A year ago, we turned on a new production well at Lightning Dock and identified it as the most productive pumped geothermal well in the country, based on publicly available data. The fair question to ask back then was: will it last?

We now have the answer. After a full year of continuous operation, the well has shown no measurable thermal decline, is still flowing more than 4,000 gallons per minute, and on its own is delivering more heat to the power plant than the field’s two original production wells ever did. It is still, to our knowledge, the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States.

So what does this all mean for our national geothermal potential?

Simply put, this is clear, empirical evidence that our industry has systematically underestimated the power generation potential of America’s naturally-occurring geothermal reservoirs. Our deep production well at LDG delivers high, steady flow while holding its temperature — and we drilled it at competitive costs. This is the exact profile of an investable asset that can produce firm, clean, predictable power for a very long time. And, right up until we did this, conventional wisdom was that it was extremely unlikely to be successful.

While Lightning Dock may be a naturally-occurring hydrothermal resource, its production profile is anything but conventional. It’s a glimpse of the massive baseload potential sitting beneath our feet, and a preview of what’s to come from our emerging industry.

Let’s dive into the details. This post is about what that year of data taught us, not only about Lightning Dock, but about the thousands of naturally-occurring geothermal reservoirs the industry has quietly given up on. Three lessons stand out.

The starting point: a field everyone had written off

When we acquired Lightning Dock in June 2024, it was a field in decline. Its two production wells were shallow — with production zones less than ~2,500 feet — and over the prior five years their brine had cooled by roughly 50°F. Typical geothermal well fields experience ~1-2°F/yr declines, but this field was 5-10x higher. And by the time we acquired the field, the plant inlet temperatures were hovering around ~255°F, and for a power plant designed for ~310°F inlet temps, it was operating way outside its design conditions. The prior operator had made some changes to its injection strategy right before we acquired it that had slowed down the cooling rate, but the inlet temps were so low by that point, that the power plant was no longer economical to run. For example, the ~15 MW gross plant was struggling to generate net power in the middle of hot summer afternoons, exactly when the grid needed it most. Under previous ownership, the working assumption was that the resource was running out.

Our thesis was the opposite: that the resource wasn’t gone, in fact, the majority of it was untapped. After acquiring Lightning Dock, we spent six months building reservoir models, then designed, permitted, and drilled a new production well to about 8,000 feet — three to four times the depth of the original production wells. We’ve written about how we drilled it and tied it in. This post is about some of the implications of what deeper conventional well fields could mean for geothermal beyond LDG.

Lesson 1: Modern data and tools are unlocking extraordinary insights and opportunities across our geothermal reservoirs.

Most U.S. conventional geothermal fields were developed in the 1970s and ‘80s with the data and tools of the time, including Lightning Dock’s discovery well, which was drilled in 1982. Most wells were shallow, the subsurface picture was coarse, and once a field started to thermally decline, legacy developers logically concluded the well field had maximized the potential of that resource.

That information environment has changed completely. At Zanskar, we take a new approach and bring modern geophysical imaging and probabilistic (”stochastic”) reservoir modeling that simulates thousands of plausible versions of the subsurface. At Lightning Dock, that combination told us something the original developers couldn’t have seen: the original wells only tapped the tippy top of the reservoir. At much greater depths, our models showed hot, permeable, fractured rock that we predicted could bring the power plant back to its capacity.

Lesson 2: Cutting-edge technologies are disrupting long-held geological assumptions.

Everyone in geothermal knows the earth gets hotter as you go down deeper. So why hadn’t anyone chased the heat at Lightning Dock by going deeper?

Because of a second, equally well-known rule of thumb: rock usually gets tighter with depth. As overburden pressure increases, pore spaces tend to close, permeability drops, and a well becomes harder to flow (Athy, 1930). Pair that with the higher cost of drilling deeper, and the conventional logic writes itself — deeper wells would flow less, cost more, and never pay back. So conventional well fields stayed shallow (typically depths of 3,000 to 5,000 feet across most fields in the United States).

But if you double click on that logic, most naturally-occurring geothermal reservoirs are hosted inside fractured intervals and not pore spaces. Do such fractures actually close with depth at the same rate that pore spaces do? And after all, we know these naturally-occurring systems are circulating fluids from much greater depths, so there must be open fractures at depth allowing that kind of circulation. And unlike pore spaces that are locked in at deposition, and only get smaller with burial, fracture zones are steeply oriented and are repeatedly reopened with every naturally-occurring earthquake or aseismic deformation cycle.

Lesson 3: When the old industry playbook says a well field is finished, it might be time to take a deeper look.

So, what happens when we leverage new technology to challenge old assumptions? Tested in the wild, did our hypothesis survive contact with reality? Let’s take the old assumptions apart piece by piece with one-year of data from our new deep well at Lightning Dock.

“Deeper rock is too tight to flow.” The new deeper well has a productivity index of about 50 gallons per minute per psi and produces over 4,000 GPM. That’s not a marginal deep well — it’s an exceptional one by any standard. Compared against produced-fluid flow rates across oil and gas and other geothermal wells, it sits at the very top of the range of possible outcomes, and it flows ~3-5x more and ~50x easier than the best EGS wells do today. And that’s with a production well that’s less than half the measured depth (aka length) of modern EGS wells, which is a testament to how productive these naturally-occurring fractured intervals can be.

As we shifted production over, the original wells were turned off while our new production well(named 44-7) was ramped up. By June 2025, the new deep well matched the production flow rate of the two original shallow wells, but increased the inlet plant temperatures by ~60°F.

“Deeper wells cost too much.” We drilled 44-7 to ~8,000 feet in fewer total drilling days than any prior full-sized well on the site, despite those wells being a fraction of the depth. Yes, deeper wells consume more materials (primarily cement and casing), but that can be offset with faster drilling — about 35% faster than even the fastest legacy well, by using oil-and-gas PDC drill bits, directional drilling assemblies, and a tightly-engineered drilling program. We laid out that result in detail in our previous post.

“Even if it flows, will it last?” This is what only time can answer, and it’s the headline of the year. After one year, we’re proud to say the answer is “yes.” Across twelve months of operation we’ve seen no measurable thermal decline. The plant’s inlet temperature, which had fallen ~50°F over the five years before we became the owner and operator, has fully recovered and stayed recovered, and net power output is back to the plant’s nameplate. In fact, over the winter, we had to curtail the new production well to prevent output from exceeding our transmission cap and in the summer on hot afternoons, we have to curtail because the power plant’s own heat rejection system can’t keep up.

After a year, we can confidently say that 44-7’s hot temperatures and high-flow position it to deliver reliable power to the grid for years to come. The deep resource didn’t behave like the industry priors said it should. It behaved like our models said it would.

Why this matters for Lightning Dock and the Community

When we acquired Lightning Dock, we were fortunate that the local operators and crew who had kept it running chose to stay on with us. The hands-on knowledge and commitment of the crew who had already been operating it for six years proved instrumental as we re-powered to full capacity.

This work directly impacts what the plant now delivers. After one year of operations across all four seasons, we’ve provided ~75,000 MWh to our customer PNM, who has transmitted that power to homes and businesses across New Mexico. That’s more than 44,000 MWh (over 140%) more than the facility would have produced had we not succeeded and instead relied on the two legacy production wells.

Bringing the plant back to full output proved that, with the right technology and the right team, we can bring large amounts of new geothermal energy online—even at sites that the industry assumed were already “tapped out.”

Why these lessons matter beyond Lightning Dock

Put the three lessons together and you get to the real point. We brought a power plant that had been written off back to full output, and we did it by deeper targeting and drilling than the legacy work and wells that defined the site. And Lightning Dock is not unique. Globally, there are thousands of known and many thousands more unknown, naturally-occurring geothermal reservoirs with electric-grade potential (Waring, 1965; Muffler et al., 1979) that have been basically ignored under the same assumptions we just tested here. Most of them have never been sampled deeper than a few hundred feet or less, nor have they been imaged with modern tools, or modeled in ways that honor physics, on-site data, and that capture the real reservoir below. If even a fraction hold a deeper, hotter resource the way Lightning Dock did, the near-term opportunity in geothermal may have less to do with inventing new kinds of reservoirs and more to do with finally seeing the ones we already have.

A note on the data

Flow rates, temperatures, and power output are from the plant’s operational (SCADA) records. The peer comparison of well productivity uses publicly reported production data for operating geothermal wells in Nevada, converted to thermal power (MWth) delivered to the plant at a common brine outlet temperature. “Most productive pumped geothermal well in the U.S.” refers specifically to pumped (low-to-moderate-enthalpy) production wells, ranked by MWth delivered, based on publicly available data. Drilling-speed comparisons are spud-to-depth, measured against prior wells drilled on the Lightning Dock site; see our previous post for the full breakdown.

For predicting legacy production well net generation using last year’s ambient air conditions (Figure 8), we built a simple regression model based on the delta between the daily average plant inlet temperature and the ambient air temperature (for simplicity, we excluded flow, wind, and other second order factors that impact finer scale net generation). This model has a R2 value of 0.9 and a root mean square error of ~17 MWh / day.

References

Waring, G.A. (1965). Thermal Springs of the United States and Other Countries of the World: A Summary. USGS Professional Paper 492.

Muffler, L.J.P., ed. (1979). Assessment of Geothermal Resources of the United States—1978. USGS Circular 790.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and computational geoscience, Zanskar is expanding the frontier of American geothermal discovery, unlocking value from hidden, forgotten, or underutilized geothermal fields. Following the turnaround of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now the site of the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and record-breaking discoveries at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada, Zanskar is showing that geothermal can be predictable, profitable, and massively scalable. Zanskar is actively deploying this model across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

Media Contact

zanskar@fischtankpr.com

Salt Lake City, UT - May 8, 2026 - Zanskar, America’s leading geothermal discovery company, today announced that it has entered a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with NV Energy to deliver 100MW of reliable, baseload geothermal power upon approval of NV Energy’s 2026 Integrated Resource Plan filed with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN).

