Zanskar uses AI to discover hidden geothermal energy site, first industry find in decades

How AI is uncovering hidden geothermal energy resources

Historically, finding new sites for geothermal power was a matter of brute force. Companies spent a lot of time and money drilling deep wells, looking for places where it made sense to build a plant. Zanskar's approach is more precise. With advancements in AI, the company aims to "solve this problem that had been unsolvable for decades, and go and finally find those resources and prove that they're way bigger than previously thought," says Carl Hoiland, the company's cofounder and CEO. To support a successful geothermal power plant, a site needs high temperatures at an accessible depth and space for fluid to move through the rock and deliver heat. In the case of the new site, which the company calls Big Blind, the prize is a reservoir that reaches 250 °F at about 2,700 feet below the surface. As electricity demand rises around the world, geothermal systems like this one could provide a source of constant power without emitting the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The company has used its technology to identify many potential hot spots. "We have dozens of sites that look just like this," says Joel Edwards, Zanskar's cofounder and CTO. But for Big Blind, the team has done the fieldwork to confirm its model's predictions. The first step to identifying a new site is to use regional AI models to search large areas. The team trains models on known hot spots and on simulations it creates. Then it feeds in geological, satellite, and other types of data, including information about fault lines. The models can then predict where potential hot spots might be.

A Startup Says It Has Found a Hidden Source of Geothermal Energy

Zanskar uses AI to identify hidden geothermal systems -- and claims it has found one that could fuel a power plant, the first such discovery by industry in decades. A geothermal startup said Thursday that it has hit gold in Nevada -- metaphorically speaking. Zanskar, which uses AI to find hidden geothermal resources deep underground, says that it has identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The discovery, the company claims, is the first of its kind made by the industry in decades. The find is the culmination of years of research on how to find these resources -- and points to the growing promise of geothermal energy. "When we started this company, I think the most common message we heard was that geothermal was dead -- it was a history of bones, a graveyard of so many failures," says Carl Hoiland, a cofounder of Zanskar. "To get to this point where, thanks to these new tools and these new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically derisk them -- we just think this is the first full-scale signal that the tide has turned." In theory, geothermal power is one of the simplest methods of generating renewable energy. Reservoirs of hot water underground, heated by the Earth's core, produce steam that can then be used to power turbines at the surface, requiring no excessive mining or complex conversions of fuel. Geothermal resources are especially accessible in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth's crust is thinner, making the western US a great candidate for power plants. The world's largest developed geothermal field, in California, is built on the site of hot springs that humans have used for thousands of years; the first power plant was built there in the early 1920s. But a big part of the geothermal puzzle is actually finding these resources. It's rare to find hot springs or vents at the surface that lead to a productive spot to put a power plant. Most geothermal systems that are hot enough to make electricity are deep underground, and there is no evidence at the surface. These are known as hidden or blind systems -- and identifying where they are is surprisingly challenging. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built over systems that were found accidentally, while drilling for agricultural wells, minerals, or oil and gas exploration. "It is sort of a needle-and-haystack problem," says Joel Edwards, Zanskar's other cofounder. "A very small percentage of the land that you will look at will have a geothermal system associated with it." In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to try to increase the US's output of geothermal energy. As part of that effort, they mapped out a grid in Nevada to try to methodically drill for blind systems.