In Trump’s January 20th executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” he criticized the “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” on America’s energy resources passed in recent years. He then immediately imposed burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations on offshore wind development, halting new permitting and withdrawing all federal waters from leasing.
Given that Trump has frozen billions of dollars in climate and clean energy funding, it might seem that climate technologies and Trump’s energy policies are mutually exclusive. As a PhD researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on technologies for decarbonizing society, this made me question if my work is in vain. However, after delving deeper, I believe there is a path forward that both Trump and climate tech advocates can get behind.
In listing our domestic energy resources as “oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical minerals, and nuclear energy,” Trump interestingly includes 3 clean energy sources – hydropower, biofuels, and nuclear energy – while leaving out solar and wind. What sets these two apart is that they are intermittent – solar and wind generate power at the whims of the natural environment. It is clear that Trump highly values reliability, as in his order “declaring a national energy emergency” he mentions it five times in the first five paragraphs.
By focusing on clean technologies that utilize domestic energy resources while being affordable and reliable, America can maintain momentum for clean energy innovation. And while no current energy technology is simultaneously cheap, reliable, and clean, several options can achieve all these criteria with federal support.
One example is geothermal energy. Geothermal relies on drilling thousands of meters underground to collect steam heated by the Earth, which is then either used directly to heat commercial or residential buildings or passed through a steam turbine to generate electricity, doing so with only 5% the emissions of natural gas. Geothermal solves the reliability issue, since heat is continuously replenished by the Earth’s core.
But conventional geothermal is currently limited to places where steam can flow easily through the underground rocks, with projected capacity expected to meet only 1.8% of electricity demand in 2050. Advanced drilling techniques borrowed from the oil and gas industry, such as horizontal drilling and hydro-shearing, can be used to create paths for steam to flow instead of relying on natural formations – expanding geothermal’s potential by 23 times to an impressive 600 gigawatts of power capacity, able to meet almost 30% of our 2050 energy needs based on demand projections.
However, there are two main issues with these enhanced geothermal systems that need to be addressed: cost and environmental impacts. First, such systems are costly in their early stages but are well-positioned to scale. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a government research agency, predicts that with technological advances in exploration, drilling, and production output, piggybacking off of advances in the oil and gas sector, the cost of electricity produced by enhanced geothermal systems can decrease to almost one tenth of current levels over the next decade, to 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, competitive with conventional natural gas or coal power plants.
Promisingly, in 2023 enhanced geothermal companies received $420 million in investments, $50 million of which came from oil and gas companies, due to the overlap of expertise and infrastructure involved. For example, Liberty Energy, a major fracking company whose CEO Chris Wright is Trump’s Energy Secretary, has invested $10 million in enhanced geothermal firms.
Beyond cost, the second main issue with enhanced geothermal is by using drilling techniques that expand underground fissures, there is a potential for inducing seismic activity, which is concerning to me both as a citizen and environmentalist. Adequate site characterization, planning, monitoring, and fast response times are all crucial to prevent seismic events and should be included in protocols and government regulation of these plants.
Another energy technology that can be affordable, clean, and reliable is thermal energy storage. Heating during manufacturing can contribute up to 15% of a product’s total cost, and accounts for almost 10% of global emissions. Instead of relying on combustion of potentially expensive fuels for heat, we can use the free natural resources of the sun by using its heat to power manufacturing processes. Due to the sun’s intermittency, instead of directly using the sun’s heat, we could store this thermal energy for later use.
The challenge is providing heat at adequate temperatures for industrial processes, some of which require temperatures up to 1500°C. Even at these extreme temperatures, cheap materials like concrete, bricks, or graphite can be used to store heat. While nascent, this technology has the potential to be cheaper than natural gas combustion, despite the potential drawback of high up-front capital cost. Encouragingly, manufacturers in industries such as cement, fertilizers, and food are already adopting thermal energy storage solutions.
These are just two examples of technologies that utilize our domestic resources and can be affordable and reliable while also reducing emissions. Further federal support can help these technologies achieve cost-competitiveness. To facilitate opportunities in a Trump era, I propose three actions.
First, clean tech companies should highlight bipartisan potential, emphasizing to policymakers how they can solve Trump’s energy problems by showing evidence of their systems’ affordability and reliability. Companies should highlight their use of domestic energy resources and their ability to utilize existing infrastructure or the expertise of the oil and gas industry, attracting partnerships for demonstrating and deploying new technologies.
Second, policymakers should foster collaboration, creating hubs for geothermal energy or clean heating, taking as a model GreenLab, an industrial park in Denmark that connects manufacturers, clean technology companies, and researchers. These hubs could facilitate knowledge sharing, resource pooling, and large-scale testing among companies.
Lastly, the federal government should invest more broadly, taking a pragmatic “all-of-the-above” approach to energy technologies, expanding beyond fossil fuels, hydropower, biofuels, and nuclear power to develop new energy resources that can be affordable and reliable. Programs like Shell Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arms of large oil and gas companies, should receive a greater portion of these companies’ spending.
The challenges posed by Trump’s policies can become opportunities for innovation. Climate technologies that efficiently utilize domestic energy resources and offer attractive incentives for traditional energy providers while being affordable, reliable, and clean can bridge political divides while driving progress. We can turn an era of “drill, baby, drill” into one of progress for a sustainable tomorrow.