Zanskar uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to de-risk geothermal exploration and drilling. Applied across the most significant geothermal exploration campaign in American history, the company has built a leading greenfield geothermal portfolio in Nevada. With existing sites already announced in the state, including Pumpernickel, Big Blind, and others on the way, Zanskar will deliver 100 MW of geothermal power to NV Energy by 2030. The PPA, which runs through 2050, encompasses multiple projects to be constructed and operated by Zanskar and sold in a portfolio to NV Energy.

“Geothermal is one of the few energy sources uniquely positioned to deliver affordable, around-the-clock power. Not only can it deliver reliable, carbon-free power with existing technologies, but it’s also uniquely suited to scale and meet growing electrical needs for years to come,” said Ryan McGraw, Chief Development Officer of Zanskar. “This agreement marks a significant step in scaling our portfolio further, and we’re grateful to be working alongside NV Energy to meet the moment to provide carbon-free power at a time of high demand.”

Energy demand across Nevada is increasing, and geothermal is positioned to deliver gigawatts of new baseload power to a full funnel of energy users across the Silver State. Already a leader in geothermal power generation, Zanskar’s AI-enabled prospecting toolkit indicates that we’re only scratching the surface when it comes to the full potential of delivering carbon-free geothermal energy to Nevada.

The PPA with NV Energy follows a string of recent announcements from Zanskar. Within this year alone, Zanskar raised $115M in Series C funding, closed $40M in novel development capital, and signed a GEODE agreement with CC Power. With this continued momentum, Zanskar is proving naturally occurring geothermal can be de-risked and scaled domestically to power the next generation of American infrastructure.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and computational geoscience, Zanskar is expanding the frontier of American geothermal discovery, unlocking value from hidden, forgotten, or underutilized geothermal fields. Following the turnaround of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now the site of the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and record-breaking discoveries at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada, Zanskar is showing that geothermal can be predictable, profitable, and massively scalable. Zanskar is actively deploying this model across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/.

Media Contact

zanskar@fischtankpr.com

Salt Lake City, UT - April 16, 2026 - Zanskar, the first AI-native geothermal energy company¹, today announced the closing of $40 million in a Development Capital Facility, co-led by Just Climate and Spring Lane Capital.

This Development Capital Facility is among the first ever structured for geothermal power, drawing on the best practices from the renewables and natural resource sectors. The financing establishes a revolving development credit facility designed to accelerate project development across Zanskar’s growing portfolio. The non-recourse facility covers key pre-construction activities, bridging projects to traditional bank project financing, and is structured to upsize to $100M as the portfolio scales.

For a sector that has long struggled to secure non-dilutive development capital, the deal is a watershed moment. It strengthens Zanskar’s ability to commercialize its pipeline of naturally-occurring geothermal systems and sets a scalable financing precedent for greenfield geothermal as a recognized asset class across the U.S.

“Zanskar has successfully transitioned from a pure geothermal explorer and operator to pioneering the financial infrastructure the entire industry needs to scale. This facility unlocks the critical bottleneck of early-stage project financing,” said Carl Hoiland, CEO and Co-founder of Zanskar. “We are deeply appreciative of our partners, Just Climate and Spring Lane Capital, whose innovation and commitment have not only validated our business model but have created a blueprint for accelerating a significant expansion of dispatchable, clean geothermal energy in the U.S.”

Diego D’Sola, Head of Finance at Zanskar, added: “The geothermal industry has been stagnant for decades and lacking the right financial structures. We believe this facility charts a cost-of-capital trajectory that will put geothermal on par with other mature energy asset classes.”

Zanskar has assembled one of the industry’s leading portfolios of greenfield geothermal projects under development and will use the project financing to rapidly build multiple geothermal power plants across the U.S. Zanskar is working towards delivering gigawatts of clean, firm power to American homes and businesses, and will create hundreds of jobs as it embarks on this historic geothermal development campaign.

“Zanskar has built a differentiated, AI-powered exploration platform that improves drilling success rates and lowers development costs. It has secured a substantial acreage with considerable resource potential. We are pleased to partner with Zanskar on this flexible, purposefully constructed Development Capital Facility which is designed to grow as the company accelerates the delivery of large-scale, dispatchable clean baseload power in a market experiencing rapidly increasing electricity demand,” said Natalia Simakina, Managing Director at Just Climate.

“Spring Lane is excited to follow on our Series C investment in Zanskar by co-leading this groundbreaking geothermal industry development capital facility,” said Jason Scott, Partner and Entrepreneur in Residence, Spring Lane Capital. “We were happy to develop this capital solution with Generation’s Just Climate and believe that it creates a path for not only Zanksar but other geothermal developers and operators to scale this crucial source of clean, firm power at a time of rising energy demand and volatile supply and prices. Spring Lane believes that a key to helping support companies like Zanskar is identifying, structuring, and financing project capital needs off balance sheet to accelerate the growth of their businesses.”

This announcement follows Zanskar’s recent $115 million Series C raise in January 2026, which has since been expanded with an additional investment from Just Climate. With two discovery sites in Nevada announced last year, and the landmark Lightning Dock project in New Mexico already providing energy to utility customers, Zanskar is poised to deliver clean, firm geothermal energy at a time of high demand.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and computational geoscience, Zanskar is expanding the frontier of American geothermal discovery, unlocking value from hidden, forgotten, or underutilized geothermal fields. Following the turnaround of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now the site of the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and record-breaking discoveries at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada², Zanskar is showing that geothermal can be predictable, profitable, and massively scalable. Zanskar is actively deploying this model across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

About Just Climate

Established by Generation Investment Management, Just Climate is a specialist investment business focused on scaling solutions for the highest-emitting, most off-track sectors of the economy. The challenge of achieving a net-zero world and addressing climate-related risk is huge, urgent and needs tremendous mobilisation of capital. Just Climate’s mission is to establish climate-led investing as a capital allocation imperative for institutional investors globally. For more information, please visit us at justclimate.com.

About Spring Lane
Spring Lane Capital is an investment firm based in Boston, MA and Montreal, QC, deploying tailored project finance and corporate equity across the “missing-middle” in sustainable real assets. We invest in sectors where decentralized, low‑carbon assets are scaling fast including energy, transportation, waste to value, food and agriculture. We are a team of builders and operators—not just investors—bringing the technical expertise and hands-on partnership needed to scale the sustainable infrastructure of tomorrow and deliver long-term value. For more information, please visit us at www.springlanecapital.com.

Media Contact

FischTank PR | zanskar@fischtankpr.com

Salt Lake City, UT - April 13, 2026 - Zanskar, the first AI-native geothermal energy company, has signed a Geothermal Exploration, Offtake and Development Engagement (GEODE) Agreement with California Community Power (CC Power). CC Power is a joint powers authority representing nine California CCAs interested in promoting better and more effective geothermal growth in the state. Zanskar will use its market-leading prospecting toolkit to locate new utility-scale geothermal resources across California ISO’s balancing authority area, and through the GEODE agreement, CC Power and its CCA members will have the opportunity to support the development of Zanskar’s greenfield geothermal projects and procure power from them.

The agreement extends Zanskar’s leading, multi-gigawatt geothermal pipeline into California, a state with immense potential for the underground energy source. Zanskar is bringing its repeatable approach to geothermal discovery and development to build geothermal power plants in California that will have a profound, long-term impact on local communities and California’s electric grid by delivering clean, firm baseload power to the Golden State.

“All over the country, we’re seeing unprecedented demand for reliable, baseload power. California is no exception, with growing pressure on the grid driven by rapid electrification and aging power infrastructure,” said Ryan McGraw, Chief Development Officer at Zanskar. “California has made a clear goal to be powered by 100% clean energy by 2045, and Zanskar can help deliver. We’re grateful for the partnership with CC Power to explore how we can deploy geothermal to provide around-the-clock reliability that is crucial to offsetting California’s rising demands with clean, firm baseload power.”

“Geothermal energy offers a renewable resource that can provide valuable round-the-clock reliability that cannot be provided by California’s existing portfolio of wind, solar, and battery resources,” said Alexander Morris, General Manager of CC Power. “The GEODE Agreement with Zanskar allows CC Power and our members to thoughtfully build a relationship with a geothermal developer who is advancing innovative technologies for unlocking incremental geothermal capacity within California that supports local reliability, jobs, and investment. The GEODE Agreement provides mutual benefits in advancing technology and project development towards the goal of new geothermal power plants here in California that will benefit our member agencies in serving the clean energy and reliability needs of their local communities.”

Zanskar has built a repeatable approach to geothermal targeting, as demonstrated by the company’s success in Nevada with projects including Pumpernickel and Big Blind, the first blind geothermal site discovered in 30+ years. Through continued partnerships and strategic agreements such as this one, Zanskar will continue to scale faster and further, finding hidden geothermal energy sources across the Western U.S. and California.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and computational geoscience, Zanskar is expanding the frontier of American geothermal discovery, unlocking value from hidden, forgotten, or underutilized geothermal fields. Following the historic turnaround of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now the site of the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and record-breaking discoveries at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada, Zanskar is showing that geothermal can be predictable, profitable, and massively scalable. Zanskar is actively deploying this model across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

About California Community Power

California Community Power is a joint powers authority comprised of nine California CCAs. CC Power combines its member CCAs’ buying power, representing about 12% of the CAISO’s load, to procure new, cost-effective, clean energy and reliability resources to continue advancing local and state climate goals. CC Power members represent 2.7 million customers across 112 municipalities spanning from Humboldt County to Santa Barbara County. Learn more at www.cacommunitypower.org.

Media Contacts

FischTank PR | zanskar@fischtankpr.com

Alexander Morris | California Community Power
amorris@cacommunitypower.org

This Series C positions Zanskar for rapid growth by enabling the company to advance its gigawatt-scale pipeline through a historic geothermal exploration and development campaign. Zanskar will spearhead one of the largest ever expansions of American geothermal power supporting construction on multiple geothermal power plants throughout the Western U.S., which are slated to begin delivering power before 2030. Zanskar will also expand its industry leading discovery platform and exploration drilling programs, and establish new relationships with strategic partners and customers.

