Geothermal Isn’t Niche Anymore: Fervo Energy’s Sarah Jewett on Next-Generation Geothermal
In this episode of Path to Zero, Tucker Perkins talks with Sarah Jewett, Vice President of Strategy at Fervo Energy, about what this Utah project means for the future of clean, firm power and how advances borrowed from the shale revolution are unlocking geothermal in places once considered impossible.
Before joining Fervo, Jewett spent years in the oil and gas sector, including time at Schlumberger, where she worked directly with the subsurface technologies — directional drilling, completions, and reservoir analysis — that now form the backbone of Fervo’s geothermal approach. Trained as a mechanical engineer with additional business and strategy expertise, she brings a rare combination of deep technical fluency and commercial insight to one of clean energy’s most promising frontiers.
Fervo Energy photo
Reinventing geothermal with oil and gas technology
Fervo’s mission is to reinvent geothermal energy so it becomes the cleanest, most scalable, reliable, and affordable source of power on the grid. Traditional geothermal has been geographically constrained to rare spots with naturally occurring hot water and steam in complex fracture networks underground. Developers had to “get lucky” and hit those fractures with vertical wells, which made the resource risky and hard to scale.
Fervo flips that model. Instead of hunting for perfect natural geology, they create predictable “subsurface radiators” almost anywhere there is hot rock. Using proven tools from the shale industry, such as horizontal drilling, multi-stage completions, fiber-optic monitoring, they drill long horizontal wells into hot rock and engineer the pathways that move heat to the surface. On the surface, the power plant is relatively conventional; the innovation is underground.
As Jewett puts it, there’s hot rock everywhere. The challenge is figuring out how to cost-effectively pull the heat out.
From Project RED to Cape Station
Fervo’s first big milestone was Project RED in Nevada, a combined technology and commercial pilot. Instead of just proving out the engineering, Fervo chose to prove that customers would pay for “firm clean energy” at the same time. They located next to an existing geothermal plant, developed their own horizontal well pair just outside the traditional resource area, and sold hot brine into the existing facility.
Project RED used a three-well system—two 3,500-foot horizontal wells (one injection, one production) and a vertical monitoring well—and now delivers about three megawatts of net power that didn’t exist before. Just as importantly, it showed that Fervo’s approach could work technically and sell commercially.
Fervo Energy photo
Those lessons are now being applied at a much bigger scale at Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah. Cape Station is planned as a 500-megawatt, two-phase project: 100 megawatts to the grid in 2026, and another 400 megawatts in 2028. Fervo has already completed the well field for phase one—24 wells drilled from three pads—and has significantly reduced drilling costs compared to Project RED by repeating and refining the process.
Jobs, trust, and community benefits
Jewett spends a lot of her time selling the project to the communities where Fervo works. In Milford and Beaver County, Fervo arrived just as a major non-ag employer was laying people off. The biggest question locals had was simple: “When are you going to start hiring?”
Fervo’s answer has been multi-layered. They have roughly 20 full-time Fervo employees based in the local community and around 350 people on-site through contractors and construction firms. The company actively encourages local hiring and works with regional firms such as Rollins Construction and Vortex Crane to keep as much spending in the community as possible.
At the same time, Fervo is careful to acknowledge and address local concerns: induced seismicity, water use, groundwater protection, truck traffic through town, and the visual and noise footprint of the plant. The company works to mitigate risks proactively and to be transparent about what can go wrong, how they aim to prevent it, and how they would respond if something does happen. Over time, Jewett says, building venues for honest dialogue has created trust.
Fervo Energy photo
Quiet, closed-loop, and low-impact
Compared with many forms of energy development, operating geothermal plants can be surprisingly unobtrusive. Fervo’s designs are closed-loop: geothermal brine is pumped through a heat exchanger, where its heat is transferred to a working fluid that powers the turbines, and then the brine is reinjected underground. There are no big steam plumes venting to the atmosphere, and sound levels are relatively modest.
Water consumption is a concern in the arid West, but Fervo uses air-cooling on its plants and keeps brine in a closed loop rather than venting it, which helps minimize water use and contamination risk. Because there are no hydrocarbons in these reservoirs, many of the chemical and methane issues associated with oil and gas fracking simply don’t apply.
Another key selling point is land efficiency. Jewett notes that Fervo can place around 10 horizontal wells on a single six-acre pad and potentially produce about 50 megawatts of power from that footprint. Replicating that output with solar or solar-plus-storage would typically require far more surface disturbance.
Cost, scaling, and the shale analogy
Historically, geothermal has had a reputation as an expensive, high-risk resource, in part because of “dry wells” and declining reservoir performance. In older projects, developers depended on natural fracture systems that weren’t fully characterized; roughly a third of wells in some fields turned out to be duds, and once the resource declined, there was often no way to economically “recharge” it.
Fervo’s horizontal-well approach is designed to remove both problems. By engineering the fracture network they need, they greatly reduce dry-hole risk. And if temperatures or output decline over time, they can drill new well pairs into the same field to boost production rather than being stuck with a stranded power plant.
Jewett draws a direct analogy to the shale revolution. Techniques like long horizontals, precision fracking, and sophisticated monitoring completely transformed U.S. oil and gas. Many experts said those tools wouldn’t work in geothermal—until Fervo went out and used modern flex rigs, drilled long horizontals into the granitic basement, and proved otherwise. She believes that the same physics-driven toolkit can unlock geothermal at a much larger scale.
Policy support, investors, and the cost of capital
On the policy side, geothermal has traditionally been an afterthought, struggling to access the same level of tax incentives that wind and solar enjoy. That changed with recent legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which put geothermal on a more level playing field with solar for at least the next decade. Fervo’s founders deliberately built their business assuming they wouldn’t have generous tax credits forever and are focused on driving down costs quickly enough that the technology can stand on its own.
Even with improved policy, Jewett says the biggest bottleneck now is low-cost capital. Given how capital-intensive geothermal projects are, the ability to attract investors who see the risk as manageable is critical to scaling. Fervo has built credibility in the investor community by setting ambitious but clear technical milestones for each funding round—then achieving them and showing exactly how the money was used. That track record, along with high-profile interest from clean-tech investors and figures like Bill Gates, is helping open the door to more funding.
Fervo Energy photo
A 20 percent vision for geothermal
Today, geothermal provides about half of one percent of U.S. electricity. Fervo’s internal vision is far more ambitious: Jewett says the company believes geothermal can supply more than 20 percent of the U.S. power grid by 2050—roughly the scale of the current nuclear fleet.
Investors, policymakers, and communities are starting to see that potential. A resource once thought of as niche and location-limited is now being reimagined as scalable, dispatchable, around-the-clock clean power that borrows the best of America’s oil and gas know-how.