Hell’s Kitchen Project Heats Up U.S. Energy Scene

Baker Hughes teams with CTR on a 500 MW geothermal venture to fuel data centers with round-the-clock clean energy

29 Oct 2025

Baker Hughes, best known for oil-field services, is venturing deeper into the Earth for a new kind of energy rush. In September 2025 it announced a partnership with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to deliver 500 megawatts of geothermal power from the Hell’s Kitchen development in California’s Imperial County, enough to fuel a growing constellation of data centers hungry for round-the-clock clean energy.

Under the deal, Baker Hughes will supply high-temperature drilling tools, power systems and financial backing. CTR, which controls 4,500 acres around the Salton Sea, expects the first 50 megawatts to come online by 2027. The project positions geothermal as a potential workhorse for hyperscale computing, offering steady, carbon-free power that solar and wind cannot match.

The tie-up reflects a broader revival of interest in “next-generation” geothermal. Once limited by geology, the industry is being transformed by digital analytics, directional drilling and other oil-field technologies. Analysts expect such advances could expand America’s geothermal capacity to several tens of gigawatts by 2035.

For Baker Hughes, the move is strategic. The firm is repurposing decades of subsurface expertise from oil and gas to lower drilling costs and shorten project timelines, long-standing obstacles to geothermal’s growth. For data-center operators, this could provide a rare form of baseload renewable power, vital as artificial-intelligence workloads and cloud demand swell.

The path will not be easy. Geothermal projects remain capital-intensive and technically complex. Hell’s Kitchen’s layered geology and permitting hurdles could slow development. But Baker Hughes’ experience may help steady the venture.

If successful, the partnership would signal more than corporate diversification. It could mark the start of a structural shift, as oil-service giants seek to reinvent themselves in a decarbonising economy. A working model at Hell’s Kitchen might do for geothermal what shale did for oil, unlocking a vast, underused resource hidden in plain sight.