The Enormous Potential for Hot Dry Rock Geothermal Energy

The concept of hot dry rock (HDR) geothermal energy originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1970 it was proposed as a method for exploiting the heat contained in those vast regions of the earth’s crust that contain no fluids in place—by far more widespread than natural geothermal resources (HDR represents over 99% of the total U. S. geothermal resource). Although often confused with the small, already mostly commercialized hydrothermal resource, HDR geothermal energy is completely different from hydrothermal energy.