On a hillside north of Milford, Utah, the West’s energy future looks a lot like its past: 150 feet of latticed metal, centered around a drill.
Here, mud-soaked men in hardhats work above the rangeland scrub, stacking tube on tube, 90 feet at a time, into the unseen earth below. It’s rough work — two weeks on, two weeks off, all in service of punching a 9⅞ inch hole more than 10,000 feet into the tough granite basement of the Beaver Valley.
“What we’re doing here doesn’t look or feel much different from what you’d see in the Permian Basin,” said Sarah Jewett, chief operating officer of Fervo Energy, the Houston-based firm running the operation.
But at the place Fervo calls Cape Station, Jewett isn’t searching for gas or oil.
“What we’re looking for,” she said, “is heat.”
Three years ago, Fervo Energy broke ground on this patch of federal land in Western Utah to pilot a new type of power plant — one that co-opts the hydraulic fracking techniques developed for the natural gas extraction to find a one-day replacement for fossil-fueled electricity: large-scale geothermal energy.
Last month, Fervo delivered its first watts of electricity generated at a Cape Station plant through transmission lines toward Delta, Utah. There’s more on the way: Google has already purchased about 400 megawatts, with an option of upping that to a gigawatt by 2030, according to the firm. The timeline coincides with when the tech giant is considering opening a new data center nearby, drawing power straight from Fervo, Milford Mayor Nolan Davis told the Deseret News.
Estimates vary, but a single gigawatt can typically power between 700,000-750,000 homes. It’s a fraction of what Fervo CEO Tim Latimer projects for his Cape Station project. On Wednesday, Latimer said recent estimates determined Cape Station could produce up to eight gigawatts on its own — twice what the company originally projected. If true, the single site could make nearly enough to power all of Utah twice over on a hot summer day, according to Logan Mitchell, climate scientist and regulatory manager at Utah Clean Energy.
Nationwide, geothermal power plants generate about four gigawatts of power — 0.4% of the national output, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Between Cape Station and Blanford, another site that Fervo is exploring in the same valley, Utah’s geothermal promise could revolutionize the West’s energy backbone — if companies like Fervo can scale it up at a cost palatable for everyday consumers, Mitchell said.
Those prospects are why important eyes are watching.
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum flew to Milford to tour the site, making it the first geothermal operation he’s visited as a cabinet member, according to a staffer.
“I would say this is a great example of President Trump’s energy dominance agenda, which really is about energy abundance,” Burgum said Wednesday. “It’s about reliable, affordable, secure energy. And the geothermal that’s being produced here is absolutely that.”
Geothermal has ‘crossed a tipping point’
Geothermal power isn’t new. Just up the hill from Cape Station, the PacifiCorp’s 34 MW Blundell power plant has been operating on a fault in the Mineral Mountains since 1984. But through geothermal’s history, Mitchell said, people have always had to harness it on the Earth’s terms. Blundell, for example, is fed by a nearby hot springs, with a boiling reservoir to turn the turbines that produce the power.
Cape Station manufactures those conditions. Crews drill parallel shafts that hook horizontally, and blast water down one. The water filters through intentional cracks, where the earth heats it to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The superheated water arrives on the return side and, under pressure, moves out of the ground, through a trunk pipe, and toward the power plants. Through a series of heat exchanges, the water then boils a different compound that does evaporate, expands, and turns the blades on one of dozens of massive turbines, producing electricity.
“Turn it on, run it for 30 years, and that’s your project,” Latimer said.
Unlike wind and solar, which spread across the landscape, Fervo’s “enhanced” geothermal is packed underground. On its Phase 2 drill site, eight wells are spaced 15 feet apart at varying depths. A separate operation’s turbines and solar arrays actually sit atop the tunnels. On a recent afternoon, so did antelope and sagebrush.
“More wells on less space means more energy,” said Roman Esqueda, who leads a drilling team at Cape Station. His team’s latest tunnel ran more than 18,600 feet, he said, but the above ground work took place on a pad about the size of a superstore parking lot.
