India commissions first geothermal wells as US backs 21 drilling tests

India's two wells are a small start. They are 1,000 metres deep, and Puga Valley sits more than 14,000 feet above sea level. They will support reservoir evaluation and lead toward India's first 1 MW demonstration geothermal power project. That evaluation comes first. Any decision on the 1 MW demonstration plant comes after that. India notified its National Policy on Geothermal Energy in September 2025.

The US list is separate. On 30 October 2026 the Department of Energy's Office of Geothermal published 21 field-scale tests and exploration drilling projects. Five are full-scale enhanced geothermal systems trials and sixteen are exploration wells. Both halves aim at the same problem: drilling risk.

For utilities, investors and regulators, the value of this work is information, not electricity. Each well that confirms a reservoir, or fails to, tells the industry whether drilling costs can fall far enough for geothermal to compete as baseload power. No completion dates are attached to the 21 projects.

Washington funds 21 geothermal drilling tests

The portfolio is split by purpose. Five projects are running field-scale enhanced geothermal systems tests at depths and temperatures appropriate for full-scale development. Fervo Energy is drilling, completing and stimulating wells in Elmore County, Idaho. It will also deploy what the department calls the first high-temperature three-component geophone array at or above 200°C. Quaise Energy is running a field-scale demonstration on the southern flank of Newberry Volcano in central Oregon, where bottomhole temperatures reach 265°C to 365°C. That is above the range where most conventional EGS tools and materials have been validated.

Two more tests sit in the West. AlterG Resources is testing a deep horizontal well pair in Pershing and Churchill Counties, Nevada. Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals is drilling a short-lateral horizontal injection well at Lightning Dock in Hidalgo County, New Mexico.

The University of Utah is designing, drilling and testing an EGS doublet at Dixie Valley West in Nevada. The aim is to show that a reservoir built next to an existing hydrothermal system can sustain circulation and deliver commercially relevant heat. Those five tests decide whether engineered reservoirs work at scale.

The sixteen exploration projects are the quieter half. They gather subsurface data to characterise and potentially confirm next-generation and conventional hydrothermal resources. DAVINCI EP, for one, will drill and test two paired horizontal confirmation wells in the Brawley Known Geothermal Resource Area in California. Zanskar Geothermal and Minerals is also testing a confirmation method using directionally drilled deep wells from a single pad.

Drilling is the bottleneck

Cost starts at the bit. In the western United States, geothermal drilling rates commonly run 150 to 250 ft/day. That is about an order of magnitude lower than rates in continental oil and gas development in shale rock, according to the Office of Geothermal. The rock is hard, fractured and abrasive, and formations are often underpressured, which causes circulation loss during drilling.

Well design adds to the bill. Geothermal wells are often more than twice the diameter of oil and gas wells, and casing and cement can account for as much as 50% of a well's cost.

High-temperature environments need specialised materials and tool designs, which raises the price of the downhole electronics, elastomers and monitoring gear a well requires. State-of-the-art rigs and their higher daily rental costs are often avoided because margins on many geothermal projects are tight. Data is the cheaper fix. The Geothermal Data Repository held 764 TB of information, about 60 million downloads, 1,400 datasets and 145 data providers as of mid-2026, the Oil & Gas Journal reported. The repository supports district heating pilots, play-fairway analysis and the FORGE enhanced geothermal systems site in Utah. The Office of Geothermal has also spent more than $9 million on machine learning across two phases, $5.5 million for exploration and $3.5 million for operations.

Singapore plans a 15-month study

Singapore's numbers are bigger and its timetable longer. An earlier survey found the country's underground heat sources could generate more than 60 times its current annual electricity consumption, The Straits Times reported. The government said on 26 October that a 15-month feasibility study will begin at the end of 2026, run by a consortium of Surbana Jurong and GLJ. Singapore's resource is dry, unfractured hot rock several kilometres down, not the hot water reservoirs found in volcanically active regions. The dense urban environment will also limit how many plants can be built. A 2022 report found emerging technology including geothermal could supply around 10% of the country's energy needs by 2050. The minister said the amount of electricity produced will depend on cost, technical feasibility and the pace of advances in deep drilling technology.

What happens next

The Singapore study will cover safety, technical viability and cost. Minister for Energy, Trade and Industry Tan See Leng said the country has not made a decision on tapping geothermal energy and that one could take many years.

The US list carries no completion dates. The Office of Geothermal says the field tests should reduce technical and development risk and give investors data for future commercial projects. Until wells get cheaper, progress will be measured in drilling rates and cost per well, not in announced capacity.