2026 GRC Panel - Future of Geothermal in Texas and Gulf Coast: From Resource Potential to Commercial Reality
Wednesday, September 23
1:30 PM – 3:30 PM | Session 7A: Panel - Future of Geothermal in Texas and Gulf Coast: From Resource Potential to Commercial Reality
The U.S. Gulf Coast, particularly Texas and adjacent states, contains significant but underdeveloped geothermal resources. Multiple pilot projects, feasibility studies, and technology demonstrations are currently underway, yet no commercial geothermal power plants are operating in this region today.
Unlike the western U.S., where geothermal development has benefited from high geothermal gradients, decades of exploration, minimal competition from low-cost natural gas, and sustained government support, the Gulf Coast presents a fundamentally different context. Here, geothermal must compete within a natural-gas-dominated power market, while also navigating lower gradients, regulatory novelty, and limited geothermal operating precedent.
At the same time, the region offers unique advantages: rapidly growing electricity demand, an extensive oil and gas infrastructure, subsurface database, world-class drilling and completions expertise, a skilled workforce, business-friendly policies, and opportunities for co-production, direct-use applications, and grid-support services, and data centers. These factors make the Gulf Coast a compelling—if unconventional—testbed for next-generation geothermal commercialization.
This panel will explore what it will take to move geothermal from “potential” to “projects” in Texas and the broader Gulf Coast.
The panel will address four core questions:
1. What makes Gulf Coast geothermal fundamentally different from western U.S. geothermal?
2. Which resource classes and technologies are most viable in Texas and adjacent states?
3. What end-use cases (power, heat, hybrid systems) can work economically today?
4. What policy, market, and partnership models are needed to reach commercial deployment?
Moderator: Ken Wisian, HotRock Geothermal, Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin
Panelists:
- Shuvajit Bhattacharya, Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin
- Cole Fisher, T5 Holdings
- Lev Ring, Sage Geosystems
- Barry Smitherman, TxGEA