A geothermal developer has secured more than $135 million to reach new depths and advance superhot rock development in Central Oregon’s Newberry Volcano.

Texas-based Mazama Energy says the investments, made by major venture capital companies and oil businesses, will allow it to continue its quest to drill thousands of feet below the surface to harvest heat to generate renewable power.

The funding will allow Mazama to create its Project Ceres — a horizontal well development which the company says has the potential to generate 15 megawatts of electricity in 2027. That would be enough to power the equivalent of 4,500 average households.

“We see this as an investment in Oregon’s energy future,” said Pete Lumley, Mazama’s communications director.

Deschutes County Chair Commissioner Phil Chang concurred, applauding the investment for both its local and its potential global impact.

If geothermal companies eventually deliver as much electricity as they forecast, Chang said, the region could become a net-exporter of energy and, in turn, “our community can make a meaningful contribution to the efforts to fight climate change globally,” he said.

Drilling deeper into the earth to harvest heat for energy has recently been gaining steam in the U.S. as the next big renewable energy source.

Conventional geothermal energy has been used for decades, including in Klamath Falls, but it requires a natural reservoir of hot water or steam near the earth’s surface to generate electricity, which restricts where this technology can be used.

Now, many companies are working to figure out ways to access the heat beneath our feet to use as a baseload, or continuous, energy source, beyond what conventional geothermal can deliver.

Besides Mazama, there’s been a flurry of investment in geothermal opportunities in Oregon’s Newberry Volcano and across the Northwest.

Quaise Energy, another Texas-based geothermal development company, has developed millimeter wave drilling technology to reach superhot rock depths. The company is currently working on developing a 50-megawatt geothermal plant called Project Obsidian by 2030.

Virginia-based Hexagon Energy announced earlier this month that it plans to explore geothermal opportunities on Weyerhaeuser Co.-owned lands in Oregon and Washington. And in August, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sold geothermal development rights to 9,500 acres on Mount Hood National Forest to unnamed developers for more than $1 million.

New technology to meet a growing need

The boost in funding in geothermal is coming as regional power planners, researchers and independent analyses show the Pacific Northwest is going to need a lot of energy to keep up with growing demand, including from new large power users like data centers.

Mazama Energy is attempting to build what it says will be the hottest engineered geothermal system ever through an enhanced geothermal system called superhot rocks.

“We’re not just drilling a hotter hole, we’re engineering the whole system,” Lumley told OPB on Friday. “It’s a sustainable energy source, and it allows us to extract the heat from the hot rock below and turn that into electrons.”

The company does this by drilling thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface and injecting water into an engineered hot rock reservoir. The water absorbs the earth’s heat and returns to the surface as steam. That steam drives a turbine to generate power. The steam is then cooled, converted back into water, and reinjected into the reservoir to allow the cycle to continue.

“It’s continuous, unlike some other renewables, where they’re cyclic through the day — if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, we don’t have the power,” Lumley said.

Last year, the company drilled more than 10,000 feet below the surface, reaching underground areas with temperatures as high as 629 degrees Fahrenheit.

Then, the company drilled a second well to the same depth in about two weeks, or 80% faster than the first well, Lumley said.

The company is pushing to drill faster as it works to make the case for its business model and demonstrate that it has the potential to compete with oil and gas, he said.

”We drilled in 80% faster; that means we’re saving over $100,000 a day,” Lumley said.

Now, Mazama is going deeper.

In its next phase, called Project Athena, the company is going to drill more than 15,000 feet deep.

Deeper means hotter rock, Lumley said, and that means more heat can be harvested for energy use.

“We need to drill fewer wells,” he said. “We need to use less land, and we use less water during the drilling and the production of the electrons.”

If successful, Lumley said Mazama Energy could hit two milestones — generating 50 megawatts by 2029 and up to 200 megawatts by 2030. That’s enough energy to power about 200,000 average households.

And if that is successful, Lumley said the company forecasts it could produce 10 gigawatts of continuous commercial energy at Newberry some day.

Boosting the local workforce and economy

The $135 million investment toward Mazama’s geothermal development is a reflection that this form of energy is now technologically and economically mature and viable, which can have many benefits for the local community, Deschutes County Chair Chang said Monday.

“Adding cost-effective renewable generation of this type is pretty exciting, not just for Central Oregon, but for the state,” he said.

Chang said these kinds of investments in the region could play out big for the residents, meaning potential for a lot of high-skill and high-wage jobs.

He’s also hopeful geothermal companies based in the region can reach what is known as a “benefits agreement” with local communities. That could include a commitment to invest in the development of a renewable energy workforce.

“This could be training programs in high schools, community colleges, and OSU Cascades,” Chang said. That could “produce a workforce not just for enhanced geothermal systems, but also for a variety of other kinds of energy generation and energy efficiency type projects.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/22/texas-geothermal-company-gets-135-million-funding-boost/