The House has approved a geothermal legislative package, made up of parts of several Republican- and Democratic-authored bills aimed at accelerating approvals for geothermal projects, which generate clean energy by drilling deep into the Earth to access stored heat. The Geothermal Energy Advancement Act passed in a voice vote Tuesday afternoon, a significant show of bipartisanship focused on bolstering domestic energy development ahead of the midterm elections, as surging energy and electricity prices are quickly becoming a key issue for voters across the country. Geothermal energy can provide electricity and heating by extracting heat from underground reservoirs of hot, typically porous, rocks saturated with water. To generate energy, the extracted heat is used to produce steam, which then travels through piping and turbines to create electricity.
It is a clean, renewable source of energy that has been used for hundreds of years, heating natural hot springs, rivers, and pools in regions such as Iceland and New Zealand.
Extracting geothermal energy was long restricted to areas with high levels of volcanic activity and movement of tectonic plates, which more easily bring heat from the Earth to the surface. The oil and gas drilling industry, however, has indirectly made geothermal energy more accessible across the globe, as technological developments such as hydraulic fracturing allow developers to target the Earth’s internal heat several miles deep into the ground.