This round marks the largest venture investment to date into AI-enabled discovery of geothermal resources, signaling a decisive shift in market confidence toward the commercial potential of undiscovered, naturally-occurring geothermal systems. By uncovering gigawatts of new geothermal potential in just a few years, and at a fraction of the traditional cost, Zanskar has proven that high-grade natural systems aren’t rare: they are just hidden. This disrupts conventional thinking that these systems are too risky or too constrained to develop at any meaningful scale, and sets the stage for rapid growth in the geothermal sector.

“We started Zanskar with the belief that AI would have as profound an impact on geothermal cost and scalability as modern drilling technologies have. It would do so by enabling us to find more hidden geothermal systems, and to produce more power from each of those systems, than legacy models assumed. The result is a terawatt-scale opportunity,” said Carl Hoiland, CEO and Co-founder of Zanskar. “We’ve already confirmed multiple large, previously unknown geothermal resources across the Western U.S., and deeper drilling has validated that these systems can produce far more energy than expected. Thanks to the support of forward-thinking investors across energy, infrastructure, and technology, and the exceptional progress of our world class team, we are ushering in a new wave of clean, firm, geothermal power.”

Zanskar’s AI-native platform is a unified operating system for geothermal discovery and development that lowers discovery costs and increases the size of each geothermal field. Zanskar’s unique approach of marrying boots-on-the-ground geoscience with custom built software and AI tools has empowered Zanskar to collapse discovery timeframes and costs relative to industry best practices. This has firmly established Zanskar as the leading geothermal exploration company.

“Spring Lane is excited to lead the Series C financing for Zanskar and join the Board of the company,” said Jason Scott, Partner and Entrepreneur in Residence, Spring Lane Capital. “We are eager to support Zanskar because we believe there is a near infinite demand for firm, clean power around the world right now and geothermal energy is one of the only immediate ways to serve this enormous market. Zanskar is unique in that they have identified more geothermal anomalies in North America than any other company in decades. We believe that Spring Lane’s financial and operational support will enable them to rapidly develop enormous amounts of geothermal capacity, initially across the Western US.”

“The world class team at Zanskar is exactly what this country needs: fast, disciplined and very effective,” said Andrew Beebe, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures. “They are positioning geothermal to be one of the cheapest, cleanest and safest energy sources in America—right when we need it most.”

“We’ve always been inspired by the early, legendary explorers that came before us. Their resourcefulness and unfailing optimism laid the groundwork for discovery today. We like to think they’d be proud to see how we’ve resurrected and accelerated grassroots exploration with big data, modern computing, and more efficient field data collection, resulting in a pace of discovery not seen before,” said Joel Edwards, co-founder and CTO of Zanskar. “The resources we need are out there, hidden within the Earth’s crust, and we’re working hard to find the most exceptional hotspots to build a new era of geothermal energy, starting in the United States”.

As the U.S. races toward meeting demand for baseload power, and hyperscalers seek out clean, firm power for their data centers, Zanskar is positioned to deliver gigawatts of power—proving AI has the ability to help meet its own power demands. As it builds out geothermal power plants across the U.S., Zanskar seeks out engineers, developers, financers and others to join the team to help discover and deliver geothermal power at a pace, scale, and cost that solves energy, forever.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and computational geoscience, Zanskar is expanding the frontier of American geothermal discovery, unlocking value from hidden, forgotten, or underutilized geothermal fields. Following the historic turnaround of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now the site of the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and record-breaking discoveries at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada, Zanskar is showing that geothermal can be predictable, profitable, and massively scalable. Zanskar is actively deploying this model across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

Media Contact

zanskar@fischtankpr.com

Photo cred = Nils Caliandro, Geologist

It’s been one heck of a year at Zanskar, and the geothermal fun just keeps piling on. We’re excited to announce yet another geothermal (capital “D”) Discovery, our third over the last year. This time, our Discovery is at a brand new site with no geothermal manifestations at the surface (what industry insiders call “blind”) and no history of any geothermal exploration or other prior well data. A Discovery made in barren, frontier desert land. The kind of Discovery Zanskar was made to find.

Just two years ago we found this hidden gem tucked away in a typical western Nevada basin juxtaposed against a towering mountainous backdrop. After acquiring the BLM leases at auction, we collected several high-resolution geo datasets, and our geologists, utilizing our custom-built AI tools, then targeted and drilled two intermediate depth exploration wells. After a brief equilibration period, we logged these wells, and are extremely excited to announce that we discovered a ~250°F permeable reservoir at just ~2700 ft depth. Read on to learn more why this is such an exceptional discovery, a first of its kind made in over 30 years, and yet, how we are just scratching the surface of a massive and even hotter geothermal system below.

1. Why Big Blind means conventional geothermal is anything but “tapped out”

There is a widespread perception out there that the best naturally-occurring geothermal systems have already been found, that the new ones are essentially the leftover scraps and can only be found in “niche places”, and that the resource upside is limited to a few tens of GWs (e.g., DOE’s Pathways to Commercial Lift Off, 2024). We disagree that conventional upside has such a low cap, and in fact, think these estimates are more than an order of magnitude too low for two simple reasons, (1) there are many multiples more hidden and yet undiscovered systems out there (just like Big Blind), and (2) each system can support much more power generation than typical shallow well fields by going deeper (just like we did at Lightning Dock).

We don’t blame anybody for the “tapped out” misperception. Conventional geothermal hasn’t grown much in decades and the geothermal pipeline in the USA is quite stale. For the most part, the pipeline of publicly known geothermal prospects with utility-scale power potential is roughly the same pipeline we had back in the 20th century (Edwards et al., 2025). The few exceptions are from accidental discoveries made by mining companies (e.g., McGinness Hills, Tungsten Mountain, Don Campbell, and Blue Mountain), and a few by govt funded academic campaigns incubating new tools (e.g., Teels Marsh and Rhodes Marsh).

Why does a stale pipeline matter? Because much of the present-day undeveloped and publicly known pipeline is either off-limits (e.g., located on conserved lands) or is on developmentally challenged lands (e.g., far from interconnection). The industry needs new sites to scale. And that means we have to find new “blind” geothermal sites, those with no surface clues but which we know from first principles are actually quite abundant beneath the surface. This same inflection point occurred in oil and gas too, around a hundred years ago, when the industry shifted from exploring only areas with surface seeps to those without seeps. Just as the case was for oil and gas, the geothermal industry’s ability to find new blind systems is a key ingredient for its accelerated growth.

We found Big Blind just ~2 years into our broader grassroots exploration program, back when our regional models weren’t as good and our field program was a bit smaller. Since then, we’ve found dozens more “hotspots”, with similar signatures of MW-sized excess heat flow. With the conversion of Big Blind into a bonafide geothermal Discovery, that increases the likelihood that our other early-stage “hotspots” will convert as well. Which means, that yes, conventional geothermal is certainly not “tapped out” and there are yet many exceptional, naturally-occurring geothermal systems to find.

2. What did we find at Big Blind

Our Big Blind Discovery sits in a classic Great Basin landscape, a beautiful expanse of salt-desert scrub and shrubland communities that cover western Nevada. There is nothing geothermally obvious at the surface that would catch the eye of any casual or expert geothermal enthusiast (see picture below).

We discovered a geothermal “anomaly” here in late 2023 using our prospecting toolkit. Based on those early-stage data, it was clear the site had above background heat flow. When we talk about finding more new geothermal anomalies (“prospects” is a good term here) than any explorer in history, this is the stage and type of site we’re typically referring to. Meaning, we haven’t yet proven an electric-grade resource exists, as not all geothermal anomalies are capable of producing utility-scale power, but we have definitely proven a naturally-occurring geothermal system exists (i.e., a lowercase “d” discovery).

To test whether the site had electric-grade potential, we did what we did at Pumpernickel, we paired our geologists with our AI-prediction engine to come up with the best possible targets to test the temperature and permeability of the system, as well as its spatial extent. We permitted and spudded two intermediate-depth wells in July and August, 2025 (picture of rig at top). The second of the two wells reached a total depth (TD) of 2668.5 ft and recorded a maximum equilibration temperature of ~250 F (Figure 1). We encountered total lost circulation of our drilling fluids, recovered multiple zones of thoroughly fractured geologic core that correlated with multiple zones of imaged open fractures, all tell-tale signs of massive reservoir permeability (Figures 1-3).

Figure 1. Plot of the core logging data from BGS-67(61-32)-29, our Discovery well. From left to right: Well Diagram, the simplified Lithology, temperatures versus depth, and open fracture density as a pre-image log proxy for zones of likely faulting.

Figure 2. Geologic core (left) and image logs (right) showing a 70 ft zone with alteration, brecciation, gouge, and temperatures of 240 F. This zone is at the bottom of a 300 ft zone dominated by high fracture density, alteration, and evidence of faulting with temperatures over 225 F and a gradient of 100 C/km.

Figure 3. Geologic core (left) and image logs (right) showing a zone with alteration, evidence of open fractures that host exceptional permeability, and temperatures of 250 F.

So what exactly makes Big Blind such a big deal? It’s the first blind geothermal Discovery in a very, very long time at much lower costs. The industry has not sourced its own blind geothermal Discovery since the late 1970s / early 1980s, when the oil majors were wildcatting deeper and more expensive geothermal exploration wells across the intermountain west. Back then, with well funded exploration campaigns backed by cash flowing oil and gas majors, the cost of finding new blind systems was not cheap, and our best estimates put their costs of discovery per MW at an order of magnitude higher (>$100k per MW). The majors subsequently shifted their focus to development work during the 1980’s. And thus, the USA got out of the game of exploring for new geothermal systems. But Zanskar has brought that game back today at much lower costs through a mix of much more precise exploration and much cheaper data collection methods (<$15k per MW).

What’s so exciting about Big Blind is that it isn’t Zanskar’s only blind anomaly in the hopper; we have dozens more behind it. And as we test these anomalies with deeper drilling, we’re set to prove many more sites capable of generating utility-scale power. In other words, Big Blind is just the beginning.

