective.
If Tesla was right all along, then it should be treated like it’s right – don’t hold back attorney’s fees or a $1 penalty saying that the plaintiffs just didn’t ask for the right remedy.
And if plaintiffs are right, then their win shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they didn’t ask for the exact right thing. If the court thinks they’re right but asked for too much, just give them part of what they asked for. If that’s not in the Supreme Court’s purview, then kick the decision back down and ask the Court of Chancery to reconsider and design a proper remedy.
What if Delaware is just spooked?
But maybe the decision isn’t just about what happened in this legal case, and more about Delaware trying to earn back its “pro-business” reputation which led over 2 million businesses to choose the state as their legal home.
That reputation has taken a hit in recent years as Musk has encouraged his ultra-wealthy pals to abandon the state. Despite that Delaware remains the state with the most established business law in the country, Musk moved to Texas hoping that he would be able to benefit from corruption there and push policies that would help him personally and harm shareholder rights – like a new law that bans shareholders from bringing actions like this court case unless they hold billions of dollars in Tesla stock.
Some other companies have also redomiciled, perhaps hoping to benefit from the same corruption Musk sought out.
This has spooked Delaware, and encouraged it to change its laws as a PR exercise to stop companies from leaving.
I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s ruling, beyond the legal rationale, was intended to have the same effect. What’s the big deal about spending $55 billion of Other People’s Money (namely, Tesla shareholders) if it helps Delaware regain its sheen of kowtowing to any corporation that comes its way?
Valuing one bad employee as worth more than all the rest
But past the legal aspects of this, the whole situation around the pay package stinks for just about everyone – employees, shareholders, and humanity as a whole.
There is certainly something “inequitable” about this award, but it’s not what the Supreme Court thinks it is.
Tesla is a company that is driven by its employees – some 120,000 of them. Most of those employees are bright people doing a good job at designing and building good products.
Most of them also don’t actively try to sabotage the company. But one does: Elon Musk.
Musk is bad for Tesla
He’s been an unbelievably bad CEO in recent years, with an unwise entry into politics both in the US and abroad, driven by his twitter addiction. His politics have largely focused on pushing white supremacist nonsense including support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler, and funding and supporting groups that oppose renewable energy and vehicle electrification.
These actions have directly harmed Tesla through loss of expected revenue, and have also reduced the brand’s profile in the public eye. Tesla is now the only EV brand with negative perception, and it’s due to Musk himself. His actions have driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away – including business customers.
As a result, Tesla’s sales have been falling both in the US and around the globe in a rising EV market. All told, one study found that he cost Tesla over 1 million sales in the US alone with his braindead political takes. Even his own company had to chide him.
Finally, his actions in the past years have harmed electric vehicles as a whole, and thus been bad for the environment, which is the most important issue facing humanity. Musk has even rhetorically got into climate change denial himself.
Any single one of these actions should be a fireable offense in any normal situation.
And the worst part is, everyone with a brain knew how bad these actions were going to be ahead of time, but this dummy only figured that out last week (anyone want to bet that he’ll actually follow through on that about face? anyone? hello?).
And yet, the pay packages approved for him, improperly marketed by a captured board and voted for by shareholders who were promised vast wealth despite that these packages have and will massively dilute their holdings, value this one bad employee at significantly more than all other Tesla employees combined. And that money is coming out of the pockets of shareholders.
Money taken from shareholders and given to Musk, denying their share in company success
The tens of billions of dollars that will now be channeled to Musk, which he has shown he will use to harm Tesla, come at the cost of value that would have otherwise been created for shareholders and employees who hold shares, by diluting everyone’s holdings in the company.
Tesla could instead have spent its money on stock buybacks or dividends, thus allowing shareholders to enjoy the company’s success (which is the entire point of a public company), but instead it chose to play financial games that channel money from shareholders to the person that is currently acting least in the company’s favor.
So here we have a situation where a man who is causing harm to the company, the mission, the shareholders, and indeed the entire planet, is being valued at more than all of his employees put together and has a court jumping through what it itself deems are “narrow” hoops to uphold an award that is larger than any other employee has received in the history of the world. And regardless of the legal reasoning involved, I just don’t think any of that that is a good idea for anyone.
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An Angus ranch in southern Oregon has become the test case for a new kind of cattle-friendly solar, hosting RUTE SunTracker’s first commercial project.
The one‑acre, 120‑kilowatt array is the first real‑world installation of RUTE’s patented, cable‑stayed solar tracker designed specifically to coexist with grazing cattle. RUTE supplies the hardware and is also acting as the developer for its first regional cattle‑plus‑solar demonstrations.
What makes the setup different is the clearance. The tracker system provides about 10 feet of headroom, with panel heights reaching up to 16 feet across the array. That gives cattle full access to the pasture underneath while allowing ranchers to keep managing the land as usual. The project is interconnected to Pacific Power’s grid in Jackson County, Oregon.
