At the World Geothermal Congress in Calgary last week, you could name an attendee’s tribe inside a minute by the words they used: conventional, stimulation, closed loop, superhot rock. The camps talk to each other less than you might expect, and they divide on three tradeoffs: how much heat they pull from the rock, how much fluid they lose doing it, and can you build it anywhere.
Enhanced geothermal, Fervo and its peers, fractures hot rock and pulls heat fast by convection. The price is water lost to the formation. Closed loop, Eavor and XGS, seals the wellbore and loses very little. The price is a slow heat rate and higher upfront capital cost. Conventional hydrothermal, 17 GW worldwide, is the proven option, bound to the rare geology it needs. Superhot, Quaise and Mazama and 400 C, promises a step change in heat the engineering cannot yet deliver. Four bets, one pool of capital.
That isolation looks like a problem. Capital is finite, and a sector fighting itself for dollars fragments the story for every allocator trying to underwrite it. Fervo just priced a roughly $1.89 billion IPO at a $7.7 billion valuation. Eavor put 0.5 MW on a German grid in December, a quarter of its 2 MW first phase. Those are different risk profiles reaching for the same check.
But the cost of the tribalism is smaller than it seems. Below the surface the tribes stand on common ground. Fervo’s edge is multistage fracturing and fluid conformance lifted wholesale from the Permian, and SAGD operations in the Oil Sands. Eavor drilled Geretsried to 4.5 km with SLB. Quaise runs Nabors rigs and has raised $120 million. The conversion side leans on off-the-shelf hardware, ORC and flash steam, that predates all of them. The result? While the subsurface dialects diverge, the toolset is shared.
That shared toolset is why the fragmentation does not have to hurt. When a service company shaves a week off a lateral or drops cost per meter, every tribe benefits at once. Fervo cut drilling times 70% between its pilot and Cape Station. That learning curve does not respect tribal borders. It is one curve, and the whole sector rides it, whichever subsurface approach turns out to have the most velocity.
The hyperscalers already sense it. Meta signed 150 MW with Sage and another 150 MW with XGS. Google lined up both Fervo and Ormat through the same Nevada tariff. They are spreading chips across the tribes because the ground underneath is the same.
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