3. We’ve just scratched the surface at Big Blind

If this Big Blind doesn’t excite you, it might be because you are dismissing ~250 F brine as barely hot enough for utility-scale power. While on its face that critique is true, it’s missing a forest for a tree. We drilled two targets that tested the extent of the system and that only reached a max depth of ~2700 ft. Remember that our stochastic models explore a wide possibility space, meaning, many possible conceptual models that capture what the system could look like while still honoring geologic data. Part of our exploration strategy is to explore end-member models—in other words, we drilled exploration wells, not exploitation wells. Our models show that there are hotter portions of the system that we can drill next at similar depths as we just drilled, and most importantly, that there is much hotter parts of the system at greater depths. When we get to the exploitation stage, those higher temperature zones will become our production zone targets.

At Lightning Dock, we showed that by simply drilling into much deeper and hotter portions of the geothermal system (going from ~2000 ft to ~8000 ft depths), we were able to (1) increase the production brine temperatures by several tens of degrees Fahrenheit, (2) have more stable production brine temperatures over longer timeframes, and (3) increase the productivity (i.e., the ability of the well to flow) of our production wells. Conventional wisdom suggests that permeability should decrease with increasing depths, but that may not be true for fracture hosted permeability in these fault-hosted geothermal systems. If indeed these fault hosted geothermal systems are as permeable or as close to the same permeability at greater depths, then sites like Lightning Dock, Pumpernickel, and Big Blind will generate a lot more power than typical, average depth geothermal well fields (~2000-5000 ft depths). Our full-physics simulations indicate that more than an order of magnitude more generation is possible. And that’s just one more reason our team remains relentlessly focused on unlocking the true abundance of naturally-occurring geothermal systems.

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zanskar, the largest geothermal exploration company in the U.S., today announced the discovery of ‘Big Blind,’ the first blind geothermal system identified and confirmed to be commercial in the U.S. by the industry in over 30 years. Located in western Nevada, the site possesses no geothermal manifestations at the surface, and no history of geothermal exploration or other prior well data. Using its market-leading prospecting toolkit, Zanskar discovered a geothermal anomaly that indicated the site possesses exceptionally high heat flow. Zanskar’s team of geologists then leveraged its AI-prediction engine to site viable well targets to test the temperature and permeability of the system, as well as its spatial extent.

Zanskar drilled two intermediate depth wells in July and August 2025 and intersected an approximately 250°F permeable reservoir at roughly 2,700 feet depth. These conditions exceed minimum thresholds for utility-scale geothermal power and contrast greatly with regional background subsurface conditions, which would require much greater well field depths (~10,000 ft) and expensive stimulations associated with next-gen drilling technologies to achieve similar temperature and permeability conditions to what these discovery wells encountered in a natural geothermal system.

Naturally occurring geothermal systems with characteristics similar to Big Blind can produce over 100 MWe of domestic power each with off-the-shelf power plant technology. The exact capacity of Big Blind will be confirmed by additional exploration drilling and reservoir characterization, including full-sized well drilling and long-term flow tests of the resource. Importantly, these discovery wells only scratch the surface of this naturally occurring geothermal system, which extends to much greater depths, and contains higher-temperature thermal energy that can be reached and utilized during the exploitation stage.

“The discovery of ‘Big Blind’ further validates Zanskar’s geological AI foundation models as well as the ingenuity of its growing geology and drilling teams, and positions the company for rapid growth as the market opportunity for domestic conventional geothermal energy production heats up,” said Carl Hoiland, co-founder and CEO at Zanskar. “The speed and repeatability our team has demonstrated is incredible, enabling us to quickly identify and drill at new sites across the western U.S., with the potential to deliver energy at gigawatt scale.”

This unveiling of Big Blind follows Lightning Dock (in New Mexico) and Pumpernickel (also in Nevada), firmly establishing Zanskar among the most prominent geothermal discovery companies in the world. The discovery and confirmation of the first blind geothermal site in 30+ years is just the beginning, as Zanskar has already found a deep bench of additional geothermal anomalies that are slated for deeper exploratory drilling. Zanskar’s stream of new geothermal discoveries will enable large energy consumers, governments, and utilities to scale their adoption of clean, firm, geothermal energy. Zanskar’s AI-native technology is both cost effective and highly repeatable, turning hidden geothermal resources into solutions for addressing increased energy demand and its resulting cost pressures.

“Naturally occurring geothermal systems are commonly overlooked for being ‘too difficult to find,’ or ‘too sparse to matter’, a narrative being dispelled by Zanskar’s ability to repeatedly find new geothermal hotspots such as Big Blind,” said Joel Edwards, co-founder and CTO at Zanskar. “What’s often called ‘conventional geothermal’ is a tremendous, untapped source for reliable clean, firm power at low costs in the western U.S. We’re excited that after years of behind-the-scenes work finding these new geothermal hotspots, we’re now proving they can support power generation facilities with the drill bit.”

About Zanskar

Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and advanced geoscience modeling, Zanskar is unlocking value from forgotten, hidden, underutilized, or undiscovered geothermal fields that industry narratives would tell you are “tapped-out.” Following the success of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, already the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and the recent exploratory drilling success at Pumpernickel and Big Blind in Nevada, Zanskar is showing that it has a repeatable, scalable model that it’s deploying across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

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FischTank PR

Fresh off the heels of our successful repowering of Lightning Dock Geothermal, we’re excited to announce another geothermal discovery, this time at a greenfield site in northern Nevada called “Pumpernickel”. This is a site long known to the industry, but which has been written off for not being capable of generating utility-scale power. But by leveraging AI-augmented well targeting, we discovered ~280°F heat at just ~2500 ft depth, surpassing prior estimates and confirming viability for a conventional well field power development. Advanced well field targeting with custom AI tools is the exact same playbook that repowered Lightning Dock earlier this year, and is our pathway forward for scaling conventional geothermal power. Read on to learn more about our Pumpernickel discovery.

Zanskar was founded with the belief that the U.S. has far more geothermal potential than currently utilized, but that we didn’t yet have the tools to systematically, and not accidentally, uncover them. Zanskar is showing how porting over modern geoscience and machine learning into geothermal will make up a core toolkit needed to make geothermal power predictable and scalable. For the last 5 years, we have done the hard work of building integrated geology, AI, and exploration tools, making predictions, and testing those predictions in the field. In the early days, we focused on shallow predictions that we were able to cheaply and quickly test. But this year, we started to make deeper predictions, and started taking million dollar drilling bets.

We first tested this theory with deep drilling at Lightning Dock Geothermal (LDG), where we used data-first, AI-enabled modeling to help target the deeper resource to revive a legacy field that industry insiders had written off and to deliver utility-scale power quickly and cost-effectively.

Next up, applying our deeper targeting models to a greenfield site, one with a known potential resource that had been written off. Located in Humboldt County, Nevada, the site has been called a few names over the years, “Hot Springs Ranch”, “Tipton Ranch”, and “Pumpernickel”. And for now, we’re sticking with the name Pumpernickel (named after its location in Pumpernickel Valley, Nevada).

Zanskar has just finished a drilling campaign at Pumpernickel, a site with sparse data, a spotty exploration history, and a lot more uncertainty than LDG. And we’re happy to announce that once again, we struck steam.

Pumpernickel isn’t just hot. It is hot and has permeability (the other equally important ingredient for conventional well fields). Permeability is equally as important because it saves you all the costs associated with unconventional well fields (e.g., drilling and completing long horizontal laterals and then fracking). And based on this first drilling campaign, we’ve proven Pumpernickel can support a low-cost, conventional well field. And importantly, our models led us straight into the resource, without spending tens of millions in exploratory drilling costs to find it or prove it.

Expedient and accurate exploration is what geothermal needs to reach its potential. In the last 10 years, only 1-3 greenfield sites in the U.S. have had discovery wells of this caliber (hard to know exact number as info is not public, but it is a very small number), and only 1 greenfield power plant has been built and put online (Tungsten Mountain). The industry has to move faster and Zanskar is on a mission to do just that. Accuracy means lower costs, shorter timelines, and more confidence going into development. And while we love to see all the innovation happening in how to access deeper or hotter rock (advanced drilling methods), geothermal energy can’t scale if we don’t solve the equally critical challenge of knowing exactly where to drill.

LDG demonstrated that we can increase the net generation at already operating geothermal power plants. Pumpernickel proves that we can open up entirely new greenfield sites to power development, even those with a few skeletons in their closets (Pumpernickel has had a few explorers come its way prior to Zanskar). Together, they are part of a repeatable, high confidence approach to finding and scaling geothermal. And with dozens more similar geothermal anomalies already found and in the queue, LDG and Pumpernickel are just the beginning. Let’s dig into what we discovered and how we did it (again) at Pumpernickel.

Below is a brief memo on finding temperature, finding permeability, and testing our stochastic reservoir modeling approach at Pumpernickel. A few key highlights before diving in:

• maximum equilibrated temperature of ~280 F at ~2500 ft measured depth

• multiple loss zones and artesian flow zones correlated to highly fractured damage zones (telltale signs of exceptional permeability)

• enough heat-in-place at <2 km depths to support a phase I 20 MWe development (minimal size needed to economically justify development)

1. Proving temperature

In the world of thermal power plants, plant inlet temperature is a key physical property that controls both the thermal-to-electric efficiency and net power generated. Geothermal power plants are indeed thermal power plants, but they generally operate at lower plant inlet temperatures than their thermal power plants peers (coal, nat gas, and nuclear). For what are called “moderate enthalpy” geothermal fields, like those that exist at shallow depths (1000-5000 ft) in the intermountain west (e.g., Nevada), the median production well delivers ~292 F inlet brines to geothermal power plants (NDOM, 2024; Figure 1).

Figure 1. Histogram of the average inlet brine temperatures per production well in Nevada during 2024 (NDOM, 2024).

