The Pennsylvania House passed HB 2076, the Geothermal Energy Development Act, on May 4, 2026, by a vote of 118 to 83. Rep. Arvind Venkat (D-30, Allegheny) is the bill’s prime sponsor, and he circulated the proposal with Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, a Philadelphia Democrat, and Rep. Craig Williams, a Republican representing Delaware and Chester counties. Importantly, the bill passed the House with bipartisan support. The bill takes aim at a constraint Pennsylvania can fix directly. Despite having a strong oil and gas workforce and geothermal resource potential, the Commonwealth has no standard regulatory path, so every project has to invent one.
Pennsylvania has no designated regulator to whom a geothermal developer can submit plans for approval. Projects can still proceed under existing law, but the existing law does not answer which agency holds jurisdiction, or under which statute, so each developer works that out on a case-by-case basis. Bespoke permitting is a tax on being early, paid in legal hours and time wasted. HB 2076 designates the regulator and defines the process. Regulatory certainty is an unglamorous thing to legislate. It separates a state with a demonstration project from a state fostering industry growth.
Where the framework came from
Project InnerSpace published The Future of Geothermal Energy in Pennsylvania in February 2025 with Penn State’s Center for Energy Law and Policy. Authors from four Pennsylvania universities wrote it, with 16 further contributors and reviewers, and it set out 23 recommendations across six areas of focus. Two of them concern this bill’s subject matter: clarifying regulatory authority for geothermal development, and accelerating clean geothermal through permitting reform and improved siting. InnerSpace Action has worked to implement these findings through this bill.
Fiedler, who chairs the House Energy Committee and later cosponsored HB 2076, said, “Geothermal energy is a potentially limitless, always-on power source that could provide clean, locally-sourced electricity to millions of Pennsylvania residents and businesses.”
The federal selection
HB 2076 is arriving just as Pennsylvania’s technical geothermal case is beginning to move from paper to the field. On April 14, 2026, the Department of Energy’s Office of Geothermal selected a $14 million enhanced geothermal systems project in Pennsylvania for award negotiations, the second selection under its EGS Pilot Demonstrations funding opportunity. Selection is not a commitment to fund, and negotiations have to close first. If they do, Indiana County would host the first enhanced geothermal demonstration in the eastern United States, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection would run it alongside Gradient Geothermal, Teverra, Lehigh University, Idaho National Laboratory, CNX Green Ventures, and Seequent.
The proposal aims to repurpose a horizontal shale gas well for geothermal use, assess well orientations and placements, and test fracturing techniques to create an engineered reservoir in the thermal resources of the Appalachian Utica Shale. A state environmental regulator and an Appalachian gas producer on the same project team arethe kind of coalition geothermal needs and rarely gets. If the project succeeds, Pennsylvania’s geothermal opportunity gets more real, and so does the need for a regulatory framework that can handle what comes next.
Why Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania produced 9,911.3 trillion Btu of primary energy in 2024, second only to Texas among the states. Operators have drilled hundreds of thousands of wells since 1859, more than 200,000 conventional wells remain on the books, and crews have spent roughly twenty years drilling horizontal wells in the Marcellus and Utica.
Deep geothermal is a drilling business before it is an energy business. It runs on rig crews, directional drillers, completions specialists, mud engineers, cement crews, water handling, and the regional supply chain that keeps all of it moving. The same regional workforce and supply chain that drilled the Marcellus could be deployed here, and the Indiana County project starts from a shale gas well.
That said, a gas crew is not a geothermal crew and not all skills transfer. What does transfer is the hard part: drilling deep wells accurately and repeatably. Most states would have to import that capability or build it. Pennsylvania would only have to keep it. Pennsylvania led the charge historically with the first oil well and in the shale revolution; now it can be at the forefront of the next drilling revolution.
What comes next
HB 2076 went to the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee on May 7, and the chamber’s record shows no action there since. A companion bill, SB 1131, sits in the same committee. The two-year session expires November 30. The committee could still take up and report HB 2076, after which the Senate would need to act before the session ends.
If HB 2076 dies in committee without a vote, it won’t have been rejected on the merits. A bill that cleared the House 118-83 with bipartisan support doesn’t need to lose a vote to fail; it just needs the calendar to run out first.The cost falls on the projects that would have used the framework, in a state better equipped for geothermal than almost any other. For the place that drilled the country’s first commercial oil well, that would be a costly way to sit out the next drilling revolution.