And unlike Blundell, which exhausts steam, Fervo’s system is closed; both the water and the evaporative solution are reused, Latimer said. The state water board backs that claim: Fervo has been given a non-consumptive use permit, pulling water from deeper than any farmer’s well and pushing it through the system over and over again.
“For a water-constrained state, that’s a really big deal,” said Emy Lesofski, director of the Utah Governor’s Office on Energy.
“For me,” she added, “This is an incredible advancement in technology, and it’s happening in Utah.”
That’s not an accident.
Nearby, the Department of Energy’s Utah FORGE, or Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, pioneered many modern geothermal methods, making data available to commercial outfits like Fervo. And, it mapped the underlying geology of the property Fervo now leases, “de-risking” a portion of the development, Lesofski said.
The data was “a look under the hood,” she said. And while it offered a head start, Fervo’s system could work almost anywhere, Mitchell said. Anywhere it is cheap enough, that is.
As it stands, geothermal energy is getting there, Mitchell said. PacifiCorp seems to agree: In a public input meeting for its 2027 Integrated Resource Plan, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power found geothermal to be less expensive than natural gas. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they’re not considered a “firm, dispatchable resource,” Mitchell said. There’s too much down time.
“There’s a daily catastrophic failure on solar,” Burgum said. “It’s called sunset.”
Geothermal, though, can be up 24/7/365, Burgum said.
And now, according to Mitchell, its price “has crossed a tipping point.”
Critics have found reasons to be leery of Fervo’s technology — particularly its non-consumptive water claims. Operational data will clear some of that up once the plant gets off the ground, Mitchell said. But barring any “showstoppers,” he said, the future of this new form of geothermal depends on price.
That’s something Jewett understands, too.
“Every decision we make out here is to drive the cost of geothermal down,” she said. “It shouldn’t be chosen because it’s a clean energy solution. It should be chosen because it’s affordable, and because it’s efficient.”
‘I never thought I’d see this happen in Milford’
Some five miles south, Milford Mayor Nolan Davis decorated his office in his town’s history: photos, flags, a slab of copper pulled from a local mine. In truth, he’s part of that history: between his time on the city council and the Mayor’s desk, he’s been in public office more than 30 years. The mines, the railroad, the Smithfield hog farms — he’s seen Milford’s next-big-things all come and, ultimately, go, taking hundreds of jobs with them. Through it all, he’s seen his town of 1,600 dwindle to a pit stop on the way south to the booming hubs of Cedar City or St. George, and a generation leave on state Highway 257 with no reason to come back.
“We export our kids,” he told the Deseret News. “There’s nothing here for them.”
More recently, though, he’s added a camo Fervo hat to the decor — a nod to a different future. Soon, he may add the Google brand, too.
Davis says he fields five calls a week from data center developers. The energy coming from up-valley has put Milford back on the map.
To Davis, Fervo has been a “fantastic neighbor,” starting the day he met Jewett in the early days of development.
“The first thing she said was, ‘What can we do for you,’” he remembers. Since, Fervo employees have started going to football games, coaching Little League. They donated $15,000 to the town’s library, he said. The company’s subcontractors have worked to house employees and bolster city infrastructure, sparing Milford’s coffers.
Davis said he isn’t worried about Milford’s water supply or quality. And, he said he hasn’t felt any earthquakes commonly associated with fracking, though the U.S. Geological Survey reported several small tremors around the drill site Wednesday alone.
None of the power generated in the Beaver Valley has ever stayed local, he said. Producers “can sell it in California for a lot more than we pay in Utah,” he said. That’s OK, he said — if the new jobs it brings can help a few more businesses open back up on Main Street, or fill the empty desks at Milford High.
He doesn’t want his town to be Cedar City or St. George, he said. He wants to give the kids a reason to come back home. For the first time in a long time, he thinks it’s almost here.
“I never thought I’d see this happen in Milford,” Davis said. “I just thought we’d limp along. We’d be up, we’d be down, but we know how to survive. But in the past three months, it’s snowballed. Now, we really need to get down to work.”