At Pumpernickel, we first targeted <3000 ft depths, and therefore needed to encounter >230 F, to assure ourselves that Pumpernickel could produce close to average Nevada inlet brine temperatures (~290 F) with initial phase 1 production well field depths (<8000 ft). Our mean stochastic model predictions suggested we’d encounter ~240 F temps at ~3000 ft, and so we were optimistic heading into the drilling campaign.

In our first exploratory hole we encountered difficult drilling conditions that prevented us from reaching our target and also prohibited us from even getting logging tools to the bottom of the hole (hot, unstable drilling conditions can be a great sign of a big geothermal reservoir but make drilling difficult!). Our second exploratory hole, however, did reach its target despite encountering multiple total loss circulation zones and proved a maximum equilibrated temperature of ~280 F at ~2500 ft (Figure 2). What is most promising about this well is that these electric-grade temperatures are correlated with one of several, thick, heavily fractured damage zones.

As you can imagine, proving ~280 F at only ~2500 ft is a very exciting moment for Pumpernickel and for our team. These results mean we can find at least the same reservoir brine temperatures that the median (~290 F) Nevada geothermal production wells produce by targeting future production wells >2500 ft into the resource (fault-hosted geothermal systems cool off as they convect upwards from greater depths). Already finding ~280 F brines at such shallow depths is really, really exciting, and it easily unlocks an initial 20 MWe phase development.

Figure 2. Lithologic and temperature logs from the second of our two exploration holes. Note the ~280 F measured temp at ~2500 ft depth.

2. Proving permeability

Permeability is a geologic term that defines a rock's ability to facilitate fluid flow. In the world of fluid minerals (e.g., oil and gas and geothermal), permeability dictates whether a well flows, and therefore, is commercial. This is especially true in geothermal, where at ~290 F, our fluids are much less energy dense than hydrocarbons. Since they’re less energy dense, we need to flow more to access equivalent amounts of energy. At ~290 F, that gap is almost two orders of magnitude (~700 kJ / kg vs ~40,000-50,000 kJ / kg), meaning that for every unit of flow of hydrocarbon, geothermal has to flow almost ~100 times more volume to get a similar amount of energy. In conventional geothermal reservoirs, this is very doable, but for enhanced geothermal reservoirs (EGS), this is the great challenge– artificially making otherwise impermeable rocks flow at commercial rates!

Conventional geothermal reservoirs are almost always hosted in heavily fractured rocks with inherently high permeability. Therefore, fractured rocks are our drilling targets. This is what makes drilling great conventional geothermal wells such a tricky thing, the bigger and badder a geothermal resource, the thicker and more heavily fractured its reservoir rocks are, and the more technical the drilling.

At Pumpernickel, we encountered multiple lost circulation zones and artesian flow zones that correlated with thick (>60 ft) damage zones (Figure 3) that made our drilling teams work hard!

Figure 3. At right is an image log with a flat and 3D wellbore representation revealing fracture zones along the wellbore wall and at left is the rock core from the same depth interval.

Encountering total drilling losses that correlate with heavily fractured intervals documented by image logs, rock core, and equilibrated temperatures of ~280 F proves reservoir-grade permeability and temperature in one beautiful geothermal bundle.

3. Testing stochastic reservoir modeling

We talked about our probabilistic modeling approach in our last blog post on Lightning Dock and how it helped us better plan our well’s trajectory and design. We took the same approach at Pumpernickel, but with much less prior well field data, as Pumpernickel only has a few legacy geologic datasets and shallow exploration holes in and around it. How would our stochastic modeling approach work at a more data sparse geothermal site?

Using a similar workflow as Lightning Dock, we modeled a range of geological scenarios that fit prior data and then recommended drilling targets based on maximizing the likelihood of two key criteria: temperature and permeability (Figure 4). This is a perfect problem for large compute, exploring a large, but bounded search space for two parameters. In the end, we drilled two of our best recommendations considering surface constraints. The first encountered difficult downhole conditions (hot and very unstable formations associated with intense fracturing) such that we couldn’t reach our target. The second hole reached our target and encountered electric-grade brine temperatures and permeability.

Figure 4. Schematic of how our models explore the search space for maximum temperatures and permeability.

Why this matters – for Pumpernickel and beyond

As we said about Lightning Dock, we’re not looking for one-off successes. We build tools to make conventional geothermal a repeatable, predictable, and financeable energy source, unlocking a path forward to reduce the levelized costs of geothermal and make it competitive with other forms of less clean firm energy. We find value in sites that are brand new, neglected, or underdeveloped, to get geothermal megawatts on the grid today, next month, and next year. That means building and using tools that make otherwise stranded or overlooked geothermal sites commercially viable. Pumpernickel is the next data point showing that our approach is viable and working.

Zanskar's drilling results at “Pumpernickel” in Northern Nevada have proven one of the top-ranked geothermal discoveries in the U.S. of the last decade, putting Pumpernickel on a path to becoming one of the largest geothermal power plants in Nevada, with its initial phase of development delivering power in just 3 years.

Following its record-breaking success in New Mexico, Zanskar, with the industry's leading portfolio of greenfield geothermal projects under development, is poised to deliver gigawatts of clean, firm, cost-competitive power faster than anyone thought possible at a time when the U.S. is in immediate need of clean, firm, cost-competitive baseload power.

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zanskar, the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy, today announced its second deep geothermal discovery, at a site called “Pumpernickel,” in Northern Nevada. This discovery is one of the most significant geothermal discoveries in the U.S. of the last decade, proving both reservoir temperature and permeability. Now confirmed with deep drilling, Pumpernickel will move into full power development, whereby Zanskar will drill and construct production and injection wells and a power plant to deliver power into the grid. The first phase of development is expected to deliver power within just three years.

Pumpernickel further proves that there is enormous untapped potential at hydrothermal (i.e., “conventional” geothermal) resources in the United States. Conventional geothermal resources are proven to deliver cost-competitive, clean, firm power, but only if you know where to find them. Using artificial intelligence, advanced geoscience modeling, and modern data collection methods, Zanskar, already a top geothermal power producer in the United States, is countering the dominant industry narrative that Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) are the only pathway forward for geothermal growth.

"Our team’s ability to execute with these AI tools and precision drilling is unparalleled," said Carl Hoiland, Co-founder and CEO at Zanskar, "Our vertically-integrated, AI-native approach to geothermal development is delivering the speed to discovery and speed to development necessary to meet the new paradigm of rapid energy demand growth. These latest deep drilling results only further confirm what we've known all along: conventional geothermal resources are far more abundant and bigger than previously believed and are the lowest-cost route to delivering gigawatts of reliable, carbon-free, baseload power at scale."

Pumpernickel is the latest example of Zanskar’s high-confidence targeting approach to geothermal, and the company is actively drilling a deep bench of newly found geothermal sites. The discovery follows Zanskar’s success at Lightning Dock in New Mexico, now home to the most productive pumped geothermal well in the U.S., and quite possibly the world. Zanskar, as owner-operator, turned the well field from failing to world-beating in less than a year from acquisition.

“At Zanskar, our combination of modern, low-cost, field data collection and large compute geospatial models is proving that we can uncover geothermal resources others miss.” said Joel Edwards, Co-founder and CTO at Zanskar, “But claiming a site has power potential is a lot easier than proving it with a drill bit. Pumpernickel is the latest example of when we go where our models tell us, we deliver, and we're set up to do this over and over again.” .

The U.S. geothermal market is poised for more than 25x growth after decades of stagnation. With its geothermal discovery engine that is faster, cheaper, and more scalable, Zanskar has already reduced discovery costs per megawatt by an order of magnitude compared to inflation-adjusted costs incurred by geothermal's last major greenfield explorers. By demonstrating far more hidden geothermal sites than previously thought, and by showing that each site has far more power potential than perceived, Zanskar is proving that conventional geothermal power is anything but small, niche, and tapped out.

About Zanskar
Zanskar is the first AI-native geothermal energy company using AI to transform how we find, assess, and deliver geothermal energy. Combining artificial intelligence, modern drilling, and advanced geoscience modeling, Zanskar is unlocking value from forgotten, hidden, underutilized, or undiscovered geothermal fields that industry narratives would tell you are “tapped-out.” Following the success of Lightning Dock in New Mexico, already the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States, and the recent exploratory drilling success at Pumpernickel in Nevada, Zanskar has a repeatable, scalable model that it's deploying across a growing portfolio of newly discovered or overlooked sites to develop, build, own, and operate high-grade geothermal assets as a foundational component of the modern grid. Learn more: https://www.zanskar.com/

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a6dabded-4644-4686-ad89-467e72e8eeb2

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Zanskar CEO Carl Hoiland explains why geothermal is entering a new era and how new tools are helping Zanskar find hidden resources that could power the grid 24/7.

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[May 29, 2025]

May 28, 2025

By 2024, most of the industry had given up on the Lightning Dock Geothermal field in southwest New Mexico. But we saw an opportunity to prove a big idea: that even declining conventional geothermal fields still hold enormous potential.

Today, less than a year from Zanskar’s acquisition, Lightning Dock is home to the most productive pumped geothermal well in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. With just one well, we’re now powering the entire 15 MW plant and setting a new bar for conventional geothermal in the U.S.

This isn’t just a comeback story for one plant; It’s a glimpse into the future of geothermal.

We believe Lightning Dock is one of hundreds to thousands of overlooked geothermal fields sitting on enormous latent potential.

What we achieved here wasn’t a one-off. It was the result of a repeatable, deliberate, data-driven approach that we’re now applying to the next sites, and the next after that.

In part one, we explained why we bought the Lightning Dock Geothermal field and how we hoped to deliver more power at cost using today’s best drilling technologies and next-gen computational geoscience models. This post is about what happened next.

Having since completed construction of the pipeline and auxiliary equipment, we are now pushing new electrons to the grid—less than 12 months from acquisition—and putting Zanskar into a category of its own as the only geothermal startup to be operating a utility-scale geothermal power plant in the USA today.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 35% faster drilling than even the fastest of all prior wells drilled on site

• 75% reduction in surface infrastructure costs

• 3x net output and restoring gross generation back to plant nameplate ~15 MWe

• Record-breaking flow rates and heat content that outperform comparable wells in the Western U.S.

