There’s a field near the airport in the tiny town of Hayden, Colorado, that may look like just a flat expanse of patchy grass and dirt. But exciting things are happening there — if you look below the surface.

“You wouldn't even be able to see our project,” said Hayden town manager Matthew Mendisco. “Because it's all underground, basically.”

What you can't see is the start of a major geothermal network built earlier this year. Eventually this carbon-free technology will heat and cool a new business park. The system works by tapping into stable temperatures deep underground. 

“We're drilling to like a thousand feet deep per well,” Mendsico said. 

Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Energy called for a dramatic expansion of geothermal drilling. And the Trump administration has embraced it, too.

“There is potential I think for a lot of growth of jobs, high paying jobs,” said Lauren Suhrbier, the strategic development director at Clean Energy Economy for the Region, a Colorado climate advocacy group.

Right now, most geothermal companies fill their rosters by poaching workers with directly transferable skills from the fossil fuel and water well drilling industries. That means most of those high-paying geothermal jobs are done by people like Billy Baker, a driller who honed his skills over a 15-year career in oil fields.

He left the oil fields a few months ago to take a job as a geothermal driller with Bedrock Energy, the company hired to build the network in Hayden. The pay is good, Baker said, a little better than the oil and gas wages he used to earn. The work is also interesting, and not far off from what he’s used to doing. 

“ It still uses the same skillset that was used in the previous oil and gas world,” Baker said. “Using the same equipment for better in a better industry.”

It takes years of experience to become a licensed driller. In the future, the geothermal industry will likely outgrow the skilled workforce now available. The Department of Energy calls workforce development one of the biggest obstacles to realizing the technology's full potential.   

“If you're looking to scale the industry rapidly, you just have this massive bottleneck that, that it's more or less impossible to kind of pass people through,” said Andrew Iliff, policy director with HEET, a geothermal advocacy nonprofit. 

Iliff is part of a group proposing a network of geothermal education centers across the country. The idea is to partner with institutions like unions and community colleges to offer credentials and make geothermal training more accessible to industry newbies.

“If this takes off in the way that we hope that it will … 10 to 15 years from now, folks at technical high schools and community colleges see it as an option,” Iliff said.

That kind of investment could jumpstart the growth needed to build a geothermal workforce.