GreenFire Energy

GreenFire Energy was founded in 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area — note: our records showed 2013, but published technical literature and company materials consistently confirm 2014 as the founding year. The company was established to commercialize a novel closed-loop geothermal technology, the GreenLoop™, and is led by CEO Joseph Scherer. GreenFire operates from Emeryville, California and works closely with global strategic partners including Baker Hughes, Helmerich & Payne, and Vallourec to deploy its systems at geothermal sites worldwide. The company's model is explicitly commercial and modular — it focuses on projects deployable today using existing infrastructure, avoiding the long timelines and capital requirements of large greenfield developments.

GreenFire was founded on the insight that the vast majority of the world's geothermal resources — including most wells already drilled — cannot be economically exploited with conventional technology, which requires specific combinations of high temperature, high permeability, and available water. Its GreenLoop™ technology is an Advanced Geothermal System that installs a downbore tube-in-tube heat exchanger inside an existing or new well, circulating a working fluid in a sealed loop that extracts heat purely through conduction — without ever touching the rock or withdrawing any water from the formation. This approach enables GreenFire to retrofit idle geothermal wells, expand existing fields, and develop new resources that are inaccessible to conventional technology, including hot dry rock formations with no natural permeability.

GreenFire is an independent private company. Key investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures and SK E&S, who led its Series A financing round. The company has received grant funding from the California Energy Commission and collaborates with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on reservoir modeling and performance validation. GreenFire has been granted more than 48 international patents for closed-loop geothermal technology — more than any other AGS company — and has published more peer-reviewed technical papers in this field than any competitor.

GreenFire completed the world's first field-scale demonstration of closed-loop geothermal technology at the Coso geothermal field in California in 2020, funded by the California Energy Commission. The company is currently developing projects at The Geysers — the world's largest geothermal complex — deploying its Steam and 2-Phase GreenLoop (S2PGL) technology, which extracts heat from a steam-dominated reservoir without withdrawing any water mass. GreenFire has also established the world's first closed-loop geothermal laboratory at Baker Hughes' Energy Innovation Center in Oklahoma City, where it tests the technology across a wide range of reservoir and well conditions in collaboration with major geothermal and oil and gas companies.