Let’s dive into the details.

1. Drilling >35% faster using oil and gas drilling best practices

To cut through 8,000+ feet of hard and complex geology, we utilized polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) drill bits—bits widely deployed in the oil and gas industry but originally developed for hard-rock, geothermal drilling. PDC bits are made of synthetic diamond – think, incredibly durable and thermally stable – making them ideal for the extreme conditions of deep drilling.

While common in oil and gas and increasingly so in enhanced geothermal systems (i.e., where the reservoir is created artificially), these bits are more rarely used in conventional geothermal due to higher upfront costs. At Lightning Dock (LDG), we targeted ~8000 ft, much deeper than average conventional geothermal wells (~2000-4000 ft), so we thought the reduction in drilling time should offset the higher upfront costs. And they did. The PDC bits proved to drill faster through both soft sedimentary and hard volcanic zones—cutting many days off our spud-to-depth timeline compared to legacy wells drilled at the same site without PDC bits (Figure 1). We saw improvements on the order ~130% faster drilling versus average drilling times without PDC bits at LDG, with fewer bit trips and faster drilling speeds. Note that the number of non-drilling days (the horizontal parts of the drilling days plot) has a major impact on total drilling days too, and that’s less related to PDC bits and more related to drilling and mitigation plans (e.g., lost circulation zones, casing and cement runs, etc.). Also note that consumable costs (drill bits, muds, cement, and steel) are a major cost component of geothermal wells, too.

This wasn’t just about drilling efficiency—it was about enabling deeper, hotter wells that were previously not economically accessible. For geothermal to scale, especially in conventional geothermal fields that have been written off as “depleted,” going deeper is critical, and so are these kinds of cost reductions that enable that.

2. Precision steering: Why one degree of deviation changes everything

Low to moderate enthalpy geothermal production wells depend on mechanical pumps to lift hot brine to the surface at very high flow rates. Because of the high temperature of the fluids and the need to prevent premature flashing, the pumps need to live inside the well, typically within the first 500-1500 ft of the well. At Lightning Dock, that means using line-shaft pumps, which requires a near perfectly vertical near-surface section of the well to operate reliably. A small deviation in this near-surface section of the well can cause the pump shaft to rub on the sides of the well and to accelerate wear and tear; shortening the operating life of the pump itself.

So we did something rarely done in geothermal: we actively steered the well even while drilling straight down, using mud motors and directional drilling assemblies designed to keep the bit perfectly vertical without sacrificing speed. Our vertical section stayed within ~1 degree of deviation from vertical over the first 1,800 feet—well within tolerances for optimal line shaft pump performance (Figure 2), while being one of the fastest sections of our well drilled (Figure 1).

Figure 2. At left, is a plot of the “dogleg severity” (DLS), which is a measure of how sharply a wellbore is changing direction over a specific length — essentially, how “bent” the well is, of the first 1800 ft of our well (where our line shaft pump lives). The directional DLS data show that we kept the well from deviating more than ~1 degree per 100 ft, within our line shaft pump specifications. At right, is a plot of the cumulative deviation from vertical over the first 1800 ft of the well. Note that deviation is less than 15 ft south and 5 ft east.

Drilling this near-surface section of the well vertical but fast allowed us to keep our drilling costs down while keeping the home of our line shaft pump optimal for a long pump life.

3. We steered sideways to cut costs and shrink our footprint

Most geothermal developers follow a simple but expensive playbook: drill where the heat is, then build roads, pipelines, and power lines to connect everything. It works, but it's costly and environmentally disruptive. We flipped the script.

At Lightning Dock, we used modern directional drilling assemblies to deviate from vertical and “steer” the well over the course of ~5000 feet underground to our reservoir targets ~2000 ft away, enabling us to keep the wellhead within ~500 ft of the existing plant. That allowed us to hit high-potential target zones without needing to build out new surface infrastructure far from our existing surface infrastructure, saving us significant topside capital costs (CapEx; Figure 3).

The results are great: we estimate a ~75% reduction in surface CapEx for gathering pipelines (Figure 3), as well as a similar reduction in land disturbance compared to a traditional layout. This kind of directional flexibility has been standard in oil and gas for years, but now, we’re showing its impact in geothermal, too.

4. Predicting the unpredictable: Next-gen subsurface modeling

Subsurface geology is inherently uncertain. Even with detailed maps and temperature data, in geothermal fields, no two wells are exactly alike. That’s why we use stochastic resource modeling—a probabilistic approach that simulates thousands of possible subsurface scenarios, each honoring available data but reflecting a different “version” of reality that can fit those data (Figure 4).

This novel modeling framework, developed in-house by our geoscience and data teams, helped us plan for a wider range of drilling conditions we might encounter: including lost circulation zones (where drilling fluid disappears into fractures). We used these simulations to improve our drilling program—all before breaking ground.

This is the first time such advanced modeling has been applied to a U.S. geothermal resource at this depth and scale. And the results were undeniable: fewer slowdowns, greater confidence in our approach, and improvements to our overall drilling program.

5. We designed for the industry’s largest pump, unlocking world-class flow

The final piece of the puzzle was matching the well design to new, bigger, high-efficiency geothermal pumps. Advances in line-shaft pump design now allow for larger diameters, deeper installation depths, and higher flow rates—all of which improve the economics of geothermal well fields, especially those relying on pumped production (low to moderate enthalpy reservoirs).

We engineered our well to accommodate these new, larger pumps, but we also needed the reservoir to be able to support that much production. Luckily, our gamble to oversize the intermediate casing (where the pump lives) paid off. After drilling into a network of open fractures within the reservoir and conducting a brief flow test, we measured a productivity index of ~50 gallons per minute per psi—enough to justify the installation of the largest geothermal line-shaft pump on the market, and to support the full capacity of the 15 MW-nameplate plant from just one well.

Our 14-inch line-shaft pump is now installed and running, and our new well is now piped into our power plant, and it has already ~tripled our plants output, alone. With this operating data, we can now compare our new wells production to production data across 18 operating geothermal well fields in Nevada (nearly all such well fields utilize pumps for production). Assuming a brine outlet temperature of 50 C (note that every plant has a slightly different brine outlet temp, depending on plant and brine conditions), we can model how many MWth are delivered to and utilized by these Nevada geothermal power plants, and compare them to our new well. This simple comparison shows just how exceptional our new LDG production well really is; providing more MWth than any operating well in Nevada (Figure 5). For pumped geothermal wells, it is the most productive geothermal well in the USA today.

This result not only confirms that Lightning Dock has untapped potential, it validates the second half of our thesis: that conventional geothermal has much more to give as we get deeper into their systems (remember that fault-hosted reservoirs are steeply dipping and not horizontal (!), therefore the deeper we drill, the farther into the belly of the system we get, and the closer to the hotter and more productive source).

Why this matters—for Lightning Dock and beyond

Lightning Dock is more than a one-off success. It’s a playbook we are ready to run again and again.

It’s a demonstration of what becomes possible when you apply today’s best drilling methods with a model-driven, data-rich targeting approach. Our five technical improvements added up to a single well that not only repowers an underperforming power plant, but moves the site’s limiting factor from subsurface resource to surface equipment, setting the stage for a likely expansion. That’s an incredible place to be.

The U.S. has hundreds of conventional geothermal sites that are overlooked, underutilized, or undervalued by the market. Lightning Dock is a signal to the entire energy industry that conventional geothermal is full of untapped promise and “forgotten” sites. With the right team, the right tools, and the right strategy, we can unlock gigawatts of clean, firm power quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably.

February 3, 2025

At Zanskar, we believe that geothermal is the best near-term option for clean, firm power at scale, and that scaling any form of geothermal energy quickly and cost efficiently starts with conventional geothermal resources (“hydrothermal”).

Our approach to do this has always focused on two key elements:

• First, demonstrating that there are numerous undiscovered or poorly characterized sites that modern, data collection methods and large compute statistical tools can help unlock. This approach blends natural and artificial intelligence that is informed by large, geospatial datasets.

• Second, demonstrating that these sites can produce far more energy than the industry has historically shown and than current markets think is possible. We do this by rigorously accounting for subsurface uncertainty with stochastic simulation, collecting targeted datasets, and making data driven drilling bets.

We have already proven the first part of our thesis: there are an enormous number of previously undiscovered or otherwise overlooked sites. Our field teams have been out collecting data for 3 years, often in challenging conditions, and their efforts have led to the identification of a large number of previously unknown sites. Depending on your definitions around the edges, we have found more in the last year than the industry did in the last decade and soon will have found more than any other company in history (Smith et al., 2025). Some of these sites have the potential to be world-class, and we have no doubt that many more such resources are out there (hint hint, wink wink).

The second part of our thesis requires drilling full sized production wells that we can flow, and therefore, has been harder to prove due to its greater capital and permitting requirements. It is our longstanding conviction that most hydrothermal resources can be more productive than their historical output. Modern tools and technologies will allow us to tap deeper into these resources and target them more accurately and precisely (Liang et al., 2025). This represents the next phase of growth for Zanskar. Through back-testing and proxy testing of our models in digital twin environments, we have become increasingly confident in our ability to prove this, and to demonstrate it at scale.

So when it was announced that the Lightning Dock geothermal field was being sold by its prior operator due to underperformance issues, we felt there was no better time to dive in head first and acquire it to test our approach (link). We had already collected our own unique data sets in that region and thus weren’t starting from scratch, but we knew it would be a steep learning curve learning to operate a plant and to design, engineer, procure and drill large-diameter, deep production wells to expand its output.

Now, less than 8 months after acquiring the field, we are proud to announce that we have completed our first step-out production well—and the outcome is as good as we could have hoped! We targeted an ~7500-8000 foot deep fracture zone with a directionally-drilled large diameter geothermal well, placing a bet on exceptional reservoir productivity and flow. This bet paid off. After a brief flow test, we observed a productivity index of ~50 GPM / PSI and fluid temperatures of ~325 F. Conservatively, this single production well is capable of fueling the entire 15 MW-nameplate power plant, shifting the site’s limitation to surface equipment instead of resource. Notably, this well is also positioned to become the most productive pumped geothermal well in operation today in the USA (Figure 1)*, and likely the world, after connecting it to the plant.

