The global oil and gas industry is facing a potentially transformative moment. As operations continue to make efficiency gains and extend the life of mature assets, a new form of energy that relies on much of the same know-how and technology is emerging from beneath. Called “next-generation” geothermal, the promise it holds is to become a low-carbon and broadly dispatchable source of energy.
However, unlocking the full potential of geothermal energy demands much more than many expect. Exploration tends to be the easy part. But the scaling effort will also require cross-sector innovation rooted in operational excellence, and few areas hold more promise than transferring lessons from artificial lift, especially electrical submersible pumps (ESPs), which are widely used in the geothermal sector.
As an engineer who has spent over a decade optimizing subsurface production systems across multiple basins, including leading artificial lift installation and operations in onshore, offshore, and high-temperature environments, I have seen how nuanced lift strategies, digital monitoring, and pump-configuration decisions can make or break field performance. These principles are now relevant to geothermal development, particularly for closed-loop systems, enhanced geothermal systems, and hybrid configurations involving thermal networks.
This article highlights three key geothermal frontiers that benefit directly from oilfield artificial lift expertise:
- Flow assurance in high-enthalpy systems
- Downhole performance optimization under cyclic loads
- Full life-cycle digital management of geothermal assets.
Each of these areas show how knowledge from decades of oilfield lift engineering can accelerate geothermal scaleup, reduce failure risks, and shape the digital backbone of this growing sector.
Downhole Flow Dynamics
One of the most common challenges geothermal developers face centers on controlling and sustaining the flow of fluids from fractured rock at varying enthalpies, pressures, and temperatures.
Closed-loop geothermal systems, also called advanced geothermal systems, use sealed wellbores to create a circulation loop that can flow with CO2, water, or supercritical fluids. But regardless of what type of working fluid is used, flow assurance remains a matter of carefully tuning the downhole hydraulics. In artificial lift design, and particularly with ESPs, production engineers are tasked with routinely balancing multiple variables, including the head requirement, pump stages, intake pressure, viscosity, and gas‑lock risks.
These same dynamics exist in geothermal projects attempting to draw steady heat from engineered reservoirs or long horizontal loops. However, recent geothermal pilots employing thermosiphon loops that depend on natural convection instead of artificial lift have encountered issues including unstable flow rates, significant startup pressure losses, and gradual thermal decay.
In oil fields, these issues are mitigated using variable speed drives, pressure-equalization chambers, and multistage impellers designed to handle multiphase flow.
By using the same thinking, geothermal operators can customize loop geometry and fluid-injection strategies, optimizing loop diameter, insulation, and pump design for heat extraction, not just pressure maintenance.
Moreover, ESPs have evolved to operate in corrosive and high-temperature wells. The selection of metallurgy, elastomer compatibility, and motor-cooling methods in artificial lifts is directly relevant to geothermal projects targeting extreme temperatures beyond 180°C (about 350°F).
Collaboration between the domains is a likely pathway to ensuring a longer downhole equipment life and a better upfront system design.
Pumping Under Cyclic Conditions
Another major challenge in modern geothermal energy is its shift from baseload to flexible generation. Artificial lift systems have a track record spanning decades with cycling duty to deal with issues like declining oil wells or those tied to remote monitoring systems that throttle production to avoid flaring.
ESPs in these environments undergo multiple daily restarts, variable loads, and reversed flows during gas slugging. The result is a refined understanding of startup currents, shaft stress, thermal fatigue, and wear patterns under transient conditions.
Translating this to geothermal energy, operators designing wells for ramp-up scenarios must anticipate issues such as fluid hammer, cavitation, and variable flow erosion. Artificial lift engineers can model these conditions using existing downhole simulation tools to improve material selection and failure prediction. Additionally, ESPs now integrate real-time feedback on temperature, vibration, and motor torque, which allow engineers or software to issue a preemptive shutdown or speed correction. Embedding these diagnostics into geothermal control systems can significantly improve system responsiveness, lower maintenance costs, and extend asset life under cyclic conditions.
Digital Life-Cycle Management
The final, and perhaps most underexplored, frontier of the upstream–geothermal crossover involves digital life-cycle management.
Oil and gas engineers understand the value of pump run-life tracking, failure root cause analysis, and digital twins for well behavior. These are not “nice-to-have” capabilities. They are essential for managing large ESP fleets or optimizing lift strategies across dozens of fields.
However, many geothermal developers have yet to adopt such rigor. Many new systems are still measured in pilot wells, lacking predictive-maintenance models, asset-hierarchy structures, and performance benchmarking. As geothermal matures and expands, it will face the same issues that artificial lift teams in the upstream industry have been addressing for more than a decade. This includes pump failures, field-level optimization, downtime cost escalation, and the need for proactive intervention planning.
Digitally enabled life-cycle management rooted in ESP telemetry practices can offer geothermal operators the following tools.
- Track operational hours and correlate failure types across well classes.
- Simulate heat decline over time and adjust flow rates to maintain performance.
- Integrate SCADA systems to enable real-time monitoring and decision-making.
- Develop adaptive models to predict when thermal drawdown approaches economic limits.
In my experience, deploying fieldwide dashboards for ESP systems has improved intervention planning and saved millions of dollars in deferred production losses. The same discipline could yield enormous value in geothermal energy, especially as developers seek financing for long-duration projects. Investors increasingly want to see maintenance philosophy and key performance indicators embedded from the first day.
Geothermal energy must move beyond bespoke engineering and pilot-scale experimentation. It must adopt the mindset of production optimization, life-cycle cost control, and digital intelligence that artificial lift teams have spent years refining.
Engineers who have optimized ESP systems under extreme conditions already understand what it takes to design for performance, anticipate failure, and build responsive systems. As geothermal energy enters its growth phase, these engineers have a vital role to play in transferring knowledge, not just technology.
This shows us that the future of new energy will not be achieved in isolation. It will be integrated, informed, and cross-disciplinary. And by bringing artificial lift system expertise into the dialogue, we will enhance well performance while also expanding the scope of what is considered essential to the geothermal landscape.
Oghenekevwe S. Ovbije, SPE, is the director of Energia Core, where she leads cross-sector innovation spanning oil and gas and low-carbon solutions such as geothermal and hybrid energy infrastructure. She has more than a decade of experience in subsurface production systems, artificial lift optimization, and digital operations across multiple international basins. Before joining Energia Core, she held several technical and commercial leadership roles at Baker Hughes, including country product line manager for artificial lift systems. Her current research explores the application of oilfield engineering principles to next-generation geothermal systems, thermal networks, and digitally enabled life cycle management. Ovbije holds a BSc in chemical engineering from Igbinedion University Okada, a master’s in oil and gas engineering from the University of Aberdeen, and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also completed studies in infrastructure and construction finance and product line architecture at Harvard. In addition to being an active member of SPE, Ovbije is also a member of the Society of Women Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association.
