He spent his career drilling for oil. Now he's drilling into a volcano - and betting the rock underneath is worth more than anything that used to be under it.
Two miles under the flank of Newberry Volcano in central Oregon, at the bottom of a well that took months to drill, the rock reads 629 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hotter than any enhanced geothermal well anyone has ever built, anywhere, and it is the number Sriram Vasantharajan has been chasing since he took over as CEO of Mazama Energy. Not a lab estimate. Not a model. A thermometer at the bottom of a real hole, drilled through real rock, on the side of an active volcano.
Vasantharajan did not arrive at this by way of a climate startup incubator or a physics PhD in renewable energy policy. He arrived by way of ExxonMobil, where he worked his way up through engineering and program leadership roles in oil and gas exploration, and then by way of Blade Energy Partners, an engineering services firm for the upstream oil industry, where he eventually became President and CEO. The résumé reads like an oilman's. The job now is building a volcano into a power plant.
"With geothermal, you get global, round-the-clock energy that is carbon-free, cost-stable, and grid-independent." — Sriram Vasantharajan, CEO, Mazama Energy
The logic behind Mazama is simple enough to fit on an investor slide and hard enough to have stumped the geothermal industry for a decade: most of the planet has usable heat in it, if you can drill deep enough to reach it and keep the well from falling apart once you get there. Conventional geothermal plants tap naturally hot, naturally permeable rock in a handful of lucky locations - Iceland, parts of Nevada, the Philippines. Enhanced geothermal systems try to manufacture that permeability anywhere, by fracturing hot rock and circulating fluid through it. Superhot rock - anything above roughly 400°C - is the extreme version of that bet: go hotter, get more power per well, need fewer wells to do it.
Mazama's approach centers on a patented stimulation process it calls Thermal Lattice, which builds on the hydraulic fracturing techniques the oil and gas industry spent decades perfecting, adapted for rock that would destroy conventional drilling and completion equipment. The company says the approach can deliver ten times the power density of standard EGS, using about 75 percent less water and roughly 80 percent fewer wells. Those are the kind of numbers that either solve geothermal's central cost problem or don't, and Newberry was the test.
The result, announced in late October 2025: a 10,200-foot deviated producer well, drilled at peak rates of 100 feet per hour, reaching that 629°F bottomhole temperature - a world record for an enhanced geothermal system - with zero lost-time incidents along the way. "Our team's accomplishments expand the frontiers of geothermal power into significantly hotter and more heterogeneous rock regimes than ever before," Vasantharajan said. "This milestone paves the way for EGS with much more power per well and true cost parity with fossil fuels."
The site is not incidental. Newberry Volcano is the largest active volcano in the Cascade Range - a broad shield volcano south of Bend, Oregon, that has been a research target for geothermal scientists for years precisely because it holds so much heat so close to the surface. Mazama's pilot sits on its western flank, and the company has said it expects to have power flowing to local homes and businesses by late 2027, starting with a 15-megawatt pilot plant slated for 2026 and scaling toward a 200-megawatt development project.
None of this happened without money and without government interest in an industry that suddenly looks urgent again. Mazama was incubated by Khosla Ventures and is backed by Khosla and Gates Frontier, with a $36 million Series A round supporting the Newberry work, on top of a $20 million grant from the Department of Energy. The federal interest tracks a broader shift: geothermal, long a niche renewable, has become one of the few technologies that can plausibly deliver the kind of always-on, weather-independent power that data centers and AI infrastructure need. Vasantharajan has made that pitch explicit, framing Mazama's power as suited "for powering AI" - a phrase that shows up in the company's own materials and in coverage of the Newberry announcement.
"Superhot rock geothermal unlocks a new era of energy - one where truly clean, reliable, and cost-stable power is available day and night." — Sriram Vasantharajan
The company's stated target is aggressive: less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, a price point that would put geothermal in direct competition with natural gas rather than in the subsidized-renewable category it has occupied for most of its history. Getting there depends on repeating what happened at Newberry - reliably, at scale, at a cost that doesn't require a research grant every time.
That's the part of the job that looks more like Vasantharajan's old career than his new one. Drilling fast without blowing budgets, keeping crews safe on a well nobody has drilled before, managing seismic monitoring so that fracturing hot rock doesn't rattle the surrounding area - these are oilfield-services problems, the kind Blade Energy Partners built a business solving for other companies. Mazama's zero-lost-time-incident record on a well this technically demanding is the sort of operational detail an oil and gas veteran would flag before a flashier one.
Vasantharajan holds a PhD and a master's degree, both from Carnegie Mellon University, in chemical engineering - training that sits closer to reservoir chemistry and materials behavior at extreme conditions than to public-facing climate advocacy. It is a useful pedigree for a company whose central engineering challenge is keeping equipment functional in rock hot enough to compromise ordinary steel and cement, and whose next stated goal is pushing past 400°C into true SuperHot Rock territory - hotter still than what Newberry has already delivered.
What makes Mazama's story different from the last decade of enhanced-geothermal promises is that the company is not asking anyone to believe a simulation. It drilled the well. It measured the temperature. It is now trying to turn one very hot hole in the ground into a commercial power plant, on a timeline - 2026 for the pilot, 2027 for grid power - short enough that it will be provable or not within a couple of years, not a couple of decades. For a CEO who spent his career on oil rigs, that kind of near-term, checkable result may be exactly the currency he's used to trading in.
That's the line Vasantharajan uses to describe what a hot enough well can do. Mazama's bet is that the physics of superhot rock, not a subsidy, gets geothermal there.
A technical deep dive into the drilling and stimulation methods behind Mazama's record-setting Newberry well.
How a career built at ExxonMobil and Blade Energy Partners prepared a CEO to chase superhot rock.
Examining Mazama's target of under 5 cents per kilowatt-hour and what it would take to hit it.
How data center demand is reshaping the pitch for enhanced geothermal systems like Mazama's.
Unpacking the investor logic behind Mazama Energy's $36 million Series A.
A closer look at the patented stimulation technology enabling deeper, hotter geothermal wells.
The history and geology of the Newberry site and why it became a testbed for superhot rock energy.
Reviewing the federal grant that helped fund Mazama's Newberry demonstration project.
How Vasantharajan's background in oilfield engineering services shows up in Mazama's operating discipline.
A look at Mazama's staged plan to scale from pilot to utility-scale power production.