As industries strive to decarbonize, there is a growing interest in leveraging geothermal energy for factories, data centers, and power plants. A key scenario is retrofitting existing fossil fuel plants (coal or gas) or supplying large industrial facilities with geothermal heat and power. These projects often require drilling dozens of wells to provide the necessary energy output, essentially creating a geothermal field at an industrial site. The opportunity is to transform the drilling process into a factory-style operation – drilling many wells in a standardized, rapid sequence – rather than treating each well as a one-off project. By industrializing the drilling (through automation, parallel operations, and innovative techniques), the overall time and cost can be drastically reduced. This is crucial for future projects where tens of wells must be completed to meet an industrial energy demand on a tight schedule.

One example is a plan to convert the Dutch paper mill (a heavy industrial heat user) to geothermal energy. Supplying a factory or paper plant might require a network wells to deliver continuous heat. Another ambitious example is the proposal to retrofit the coal power plant in South Europe to geothermal. This 600+ MW coal plant could be replaced by modular geothermal units, but it would involve drilling to 6+ km depth and creating an EGS reservoir beneath the site. To execute this, GA Drilling has envisioned a “Reel Drilling” approach – using coiled tubing and automated drilling rigs to continuously drill and case wells in a repeatable fashion. In this approach, multiple wells can be drilled from the same pad with minimal downtime, and much of the process is automated.

Factory drilling unlocks economies of scale in geothermal development. When drilling moves to a semi-automated, continuous operation, the cost per well drops significantly due to shared infrastructure, learning-curve improvements, and reduced idle time. This makes the concept of drilling 40 or 50 wells financially and logistically feasible where it otherwise wouldn’t be. The value for industrial users is the ability to replace fossil fuel boilers or turbines with geothermal heat supply without losing output – for example, a coal plant can be retired by incrementally adding geothermal capacity in 10–50 MW blocks. Each well in a “factory” program is drilled faster and cheaper than the previous, leveraging continuous operation and even parallel drilling. Additionally, by centralizing operations on one site, permitting and mobilization efforts are optimized. In essence, factory-style drilling turns geothermal into a scalable industrial solution: large facilities get a tailored geothermal field beneath them with minimal disruption, and drilling contractors achieve unprecedented efficiency by repeating similar wells.