"Oxy drilled four miles down in Colorado, and did so quickly — a promising development for the geothermal industry."
"Last spring, Occidental Petroleum, an oil and gas company better known as Oxy, began drilling a massive hole in the shadow of a natural gas processing plant south of Greeley.
Drilling rigs are a common sight in Weld County, an area known for producing the vast majority of oil and gas extracted in Colorado. In this case, however, Oxy erected the tower for a different purpose: not to mine fossil fuels, but to tap carbon-free heat roughly 20,000 feet beneath the Earth’s surface.
The project, known as the Geothermal Limitless Approach to Drilling Efficiencies (GLADE), was supported by a $9 million grant issued by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022. Its goal was to test whether new drilling techniques could reduce the cost and time required to drill superdeep geothermal wells, a potential global clean-energy game-changer."
Sam Brasch reports for Colorado Public Radio March 5, 2026, co-published by Canary Media.
