To help make better bets on drilling, Zanskar uses artificial intelligence to identify what are known as hidden systems — that is, sites with ample geothermal potential but little to no signs of their viability on the surface. The company used the technology last year to make a discovery in Nevada, and it says that same modeling also helped pinpoint where to most productively drill at the Lightning Dock site. It combined those models with drill bit technology refined by the oil and gas industry, which helped it drill deeper holes 35% faster at what Zanskar says is a “competitive cost.” (The company didn’t provide specifics.) The new 8,000-foot well has been operating for a full year, with heat levels above where they were before the decline.
“We knew that if we were going to buy this field, we were committed to drilling deeper and going after it,” says Edwards. Edwards says that the new well is so productive that it has, on occasion, supplied “too much heat” to the existing power plant, suggesting that it could power a larger facility.
“We expect, if you look at peers of this well, it has the attributes to be productive for decades,” Edwards says.
Horne points out that by buying a developed site with an existing power plant, Zanskar offset a big cost sink compared to starting from scratch. Another company had also already drilled a deep exploratory well at Lightning Dock in 2022, which, Horne says, gave Zanskar valuable geologic information to help with its modeling. (Ben Brenner, Zanskar’s director of federal affairs, tells WIRED in an email that data from the other well was incorporated into its modeling, but the company “never saw that particular well’s data as somehow definitive or essential.”)
“They haven’t discovered anything revolutionary,” Horne says of the techniques used at the Lightning Dock site. Still, he says that the statistics provided by Zanskar “hold up” to make it one of the wells with the highest flow rates — a measure of productivity — in the U.S. While at least one other facility in Nevada has wells with higher flow rates than Lightning Dock, Brenner says that those wells are “much colder” than Lightning Dock’s, which will make them less productive over the long run.
“It’s a really good well,” Horne says.
This has been a big year for the geothermal industry, particularly for companies that are using new technologies to tap the earth’s heat. Enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy went public in May, raising $2.2 billion, although there has been a pullback in stock prices since its debut. Venture capital investors — who typically have veered away from geothermal — have also been putting money into the industry, says Stephanie Díaz, a senior associate at BloombergNEF. Venture capital and private equity investment in geothermal startups has hit $432 million through the first six months of this year, meaning that “2026 is shaping up to be the best-funded year for geothermal startups since BNEF began tracking in 2022,” Díaz says. That total includes Zanskar, which raised $115 million in a funding round in January, one of the largest raises in the sector this year.
Unlike what Zanskar is doing, enhanced geothermal uses a technique similar to fracking and requires hot rocks rather than hot water, opening up the possibility of drilling wells in areas that have been off limits. Because of this, companies like Fervo have been the focus of much of the recent investment and attention in the industry, Díaz says.
But Díaz says data-driven approaches like Zanskar’s can help de-risk traditional geothermal development. Lightning Dock, Díaz says, is also a good example of finding “adjacent areas to work that have worked historically.”