This outcome confirms the incredible potential of the Lightning Dock resource and is strong validation of the second part of our thesis that hydrothermal resources have more to give. We get that this outcome is n=1, and we are excited to prove that we are not (and Lightning Dock is not) a one hit wonder, so stay tuned.

Until then, we are incredibly proud of what the Zanskar team has accomplished, and we’re excited to see the impact these new technologies are having on driving down costs and reducing risks in subsurface development. We’re excited to share more details in the coming months.

*Footnote: Our brief flow test demonstrated a productivity index of ~50 GPM / PSI. With a high-flow pump installed, our new Lightning Dock well is modeled to produce ~5000 GPM at ~330 F. A simple query of all Nevada production wells for our new well’s metrics returns zero wells. During 2024, only 9 wells had temperatures > 325 F (Dixie Valley, Soda Lake and Steamboat) and only 8 wells had flow > 4000 GPM (McGinness Hills, Tungsten Mountain, Don Campbell), with no overlap between the two. The closest well in terms of thermal power delivered is McGinness Hills 36C-10, which had an average flow of 4077 GPM and fluid temperature of 315 F.

geothermalgeothermalenergyLDGLightning Dock

Lightning Dock is notable as the easternmost geothermal power plant in the United States and as the only utility scale geothermal power plant operating in New Mexico, having replaced the original Dale Burgett power plant in 2019. Electricity generated at Lightning Dock supplies the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) with carbon-free, firm baseload power for their customers around the State.

Zanskar has a history of providing exploration services and testing new subsurface characterization techniques at Lightning Dock. This acquisition represents an opportunity for continued research and growth within Zanskar’s renewable energy portfolio and reflects the company’s commitment to developing the largely untapped geothermal potential in the Western United States.

Carl Hoiland, CEO of Zanskar, stated, “We are excited to integrate Lightning Dock and its staff into our growing portfolio and team. In addition to providing clean power to New Mexico, the geological system and facility here are well suited for development and testing of new subsurface technologies that have the potential to make geothermal energy the most affordable and widely deployed source of firm renewable power. Our work here has already yielded promising early results that can be applied to our broader portfolio of geothermal projects. We look forward to this next stage of Lightning Dock’s history.”

Chip Schneider, Interim CEO of Cyrq Energy, added, “We are proud of what Cyrq Energy has achieved with Lightning Dock and are confident that Zanskar will continue to advance the project’s success. We look forward to working with Zanskar during the transition of operations.”

About Zanskar

Zanskar is an AI-native geothermal developer leveraging a suite of new technologies to improve the geothermal discovery and development process. In its work to decarbonize electricity generation, Zanskar is generating a pipeline of new discoveries and increasing the scalability of geothermal power generation. Zanskar is currently hiring a number of high-impact roles. Please visit www.zanskar.com to learn more

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SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals (”Zanskar”), the leading geothermal exploration company, announced today the closing of $30M in new funding led by Obvious Ventures. The round, which includes participation by previous investors such as Munich Re Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Safar Partners, and First Star Ventures, as well as newcomer Clearvision Ventures, enables Zanskar to scale its AI-led exploration technology to develop new geothermal resources.

As demand rises with more intensive computing and electrification of industries such as transportation, geothermal is an alternate, sustainable energy source that stabilizes a carbon-free grid and provides affordable electricity when the US existing energy infrastructure can’t meet demand. Geothermal utilizes heat from under the ground to produce 24/7 renewable energy, which Zanskar can pinpoint to dramatically expand the supply of power projects.

“We are ready for this next phase of growth and are excited to bring Obvious onto the team,” said Carl Hoiland, Zanskar CEO and Co-founder. “We want to make geothermal the cheapest and most widely deployed firm renewable on the planet. Since our Series A, we beat industry discovery records and developed new tools to unlock a deep pipeline of new geothermal resources needed in our energy transition.”

Since its last fundraise in 2022, Zanskar has established itself as a leader in geothermal discovery. Public accomplishments include winning multiple contracts with the United States Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Unit to explore new geothermal resources and advance their mission of energy resilience. In addition, its field data collection program collects more low-cost, early-stage field data every three months than what industry and academia combined did over the prior ten years. This early-stage field data program, in addition to rapidly iterating model predictions, enabled Zanskar to make more greenfield geothermal discoveries than the industry made over the prior ten years combined.

“Energy requirement forecasts for the electrification of industries like transportation, oil, and big tech data centers massively underestimated how much power will be needed in the U.S. and around the world to meet growing demand,” said Andrew Beebe, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures. “We’ve been scouring the planet for scalable clean power solutions to help address the current energy crisis and believe Zanskar has the disruptive technology needed to help the world avoid gridlock. With its AI-powered platform, Zanskar has made geothermal discovery more accessible and cost-effective, creating opportunities to find and distribute massive supplies of green energy now.”

“I still get excited every time we make a new discovery; it never gets old,” said Joel Edwards, Zanskar's CTO and Co-founder. “We have an incredible team who are running through all the barriers that prevent geothermal discovery and de-risking. I’m blown away by what the team has accomplished; at this pace, we’re set to do some incredible work with the new funding by bringing new tools to geothermal.”

Zanskar will deploy the funds to accelerate technology development and advance its portfolio of greenfield power projects to serve new partnerships. Please visit www.zanskar.com to learn more and connect.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is an AI-native geothermal developer leveraging a suite of new technologies to improve the geothermal discovery and development process. In its work to decarbonize electricity generation, Zanskar is generating a pipeline of new discoveries and increasing the scalability of geothermal power generation. Zanskar is currently hiring a number of high-impact roles. Please visit www.zanskar.com to learn more.

SALT LAKE CITY – August 26, 2022 — Zanskar, a geothermal exploration and technology company, today announced the closing of a $12 million Series A financing. Zanskar has positioned itself as the leading AI company for geothermal discovery, using its proprietary platform to identify and de-risk new geothermal energy resources.

With the proliferation of new geothermal extraction technologies and increasing demand for 24/7 carbon-free power, the geothermal industry is at an inflection point. However, a significant bottleneck persists in locating and characterizing electric-grade resources prior to development. Zanskar’s data-driven approach has already discovered new geothermal sites that are ready for further investment and is actively driving down the soft costs of geothermal development.

“We’re grateful for the support we have and are receiving,” said Carl Hoiland, Zanskar CEO. “These new investors are mission aligned and share our capital-light vision for unlocking this untapped energy giant.”

The opportunity is massive. A zero-carbon grid in the USA will require as much as 1 TW carbon-neutral baseload power generation, almost all of which will have to come from new power developments. Geothermal has several key advantages over other alternative firm energy sources, including lower costs, no fuel or commodity exposure, and a more consistent energy-generating profile across all seasons. Thanks to advances in subsurface technology, geothermal has the potential to fill a significant portion of this urgent market need.

“A resilient energy supply requires diverse forms of generation. At Union Square Ventures we believe that geothermal is one crucial and dramatically underdeveloped resource relative to its potential,” added Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures. “We are excited to support Zanskar in their mission to make geothermal development more scalable with predictive modeling and advanced data analytics.”

“We feel near-term urgency to expand the pipeline of geothermal resources to mitigate against grid instabilities and to accelerate the energy transition,” said board member Johanna Wolfson, a partner at Prime Impact Fund and Azolla Ventures. “The next 5-10 years are critical for unlocking a pathway towards 100% carbon-free generation, and we believe Zanskar’s discovery platform for geothermal will be key to doing so.”

Prime Impact Fund led a stealth Seed financing in April 2021, which supported the company’s growth from two to twelve full-time employees and the achievement of early technical milestones. Zanskar’s founders, Carl Hoiland and Joel Edwards, also received early support from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford University and fellowships sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office through Activate within Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Cyclotron Road Division.

“We are lucky to be following in the footsteps of prior geothermal explorers, who did so much high-risk work characterizing mostly unknown geothermal resource models”, said Joel Edwards, Zanskar CTO. “By building upon those lessons, and augmented by a convergence of technologies that have matured in the last ten years, we are discovering new resources at a scale and speed that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Zanskar will deploy the funds to advance its mission, which is to make geothermal power the cheapest form of widely-deployable, firm, carbon-free power generation on the planet, by advancing new partnerships with geothermal developers and accelerating technology development. The company is currently hiring for a number of high-impact roles. Please visit www.zanskar.com to learn more and to connect.

About Zanskar

Zanskar is a geothermal exploration and technology company composed of a team of data scientists, geoscientists and seismologists who are building a suite of new tools to improve the geothermal discovery and development process. In our work to decarbonize electricity generation, Zanskar is generating a pipeline of new discoveries of well characterized geothermal resources, reducing developers dry-hole risks, and increasing the scalability of geothermal power generation.

STUMBLING INTO STEAM

(August 26 2022) In 1948 a farmer in Animas Valley, New Mexico, drilled a water well to irrigate the dry desert landscape—they encountered boiling water at less than 100 feet depth.

In 1979 in eastern Oregon, Chevron Minerals was drilling deep exploration wells near the town of Vale in search of natural gas—they reported temperatures greater than 300 °F in a well less than 3,000 ft deep, when such temperatures aren’t typically expected until >10,000 ft.

In 2005-2006 Newcrest Resources, Inc. drilled twenty-three holes on the western edge of Edwards Creek Valley, Nevada, to test a gold prospect there—all were anomalously hot, some encountered steam, and subsequent holes found boiling temperatures as shallow as 200 feet depth.

Each was a serendipitous discovery—an accident. Each is now the location of an operating geothermal power plant that supplies carbon-free electricity, 24/7, year-round. And each will continue to do so for decades, if not centuries to come.

When you run the numbers on how many accidental discoveries have occurred versus how little of the land has been tested, it becomes clear that the vast majority of commercial-grade utility-scale geothermal resources are still undiscovered.

