These Oil Stocks Just Found Their Next Gold Rush

The geopolitical volatility has been in full force ever since ringing in the new year, dramatically escalating to a point that history hasn’t witnessed in many, many years. 

Venezuela is seeing the dawn of a new day. 

Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei is quaking in fear as the walls of his regime start to quite literally crumble around him. 

And now “mysterious” drones out of Ukraine are striking Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers — at least several tankers have been struck in the last few weeks. 

But I want you to take a deep breath.

And if you really want to see the future of American energy, don’t look at Washington… turn your head to what our drillers are doing behind the curtain. 

Because the same crews who turned shale from a joke and last resort for oil into a superpower are poking the Earth for something new. 

Look, U.S. oil companies have built an industrial machine over the last fifteen years that can drill incredibly long laterals with surgical precision, steer downhole tools like a videogame controller, and crack rock open on command.

Now that machine is getting a second career.

This time, they’re starting to look for more than just hydrocarbons, now they’re searching for heat.

If there’s one thing that we know for sure, it’s that U.S. oil companies have become powerfully efficient drillers over the last few years. Remember, it’s been that expert drilling that has helped keep U.S. oil output at record levels DESPITE  the fact that fewer rigs are out in the field. 

And in a nation that’s about to discover what “24/7 electricity demand” really means, that matters.

You and I both know the immense drawbacks to the most popular renewable sources of energy. 

The Achilles heel for solar and wind has always been their intermittent nature — something that future AI data centers simply cannot use. 

Solar takes nights off.

Wind plays hard-to-get sometimes.

Batteries help… until they run into physics, cost, and scale; that’s not to mention the fact that we still need a huge amount of investment to get up to snuff. 

Meanwhile, America is building a high-voltage economy that never sleeps, powered by data centers, AI workloads, electrified industry, and a grid that’s already getting asked to do the impossible.

Developing reliable baseload power from renewable energy isn’t a science fair project anymore.

In fact, it’s turning into the next practical piece of the U.S. energy mix, built by the same people who already know how to drill, build, and scale.

Well, we may finally have an answer.

Tapping the Earth’s Energy Furnace

Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS, is the simple idea that geothermal shouldn’t be limited to a handful of lucky places where nature did all the work.

Instead of waiting for perfect underground reservoirs, EGS uses modern drilling and reservoir engineering to make the resource, using the heat that already exists beneath huge portions of the country.

But here’s the catch… 

Geothermal energy is still very small today. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s weak. 

It’s small because it’s been boxed in by geography.

In the United States, geothermal power currently accounts for about 0.4% of total utility-scale electricity generation, producing around 17 billion kilowatt-hours in 2023. 

That’s not nothing, but it’s not the kind of clickbait number that draws eyeballs either.

The real story is what geothermal does with a relatively small footprint: It shows up every day, every hour, like an old-school power plant.

Globally, geothermal is still considered niche, too, with total installed capacity reaching over 15 GW by the end of 2024. 

But here’s the part investors should care about: the geothermal “niche” is starting to expand for the same reason shale expanded. What may surprise you is that with 3,953 MW of installed capacity, the U.S. is actually the world’s leading geothermal producer. 

And it’s been technology that has made the map bigger.

Why? Well, it’s because geothermal is gaining traction worldwide for its drilling and heat-extraction improvements making projects possible beyond the usual tectonic sweet spots. 

In other words, the industry is trying to do to geothermal what it already did to oil and gas — turn a location-dependent resource into an engineering-dependent resource.

That’s EGS.

It takes the idea of geothermal and removes the biggest limiting factor: being stuck in only a few perfect ZIP codes.

The Department of Energy’s own GeoVision work laid out the scale this could reach, projecting geothermal capacity could hit 60 GW by 2050 with technology improvements. 

Of course, the DOE has also hinted that the technical potential could be even higher, enabling at least 90 GW of geothermal electricity capacity across the U.S. by 2050 with advances like EGS. 

That’s the kind of number that stops being “alternative energy” and starts being “national power supply.”

And that’s before you factor in the new customer that’s dragging the grid into a different era.

AI.

Here, the DOE has been blunt with us all about the direction things are going: next-generation geothermal can support data centers, and part of the appeal is reducing geothermal’s historical location constraints. 

This is why geothermal keeps popping up in conversations it used to never enter.

Not because it’s trendy.

Because geothermal fits the problem.

You see, a data center doesn’t want “clean energy vibes.”

It wants baseload power that keeps everything running full steam.

That’s why you’re seeing geothermal get pulled into long-term power deals aimed at data center demand, like Ormat’s agreement to supply Switch in Nevada. 

Meanwhile, the policy machine is starting to move faster than usual, which should tell you how stressed the power system is getting.

In fact, the U.S. recently implemented emergency procedures to speed geothermal permitting on federal lands when a project is deemed urgent, with approval timelines capped at 28 days in those cases. 

Mind you, this isn’t the government being “nice.”

It’s simply what you get when it’s late to the party… again.

And EGS, in particular, is getting pushed with a very specific target in mind.

Back in 2022, the DOE’s Enhanced Geothermal Shot aims to cut EGS costs by 90% to US$45 per megawatt-hour by 2035. 

That’s the kind of cost target that moves EGS out of the lab and into utility procurement meetings.

So when you stack the numbers and the incentives, EGS checks a rare set of boxes in the U.S. energy mix:

• It’s firm power that can run around the clock, which is the exact profile the grid is short on. 
• It can scale using familiar drilling and completion methods, because the oilfield already built the playbook.
• It expands geothermal’s footprint from “where it exists naturally” to “where we can engineer it.” 
• It’s increasingly relevant to data centers and AI-driven load growth, which isn’t slowing down.

That’s why EGS is starting to feel less like a theory and more like a missing puzzle piece.

Beating Wall Street to the Punch

Look, energy transitions of this magnitude don’t announce themselves with fireworks.

We’re talking contracts, the acceleration of permits, and the quiet influx of serious capital. 

That’s what geothermal is starting to do right now.

EGS is the part that can turn geothermal from a regional specialty into a national supply option.

But the big opportunity here isn’t just “geothermal is clean.”

It’s important to remember this, especially during an era when Trump’s administration is pulling the strings. 

The opportunity here is that EGS is one of the few technologies that can deliver firm power at scale, without relying on imported fuel, weather patterns, or miracle battery math.

That’s also why the early winners won’t be the loudest companies in the room.

It’ll be the ones with development pipelines, drilling competence, proprietary approaches to reservoir design… not to mention the experience and ability to lock in long-duration contracts.

This is the moment where investors have a choice.

You can wait until EGS becomes a consensus trade and starts to become a talking point in the mainstream media, or you can do what the smart money always does during this buildout cycle.

Because the U.S. oilfield’s second career has already started.

So, it won’t stay small for long. 

Let me show you the full details behind the players making moves right now.