Projects like this are getting more attention as the solar industry runs into land‑use limits. In the US alone, about 30 gigawatts of new solar capacity installed last year covered roughly 150,000 acres. Meanwhile, the country has close to 120 million acres of cattle pasture, much of it facing rising heat and water stress.
That’s where agrivoltaics come in. By adding solar to working pastureland, ranchers can create a second revenue stream while improving growing conditions for forage through partial shade.
“Within weeks of installing the RUTE canopy, the crew observed leafier forage and increased legume presence inside the array compared to outside,” RUTE president Doug Krause said. “Even on irrigated pasture, direct summer sun can be too intense.”
RUTE’s work has been supported by grants from the US Department of Energy’s American‑Made Solar Prize and the US Department of Agriculture. In October, Oregon State University’s Agrivoltaics Program began quantitative studies at the site to measure pasture production, adding hard data to what ranchers are already seeing on the ground.
Next, RUTE plans to take the project on the road. This winter, the company will present at cattlemen’s association meetings as it looks for ranch partners with onsite electric loads, such as irrigation pivot systems.
“In the near term, our focus is on regional, behind‑the‑meter installations so ranchers and power producers can see the equipment operating in real conditions,” Krause said. “While interconnection timelines are long, these projects allow us to build momentum as we connect with developers and ranches on utility‑scale pipeline.”
Read more: Sunrun + NRG launch a virtual power plant to ease Texas power demand
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Environment
Tesla rental fleet that bought into Elon Musk’s self-driving lies goes bankrupt due to depreciation
Dutch leasing company Mistergreen, known for its “Tesla only” fleet and bold bets on a future of autonomous robotaxis, is reportedly facing bankruptcy. The company’s financial collapse highlights the danger of buying into Elon Musk’s claims that Tesla vehicles would become “appreciating assets”—a prediction that has faced a harsh reality check in the used EV market.
According to reports from Europe, the Dutch Tesla-only car rental firm Mistergreen has wiped out its bondholders and is selling off its operations.
Mistergreen had built its entire business model around the premise of operating a fleet of Tesla vehicles that would not only hold their value but eventually generate revenue as robotaxis.
Instead, the company has been forced to write down millions in fleet value as Tesla aggressively cut new car prices over the last two years, pulling the rug out from under used EV prices, and never delivered on its promise of consumer vehicles becoming robotaxis.
Back in 2019, Elon Musk famously claimed that Tesla vehicles were now “appreciating assets” because of their Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability. He stated:
“I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset.”
He even went so far as to suggest that a Tesla Model 3 could be worth $100,000 to $200,000 as a revenue-generating robotaxi. Mistergreen bought into that claim and was essentially a leveraged bet on this exact scenario.
They wrote their annual report in 2022:
Our focus is driven by the fact that Tesla’s electric vehicles are currently the highest quality electric vehicles on the market (in terms of battery quality, software updates, efficiency and range, charging network and speed), their hardware and software are prepared for future self-driving cars, and the quality and range of the Tesla (supercharger) charging network is superior. As a result, there is a significant market demand for Tesla’s and we anticipate that Tesla’s will have better residual value in the future due to the good quality of the Tesla’s currently on the market.
However, as we discussed in an article earlier this year about Elon Musk’s biggest lie, the reality has been the exact opposite. Tesla vehicles have depreciated faster than the industry average, exacerbated by Tesla’s own decision to slash prices to maintain demand and by the fact that it never delivered on its promise that software updates would make its consumer vehicles autonomous without supervision.
At its peak, Mistergreen had a fleet of over 4,000 Tesla vehicles, which is impressive, but it meant that it was hit even harder by the depreciation.
For buyers, a cheaper Tesla is great news. For owners or leasing companies holding thousands of them on their books, with high residual-value guarantees, it’s a death sentence.
Mistergreen had issued bonds to buy the Tesla vehicles, but it hasn’t been able to repay them since last year. It’s unclear how much of investors’ money has been wiped out by the bet, but it is in the tens of millions of dollars.
A couple of Dutch, Belgian, and German leasing companies will purchase the remaining fleet.
Electrek reached out to CEO Florian Minderop and co-founder Mark Schreurs for comments, but we didn’t hear back by the time of publishing.
Electrek’s Take
They believed Elon and they lost tens of millions of dollars worth of investors’ money for it.
We have been saying for years that while FSD is impressive, there’s no evidence that it can reach level 4 autonomy in consumer vehicles. Banking on it turning cars into appreciating robotaxis in the near term is financial suicide.
Musk has been promising “1 million robotaxis by the end of the year” since 2020. It’s now late 2025, and while we have seen progress, we only have a small pilot program in a geo-fenced area in Texas under constant supervision, and certainly don’t have a fleet of appreciating assets.
If you bought a Tesla for $50,000 in 2022 expecting it to be worth $100,000 today, you are likely disappointed. If you bought 4,000 of them with borrowed money, you are Mistergreen.
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