THIS IS WHAT KEEPS US UP AT NIGHT

The underpinnings of our energy future are just sitting out there.

Relying on luck would require decades to find them all; decades we don’t have.

So we’ve assembled a world class team with specialized expertise across geoscience, seismology, data science, and spatial statistics, and turned their focus entirely to reducing the risk of geothermal development and to discovering all of the imminently-developable commercial-grade geothermal resources in the USA within 5 years, expanding the pipeline of known resources so as to 10x geothermal development by 2030.

And thanks to scientific and technological breakthroughs, we’ve already begun to discover these hidden resources at a pace and scale that simply wasn’t possible before.

WHERE WE STARTED

In the late ‘00s, on a turquoise tributary of the Indus river, I held on to the edge of a raft, looking for the next geological outcrop. The high desert landscape in the rain shadow of the Himalayas was comfortingly like the western US Great Basin where I’d first trained to become a geologist. Yet even in Zanskar—one of the most stunning and remote mountain regions I’ve ever studied—the effects of climate change were on full display. At the base of retreating glaciers we pulled some final samples and prepared for our return.

Zanskar holds a hidden abundance beneath its desert veneer. Roiling hot springs at >14,000 feet elevation are just the tip of the iceberg, the other hot upwellings and reservoirs still hidden beneath the surface. It is those resources that may soon usher in a new era of natural abundance in that region—an energy abundance not dependent on imports nor on limited, carbon-emitting resources. These domestic geothermal resources could last for untold generations—a veritable Shangri-La. But, notably, Zanskar is not unique in this regard; it simply offers a vision of what abundance lies in wait across the globe, just beneath our feet, even in the most remote and surficially barren places.

It was on that trip that I met Joel Edwards, with whom, over a decade later, we would launch a company named after the region. In the intervening years we each had the privilege to work with some of the best geothermal and exploration researchers in the world, to watch and to participate in the development of new technologies that would improve geothermal exploration. Today, we’re continuing to build upon that research, inspired by the vision of Zanskar.

In tandem with announcing our Series A, we want to provide some context for our work, some insight into what motivates us, and an explanation of why our team is so hellbent on our mission of accelerating the discovery and development of geothermal energy around the globe.

THE PROBLEM

You may have expected me to lead with climate change here as the problem.

And a few years ago, I would have.

Except I’m confident now that we humans are going to solve climate change, one way or another. Likely in my lifetime. And it will be one of the most singular collective achievements of our species.

The buildout of the new energy economy is already occurring at an unprecedented pace, but it needs to go faster still. And geothermal is arguably the best way to accelerate this transition without the compromises that other solutions require, whether in land usage, metals mined, or in economic costs to the world’s most vulnerable.

THE NEED FOR 24/7 POWER, WITHOUT COMPROMISES

Solar and wind have made huge strides over the past decade, declining nearly 10x in cost and increasing more than that in deployment rates. But solar and wind alone will never suffice due to their intermittency and inherent geographic limitations. The latest modeling suggests that the US will still need ~1 TW of “firm” (i.e., always on) carbon-neutral generation capacity by 2050. The non-geothermal solutions to the firm capacity problem are limited and more costly: nuclear fission and fusion, fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration, hydropower, biomass, hydrogen, and long-duration storage technologies. Each of those alternatives has its own technical, land use, and/or geopolitical challenges to overcome.

”Conventional” geothermal resources, on the other hand, don’t require anything other than off-the-shelf technologies to utilize. And given their small footprint, the ready availability of the skills to develop them, and their low levelized costs, we could do so in just a few years time if we only knew where to drill the wells. The conventional resource potential is large enough by some estimates to more than double the total amount of renewable electricity generated in the USA (including from hydro, wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal combined) and sufficient to support full decarbonization of the grid when combined with solar and wind. And, importantly, a robust conventionals industry would serve as a springboard for investment in and unlocking of “unconventional” geothermal resources over the subsequent decade(s), which have the promise of nearly limitless energy abundance.

All this to say, geothermal has the potential to solve energy, forever. But if the industry can’t achieve meaningful growth within the next 5-10 years, it will be pushed aside in favor of more imminently scalable—but more environmentally and economically costly—forms of energy. This is geothermal’s moment.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Beyond providing power, these same resources can also be used to provide industrial-scale heat, or to accelerate the kinetics of geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide, or even, in some instances, to provide a source of critical minerals like lithium that can be extracted with less environmental impact than traditional mining methods.

Optimism that geothermal is at an inflection point has never been higher, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve seen more venture capital investment in the last 2 years than in the last two decades. However, despite this excitement, geothermal still represents only ~0.4% of electricity generation in the USA.

A major reason for geothermal’s still stagnant growth is that it is the only type of power development whose future output cannot be predicted with high confidence until after significant capital expenditure to drill test and confirmation wells into the resource—and in this sense, the capital and technical requirements are more akin to oil & gas and mining than to other power developments.

Even in spite of the industry’s presently low drilling success rates and its resultant high costs of capital, conventional geothermal development is already cost competitive with (and in many cases much cheaper than) fossil energy alternatives in many geographies. This means that even incremental improvements in exploration success can have a meaningful impact and be more readily commercialized, snowballing into bigger breakthroughs over time. If not for its real and perceived risk, geothermal would be, on an unsubsidized basis, amongst the cheapest forms of electricity generation currently possible, even when competing with wind and solar.

SUBSURFACE UNCERTAINTY’S HIDDEN COST

As you advance any geothermal project, you invest increasingly larger amounts of capital to decrease the risk of the resource to the point of feasibility. This work involves collecting new datasets, including drilling test and confirmation wells, as well as reservoir testing. Currently this work is led by experts who tell you which data to collect and where to drill—a bespoke process. Although they are excellent at what they do, it is nearly impossible for them to estimate the true uncertainty or risk of these decisions, making it difficult to rapidly scale development of new resources and to confidently allocate capital to the space.

Geothermal’s upfront risk, and its even greater perceived risk, has led to it having amongst the highest soft costs and costs of capital of any power development. Soft costs are all of the costs other than the direct equipment costs, which can include transmission studies, engineering reports, financing costs, etc. Recall that the decline in solar and wind costs this past decade was two-fold: first a decline in the equipment costs, but the final victory was really a significant reduction in soft costs.

The inherent risk of exploration and the fact that there are no guaranteed outcomes is the key driver of soft costs in geothermal. It leads to:

• failed wells which are expensive but contribute nothing to power generation;

• high costs of capital, especially in the riskiest phases of exploration and development;

• longer project timelines, which are especially penalizing given the higher costs of capital.

Because of the high perceived risk, geothermal developers tend to only be able to access capital in the range of 10-20%, with smaller developers paying more. Compare this with weighted average cost of capital (WACC) of 3-6% for utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind range, depending on the region, and it becomes clear why geothermal has had a hard time competing. If geothermal development could be financed at 3-10% WACC’s it could generate electricity at significantly lower levelized costs of electricity (LCOE).

As a result, mitigating risk and increasing scalability in geothermal can have more impact on its overall cost to the consumer than decreasing drilling or turbine costs.

ZANSKAR’S MISSION & TECH

Zanskar’s mission is simple: to make geothermal power the most affordable form of widely-deployable, 24/7, carbon-free generation on the planet.

As part of doing so, and as mentioned earlier, we’ve set out to discover all of the imminently-developable commercial-grade geothermal resources in the USA within 5 years, so as to 10x geothermal development by 2030. We consider that the low-hanging fruit. But it doesn’t stop there.

We think our work will have a catalytic impact on the entire geothermal industry (see chart below):

1. Better exploration will lead to fewer dry wells and to the identification of far more high-grade resources, decreasing CapEx and increasing the potential scale of the industry.

2. Proving the repeatability of exploration successes and the ability to forecast power output earlier will lead to lower and lower WACC, a major component of soft costs.

3. As the US geothermal industry scales from 3 to 30 GW-equivalent, economies of scale kick in, combined with maturation of new drilling and power plant tech will lead to further CapEx declines, enabling the next scale-up from 30 to 300 GW-equivalent.

Simplified model for estimating unsubsidized levelized cost of electricity (LCOE, y-axis) as a function of weighted average cost of capital (WACC, x-axis) and CapEx intensity (in USD per MW, curved black lines) for a geothermal power development. Conventional geothermal today tends to fall in the range of $4M-$6M / MW CapEx, while unconventional geothermal today tends to be >$10M / MW CapEx. Variables contributing to differences in capital cost per MW include the depth and complexity of drilling, temperature of the resource, permeability and connectivity of the reservoir, parasitic load, etc.

At Zanskar, we’re focused on the first 2 levers, which our models show have the greatest leverage on near-term LCOE. And, we’re excited by the progress we’ve already made across these three technology fronts:

1. Leveraging big data and predictive modeling to discover new resources.

2. Leveraging stochastic geo-modeling and decision science to optimize the exploration workflow for de-risking known resources.

3. Leveraging advanced seismic characterization technologies to reduce dry-hole risk when drilling and to better understand reservoir characteristics prior to operations.

A FUTURE OF ENERGY ABUNDANCE

We’re driven by a belief that our species is on the verge of solving energy forever—not just eliminating the carbon emissions part of it, but also ensuring that we never have to face running out of energy again. Geothermal has the potential to enable an energy future that is both carbon-free and near infinitely abundant. Which is why Zanskar is burning the midnight oil with an unprecedented urgency to ensure our lamps never need oil again. In short, we’re working to usher in an era of energy abundance, for everyone.

We’d love for you to join us.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

We’re shamelessly bullish about the future of geothermal, but we admittedly can’t see the future. Accordingly, please know that there are innumerable ways in which the industry and our company, Zanskar, may evolve differently than how I’ve forecast here. And if we ultimately fail, I hope it’s because someone else delivered better, cheaper, and sooner than we did; and not due to us having not given it our best shot. In any case, please don’t base any financial decisions on my statements nor consider this a solicitation to invest in Zanskar. If anything, consider it an invitation to grab a drink together next time you’re in Utah and to discuss solving energy together.