🔥 American hot rocks
Superhot geothermal aims to replicate a familiar US innovation path
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:
The underappreciated Up Wing story of America’s Shale Revolution has multiple authors. Fans of industrial policy point to federal agencies that, decades earlier, funded foundational research into hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling and seismic imaging when private investors saw little commercial promise. They also financed large pilot and demonstration programs, mapping shale resources and testing extraction techniques in real fields long before profits were visible.
Free-marketeers, meanwhile, credit wildcatters such as Mitchell Energy, whose engineers spent years refining fracturing methods until shale gas could be produced economically at scale.
Both sides are right, which is precisely the point. The shale boom was a co-production. Government absorbed the early scientific and technical risk, building a knowledge base and proving concepts through field trials. Business supplied the capital, experimentation and relentless cost-cutting that turned a laboratory curiosity into a globally disruptive energy shock that killed the emerging “peak oil” narrative.
Teamwork made the energy dream work.
Heat seeking legislation
A couple of US congressmen now want to run the same play for advanced geothermal power.
