On Monday, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, which is under the House Committee on Natural Resources, held a hearing in Cedar City to discuss the barriers to geothermal production on federal land.

“For far too long the promise of geothermal energy has been underappreciated and underutilized in our national energy conversation. Despite its incredible potential, geothermal faces regulatory delays, permitting hurdles and a lack of investment that doesn’t match the scale of opportunity,” said Utah Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy during her opening remarks Monday.

In 2023, geothermal power plants located in seven states produced about 17 kilowatt hours of electricity, which is about 0.4% of all utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., according to a congressional memo. Most of those sites are in the West or Hawaii — California produces more overall geothermal power than any other state, while Nevada generates the highest percentage of electricity from geothermal.

Despite recent advances in Utah, the Beehive State is lacking compared to California and Nevada. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Utah generates about 3.2% of total geothermal energy production in the U.S. — California is at about 66%, and Nevada at 26%. And about 1.5% of Utah’s power comes from geothermal, compared to 10% in Nevada, and 5% in California.

Speaking during the hearing on Monday, deputy director of the Utah Office of Energy Development Jake Garfield laid out the state’s recommendations to Congress and the federal government.

First, he said, the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, should offer more land for companies to lease. In the last five years, Garfield said the agency has put up more than 160,000 acres of land in Utah to lease for geothermal — during that same timeframe, the BLM office in Nevada put up more than 700,000 acres.

“If it can be done in Nevada, it can certainly be done here,” Garfield said.

The BLM should also focus on what Garfield called “broad scale, programmatic planning” for geothermal energy in the West, looking at where production is most feasible and where it should be prioritized.

“Just last year the Biden administration did a similar planning effort for solar power, and if it can be done for solar it can be done for geothermal energy, particularly because geothermal energy has far fewer impacts on the landscape,” Garfield said.

And, streamlining energy production can’t happen if the federal government does not also streamline construction of transmission lines, a unique challenge for geothermal facilities. Transmission lines need to be built to the source of energy, and doing so is a process burdened by federal regulations, Garfield said.

“We’re seeing the initial construction of a long transmission line from new energy sites in Wyoming down to southern Nevada,” he told the committee. “So far that’s taken 16 years to permit, and construction still won’t be done for another five years. If we see delays like that for transmission, we’ll never see the full buildout of Utah’s geothermal potential.”

Lastly, the permitting process for geothermal energy production itself needs to be shortened, Garfield said, calling out the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a 1970 law that requires the federal government to conduct an environmental review before moving forward with infrastructure projects.

Garfield said offering geothermal projects certain exemptions under NEPA would help the industry — like what’s being proposed by Maloy through her Geothermal Energy Opportunity Act, which requires the U.S. Department of Interior to process a geothermal drilling permit within 60 days.

Maloy is also sponsoring the Streamlining Thermal Energy through Advanced Mechanisms Act, which gives the geothermal industry the same flexibility as the oil and gas industry, cutting some of the regulations when pursuing a project on public land that’s already been studied or disturbed by industry.

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.