Rodatherm Energy is emerging from stealth today with $38 million in Series A funding, and a plan to pilot a 1.8-megawatt geothermal plant in Utah.
The pitch: a closed-loop design that cycles refrigerant through steel wellbores to extract heat more efficiently than water uses. The question that investors, utilities and rivals will ask next is the only one that counts: will those good-looking efficiencies translate into cheaper electricity?
What Rodatherm is building
Unlike traditional enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which pump water down into fractured rock to capture heat, Rodatherm will feature a closed-loop system—a likely candidate is steel tubing—containing hydrocarbon-based refrigerant. The company claims the approach can deliver heat transfer efficiencies in a rough range of 50% higher than liquid water while invoking both phase-change properties and improved heat transfer. A sealed loop also dodges filtration headaches from grit and scaling, as it sharply reduces water use — an issue in arid basins with high geothermal potential, but low water supply.
The Utah project will supply power by the end of 2026, with electricity sold to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems. Evok Innovations, a fund backed by large Canadian oil and gas firms that focus on the Canadian clean-tech sector, led the round, with contributions from greenhouse-solution investors like Toyota Ventures and others — giving credibility but also pressure to prove field performance soon.
Efficiency vs. cost: trade-offs
The expense of drilling and completing wells is the overriding factor in geothermal economics. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office reports that between 40% and 60% of capital costs for a geothermal project relate to subsurface expenses. Anything you add that makes the well more complicated — be it steel, ever-more-precisely built heat-exchanger sections or specialty fluids — has to justify itself in additional output and drop in operating costs.
Our evaporator (refrigerant loop) may have two advantages.<_r281_w > (1) Firstly, two-phase flow may have higher heat uptake by temperature/length downhole, could translate into increased power density. A second, a closed loop can slash parasitic loads by eliminating high pressure injection and production pumping that otherwise hurt net capacity. But there are new costs and risks: more- complicated downhole assemblies, thermal stresses at the high temperatures generated by adsorption, and handling of refrigerants. If the working fluid is a hydrocarbon (e.g. propane, butane), safety engineering focusing on flammability would be the most critical performance when translational concerns to design; while future variations address fluorinated refrigerants should treating global-warming potential throughout its lifecycle as well.
A packed field set the bar high
Rodatherm is among a competitive group of geothermal players. Fervo Energy, seen as the leader of the pack, has raised nearly $1 billion and is starting to build its Cape Station in phases toward hundreds of megawatts including a big electricity transaction with Google’s data centers. XGS Energy has a 150-megawatt agreement to develop and serve the data center load of Meta in New Mexico. Other pioneers with designs that take different approaches to heat harvesting — and drilling in general — include Sage Geosystems and Quaise. Closed-loop modes are not new — Eavor, for instance, but circulates fluid through sealed subsurface radiators —but Rodatherm’s refrigerant-centric spinning adds high heat flux and low pumping energy to that equation.
What the numbers say on price
Today’s enhanced geothermal is not yet always cheap. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s most recent Annual Technology Baseline has current levelized costs of electricity for EGS usually tens-of-dollars per MWh higher than mature hydrothermal operations, where development tends to fall between $80 and 150/MWh based on depth, temperature, drilling pace, and project financing. The International Energy Agency adds that with learning curves and scale, the gap should be narrowed when more wells are drilled and supply chains mature.
For Rodatherm to do better than those benchmarks, three levers count most: high specific output per well, high capacity factor and low parasitic load. Availability for geothermal is already high, with U.S. fleet capacity factors typically 70–90% based on federal energy statistics. LCOE drops if a refrigerant loop can lift net megawatts per well while keeping the capex even. On the contrary, there are costs associated with premiums for special tubulars or highly complex completions other than offsetting good efficiency.
Another swing factor is drilling performance. DOE’s FORGE program in Utah has achieved significant advances in drilling and stimulation at high temperatures, which can prove a ripple effect across developers. If Rodatherm’s wells can penetrate faster and with better thermal contact with the rock, the efficiency argument becomes even more compelling. If not, the additional hardware might undermine the economics.
What to watch in Utah
For the pilot, investors and utilities will expect results they can quantify and the bank can finance: sustained wellhead temperatures, mass flow or heat extraction rates, parasitic load data—net capacity over months of operation. Transparency on capex dollars in/megawatt – particularly completed megawatt — will be as important as efficiency claims. Independent validation will convert a promising lab and patent story into project finance.
Flatten geothermal down in cost and toward dispatch-resilient baseload, low-cost power – where it becomes an increasingly valuable complement to the wind and solar boomlets already taking off all around us.
The kid can’t beat higher installation costs Cheap on the need to scale, and you’re left with a technology that could find a niche in water-constrained or high-temperature reservoirs rather than turning the cost curve for geothermal upside down. Either way, the results in Utah will provide a rare real-world test over whether efficiency alone can pay the underground bills.
