🔥 How to ignite a geothermal energy revolution

The need for massive amounts of clean energy, sooner rather than later, may provide a reason for government and companies to work together (at least a bit). But also a reason for energy deregulation.

Quote of the Issue

“Top-down bureaucratization of the sort favored by many environmental activists moves societies back in the direction of natural states in which monopolies are secured and run by elites. Innovation would thus stall and the ability of people and societies to adapt rapidly to changing conditions, economic and ecological, via free markets and democratic politics would falter.” - Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century

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The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

“With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic.”

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The Essay

🔥 How to ignite a geothermal energy revolution

The 2007 film There Will Be Blood — although a highly watchable character study of greed and ambition set against the backdrop of the early 20th century American oil boom — will never make a list of Up Wing (pro-abundance, pro-entrepreneurial-techno-capitalism) movies. It is, after all, a film whose most famous scene involves the protagonist, wealthy oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), revealing he has outmaneuvered his opponent, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), by secretly sideways drilling underneath Sunday’s property and extracting all the oil there. Plainview colorfully and sociopathically explains his coup de grâce this way:

Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? Watch it. Now, my straw reaches acrooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I... drink... your... milkshake!

Cutthroat capitalism, at its most ruthless. That’s Hollywood's go-to portrayal of business for you, although such oil trickery really did happen in the early part of the 20th century. Yet it’s a wonderful irony that horizontal oil and gas drilling, after much innovation, has ended up playing a key role in a modern energy revolution. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — where horizontal drilling is used to tap more of the oil- and natural gas-bearing rockshale — shale gas now accounts for some 80 percent of US natural gas production, up from 2 percent in 1998. That’s one of many stunning facts found in “Hot Rocks: Commercializing Next-Generation Geothermal Energy,” a series of analytical essays published as a joint project from Employ America and the Institute for Progress.

As the title of the series suggests, the project’s goal isn’t to extoll a tech advance that, arguably, ranks behind only the internet as the biggest innovation (actually, fracking is the result of a suite of innovations including in both the actual drilling and the monitoring of the drilling) of the past few decades. Rather, it sees the Shale Revolution as demonstrating that an accommodating regulatory and policy environment — one that lowers investment risk and costs — can accelerate innovation and commercialization in the entrepreneurial private sector.