This article was written for Energi Media by Markham Hislop November 14, 2025.
Canada is sitting on a world-class opportunity to build a world-scale advanced geothermal industry, yet the federal government’s climate competitiveness strategy barely acknowledges it. That silence isn’t just puzzling, it’s risky. Because if we’re serious about electrification, industrial heat decarbonization, energy security, and creating new clean energy industrial opportunities, then advanced geothermal isn’t optional. It’s indispensable.
And the irony is this: Canada already has everything it needs to lead. We just haven’t decided to act like it.
The interviews (here, here, here) underlying this column offer a clear picture. Start with the basics: the new generation of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) is nothing like the “Iceland model” of tapping naturally occurring hot-water reservoirs. As geoscientist Gord Brasnett, the co-author of the Cascade Institute report The Deep Heat Advantage: A techno-economic analysis of Enhanced Geothermal Systems in western and northwestern Canada, explained, Canada’s geology isn’t blessed with those “geologic unicorn” hotspots where heat and water sit conveniently near the surface.
Instead, our opportunity lies deeper — literally. EGS drills several kilometres down, engineers a fracture network between two wells, and circulates water through hot rock to recover that heat. It’s modern, modular, and powered by technologies developed in Canada’s own oil and gas sector. In other words, we are already experts at the hardest part of geothermal: drilling deep, hot, technically complex wells.
Canada’s engineering capability is so strong that Canadians are already doing this work internationally. “We have folks doing insulated drill pipe in deep volcanoes in Oregon,” Brasnett explained, “and Canadians deploying drilling expertise in Germany.” Our people are helping build the geothermal future — just not here.
Why not? Partly because we lack the policy framework to bring them home. The European Union gave Ever Technologies a €90-million grant to build its first closed-loop commercial project south of Munich, supported by Germany’s €251/MWh feed-in tariff. That’s industrial policy. That’s how new clean-energy sectors are built.
By contrast, Canada’s 2025 federal budget — marketed as a “climate competitiveness strategy” — barely mentioned geothermal at all. As Brasnett said, geothermal remains “overlooked,” both because it is literally underground and because Canada has not yet deployed commercial-scale projects that would put it on Ottawa’s radar. But that invisibility has consequences. Without a strategic signal from government, capital, talent, and supply chains drift elsewhere.
Canada is uniquely suited to scale this industry
Alberta, in particular, has the deepest bench of drilling, reservoir engineering, geoscience, and oilfield manufacturing expertise in the country. “Eighty-five percent of the skills from the oil and gas sector transfer to geothermal,” Basnett noted, citing International Energy Agency estimates. Alberta has more engineers per capita than anywhere else in Canada, and its industrial parks — Calgary’s Foothills, Edmonton’s sprawling fabrication corridors — already manufacture rigs, drilling assemblies, subsurface tools, and sensors perfectly suited to geothermal applications.
This is not a workforce that needs reinvention. It needs redeployment.
The technology fit is equally strong. Much of the innovation that advanced geothermal now relies on — insulated drill pipe, high-temperature electronics, durable casing, cementing techniques — was pioneered in the oil sands decades ago and proven at commercial scale. Canada is already exporting these tools and techniques to the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. “These are made-in-Canada solutions… deployed worldwide,” Gord said. “It’s a great story we don’t tell loudly enough”.
And the economics are compelling. With deeper plays targeting hotter rock, the efficiency gains more than offset the higher drilling costs. Gord’s modelling shows advanced geothermal achieving levelized costs below $50 per megawatt-hour. That’s competitive with gas and with solar-plus-storage. For clean, firm, dispatchable power, that price is extraordinary.
Even more compelling is the global opportunity. Dozens of countries share Canada’s geology: deep, hot, dry rock, but no natural hydrothermal reservoirs.
“There are far more places that look geologically like Canada than like Iceland,” Brasnett emphasized. If we can prove out deep EGS here, it becomes a “turnkey capability” exportable to Australia, central Europe, Africa, and beyond. In a world desperate for clean baseload power, especially with electrification and data centre demand spiking, that capability is priceless.
So why isn’t geothermal a pillar of Canada’s climate competitiveness strategy?
Partly, as Brasnett carefully noted, because Canada has a habit of “spreading too little butter over too much toast,” avoiding bold bets in favour of lukewarm, incremental efforts. Meanwhile, China is filing “unbelievable numbers of patents” in subsurface technology while the United States has spent a decade running the Utah FORGE living lab to de-risk deep geothermal through coordinated research, drilling, and reservoir engineering.
Canada has done none of that.
Yet nothing prevents us from starting now. The regulatory barriers have largely been resolved; Alberta and BC now have geothermal resource development acts in place, eliminating past ambiguity about rights and permitting. The supply chain exists. The workforce exists. The technology exists. The economics are lining up.
What’s missing is the strategic decision to treat advanced geothermal the way Europe treated wind or China treated solar and batteries — as a national growth pole with backward linkages, forward linkages, and technology linkages that drive prosperity across entire supply chains.
Canada has a once-in-a-generation chance to lead in a sector perfectly aligned with its strengths. If we continue to ignore it, others will not.
We don’t need to invent this industry. We just need to build it here.