Two years ago, workers erected a towering drill in the tiny village of Szaflary, Poland, near the country’s mountainous border with Slovakia. The equipment is digging nearly 23,000 feet into the earth in hopes of tapping an underground aquifer where the planet’s molten core keeps temperatures at roughly 356 degrees Fahrenheit.
As coal-addicted Poland scrambles to supply its surging demand for electricity with cleaner sources, this effort represents one of the fast-growing economy’s most significant experiments in geothermal energy. Once complete, the project, known as Banska PGP-4, would be the world’s deepest geothermal well.
For a country scrambling to lock down more reliable, clean, and domestic resources of energy, geothermal could supply nearly one-third of the nation’s demand for heat. It could potentially come online years before the various nuclear reactors under development go critical, helping to stave off blackouts as aging coal plants start shutting down. And for the United States — where there is rare bipartisan bullishness on the future of new geothermal plants and selling energy technology overseas — Poland could serve as a key export market in Europe.
However, according to Szaflary’s mayor, Poland’s development of geothermal power is stalling due to partisan divides over energy.
“Right now, the government just doesn’t want to make more projects in geothermal,” Rafal Szkaradzinski told Latitude Media in an interview on the sidelines of last month’s Economic Forum conference in Karpacz. “They are finishing old projects, but we don’t have any new money for building what comes next.”
That’s potentially bad news for the U.S. geothermal industry as well. As Poland has grown economically in the last three decades, its demand for energy has grown in parallel, particularly for American exports; imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas jumped nearly 250% between 2019 and 2024. In 2022, Poland selected the U.S. nuclear giant Westinghouse to build its first atomic energy station, choosing the higher-end AP1000 technology partly out of a desire to cement its diplomatic relationship with Washington.
With a cadre of U.S. startups now racing to commercialize next-generation geothermal technology, Poland could become a market for yet another American-made energy source — if, that is, the country manages to establish an industry for harnessing heat from the planet’s core, be it through conventional or next-generation approaches.
Companies such as Fervo Energy, XGS Energy, and Sage Geosystems promise to expand the reach of geothermal beyond places with accessible and hot underground reservoirs like the conventional resource Banska PGP-4 is tapping, giving Poland the potential to drill for hot rocks in far more places.
Rivals such as Utah-based Zanskar, meanwhile, are using state-of-the-art drilling and surveying technology to find and harness previously unreachable conventional geothermal resources, making deep wells like the one in Szaflary even more compelling. But the country’s politicization of the energy source has left the opportunity up in the air.
Poland’s farewell to coal
Poland defies the political norms about energy in Europe. After four decades under Soviet rule, Warsaw vocally refused to follow the model embraced by many of its fellow EU members — to transition off coal by embracing cheap gas imported from Russia — on the grounds that Moscow could not be trusted with such a sensitive economic chokepoint.
In 2022, when Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s border and the Kremlin throttled supplies of gas to Kyiv’s NATO allies, countries such as Germany doubled down on coal and began buying expensive U.S. LNG as an alternative. Poland, long painted as an obstructionist to the 27-nation bloc’s decarbonization plans, looked suddenly vindicated.
At the time, Poland was ruled by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party. Despite his party’s general antagonism toward Brussels’ broader climate goals and skepticism of renewables, then-Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki backed the development of nuclear power and geothermal energy.
That dynamic mirrors the U.S. While support for nuclear power has long been stronger among U.S. conservatives than liberals in — and in many other democracies that have some reliance on nuclear power — polling in August showed for the first time higher support for geothermal among Republicans than Democrats as well.
Unlike the U.S., where most heating is provided via furnaces and heat pumps in individual buildings, Poland depends on district heating systems that circulate warmth from a central generator; the country has especially looked to geothermal to replace coal in those systems.
In much the same way supporters of oil and gas — including, notably, Energy Secretary Chris Wright — tend to like geothermal in the U.S., the coal industry’s stalwarts have traditionally championed geothermal in Poland, said Adam Błażowski, a Polish clean-tech engineer and the chairman of WePlanet, a largely European climate nonprofit that advocates for nuclear power and other often-controversial decarbonization options. Likewise, he said, geothermal supporters have tended to oppose nuclear energy, scrambling the coalitions for clean power.
But he warned that geothermal had only limited potential in Poland. “There are some places where it makes sense with huge support,” Błażowski, who also leads WePlanet’s Poland chapter, told Latitude Media.
That’s because geothermal power traditionally only works in places with easily-tapped underground reservoirs from seismic and volcanic activity, such as in Iceland, Kenya, or the western U.S. While next-generation American startups promise to expand geothermal’s reach, companies such as Fervo Energy, XGS Energy, and Sage Geosystems are all still debuting their technology in the American West; geographically agnostic geothermal is likely still years away.
“We are not Kenya,” Błażowski said in a text message. “We’re in the middle of a f-ing continent.”
Still, even with conventional resources, official estimates suggest Poland could decarbonize 30% of its domestic heat needs with geothermal energy.
The shift to renewables
At the same time as geothermal is caught up in political push-and-pull, wind is rising in Poland. On a drive east from Karpacz to the coal-mining capital of Katowice last month, this reporter saw vast fields and hills dotted with turbines. And in each one, the turbines were visibly rotating, pumping electrons onto the grid that neither produced emissions, nor filled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war chest.
But the next three years are a key moment for Poland’s nascent geothermal industry as it seeks to not just prove its potential as a district heating source but as an electricity generator. And the current Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose liberal Civic Platform party took back power at the end of 2023, has deprioritized geothermal in favor of pushing forward with wind, solar, and nuclear.
“It’s maybe not ignored, but the government gives lower attention to geothermal,” Szkaradzinski said. “They really just want a lot of wind systems.”
It’s not hard to see why wind has taken priority. Though fossil fuels still generate 70% of Poland’s electricity, wind now comprises 14% of its power output, according to data from the research group Ember, making turbines the biggest source of clean generation. In the country’s north, construction is underway on Poland’s first offshore wind farms in the Baltic Sea.
Under the Morawiecki administration, “things were easier for us” in developing Banska PGP-4, Szkaradzinski said. Digging wells is costly in a country without much of an oil and gas industry to provide drilling rigs, but the right-wing government fronted some of the necessary funding. The question for now is whether Tusk’s government will cast aside the political considerations linking geothermal to coal, and do the same.
The timing is key because the Tusk administration is falling behind on decarbonizing the country’s energy system —– right at the moment when Europe’s electricity demand is rising and Moscow is growing more brazen with its attacks on NATO territory, including in Poland. Accordingly, the government seems to recognize that wind, solar, and nuclear alone won’t cut it, especially with the long timelines for building the country’s first reactors. Last year, Poland’s National Centre for Research and Development made up to $101 million available for geothermal development. It remains to be seen, though, whether it will be enough — and whether one of the steadiest potential sources of renewable power can bridge a stark political divide the way it has in the U.S.
