HOUSTON — The future of an emerging form of American clean energy could be built on an unexpected foundation: technology and experience from Big Oil.
At least, that’s the hope of representatives of major oil companies, tech startups, scientists and climate groups who met in Houston this week to launch a $10 million series of summits.
Their goal: to use the technology of oil and gas — an industry whose products are the primary force driving the earth’s major natural systems toward collapse — to build a new stalwart of the American power sector.
That emerging force is geothermal energy, which uses heat from deep underground to generate power.
The Energy Department has argued geothermal , which offers a way to produce on-demand, zero-carbon energy without major technological advancement, could power as many as 260 million homes by midcentury.
In April, the agency projected that only $25 billion in public-private investment — less than the cost of a recent nuclear project — spent by decades’ end could begin a rolling snowball of innovation that makes that future a reality.