The US geothermal sector has gained a new entrant in Birch Geothermal, a Colorado-based startup aiming to develop second-generation enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) with an emphasis on speed, reservoir performance, and project execution.
Birch arrives at a particularly dynamic moment for the US geothermal industry. Advances in drilling and reservoir engineering are bringing costs down and shortening development timelines, while geothermal continues to benefit from unusually broad political support. At the same time, rapidly growing electricity demand, driven in part by data centers and AI infrastructure, is creating an increasingly urgent market for new sources of reliable, around-the-clock power.
For Birch CEO and co-founder Mike Matson, those trends provide a market opportunity and a geothermal investment thesis that took shape during his years as a consultant.
From geothermal consultancy to geothermal leadership
Before founding Birch, Matson was Partner and Global Lead of Geothermal at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), advising major energy companies on geothermal power and heat. His background, however, extends considerably further into the subsurface. Matson previously worked as a drilling and reservoir engineer, including on CO2-enhanced oil recovery projects in West Texas with Kinder Morgan and Oxy, before moving into clean-energy ventures including Carbon America and Storworks Power. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from Rice University and a chemistry degree from the US Naval Academy.
At BCG, Matson had an unusual vantage point from which to compare geothermal with the many technologies competing for capital in the energy transition.
In our interview, Matson recalled looking across client portfolios and asking a simple question: where were companies actually investing? Hydrogen, for example, had experienced significant swings in enthusiasm and faced uncertainty around policy support. Geothermal increasingly stood out for three characteristics that were not necessarily appearing together elsewhere: falling costs, shortening timelines, and bipartisan political support.
The momentum became increasingly difficult to ignore. The commercial milestones achieved by the sector, including the emergence of non-recourse debt financing, were signs that geothermal was beginning to move beyond the technology-development phase and toward a more established infrastructure asset class. Yet geothermal remained only a small fraction of most energy portfolios, leaving substantial room for growth.
Eventually, Matson decided he wanted to move from advising companies to actually building one. That meant returning to operations and developing technology internally rather than remaining on the consultancy side of the industry. Birch Geothermal subsequently launched in June 2026 as a portfolio company seeded by New York-based Montauk Capital.
The move also brings Matson back toward his earlier career in oil and gas, deploying expertise that he sees as highly transferable to EGS.
Being an early mover in the Enhanced Geothermal space
Birch is positioning itself specifically around what it calls second-generation EGS. The company aims to build upon the lessons learned from the first generation of EGS projects in the areas of reservoir optimization and flow control. Recent EGS projects have also provided the technical proof points needed to give the company confidence that engineered reservoirs can be reproduced elsewhere.
Being one of the early movers in the field EGS also means confronting the risks still being faced by commercial EGS development. One of Birch’s primary technical focuses is therefore flow control. Fracture zones within an engineered reservoir can potentially become preferential pathways that divert fluid away from other parts of the reservoir. Managing where water travels underground can consequently have implications for both water losses and the long-term thermal productivity of a project.
Birch’s approach combines flow control with intelligent wells and optimized reservoir design, with the objective of reducing water loss and extending system life. Backed by a team with strong reservoir engineering and modeling expertise, the company intends to adapt sensors, autonomous systems and reservoir optimization techniques developed in the upstream sector to better control fluid movement in geothermal wells.
Beyond the technology, Matson emphasizes what might more simply be described as good operatorship. This means assembling the right technical team, securing high-quality acreage, and bringing specialist partners into projects where their expertise can reduce risk. Rather than attempting to build every capability internally, Birch plans to create project partnerships that can bring additional expertise and better products to the table.
Birch expects its projects will most likely connect to the grid, although behind-the-meter opportunities remain possible. The company is targeting large developments potentially exceeding 100 MW, particularly in the Mountain West, where Matson sees significant demand for new baseload generation alongside strong state and utility climate objectives.
Importantly, Birch does not necessarily see the growing number of geothermal developers as a competitive problem. Electricity demand is expanding quickly enough that there may simply be more opportunity than the existing industry can currently serve.
Rooted in speed
With its tagline “Rooted in speed”, the emphasis on development timelines is explicit in Birch’s identity. Matson explains that the concept of speed is not simply about drilling faster.
The notion starts with project selection. Birch intends to make development decisions with a bias towards projects that deliver electricity to the US market as quickly as possible. From there, execution will involve landowners, permitting agencies, community stakeholders and a consortium of technical and commercial partners brought into the process early. Community engagement will be an early priority alongside permitting, land acquisition, and technical development. With this approach, non-technical issues that can become bottlenecks are instead addressed early.
The company also intends to build machine learning and artificial intelligence into its operations from the beginning. Rather than treating digital tools as something layered onto an established development organization later, Birch wants a data-driven backbone that can support project execution from the outset.
Birch believes that, with the right project, the period from land acquisition to geothermal operations could potentially be less than five years. By focusing on speed, the company aims to compete based on superior ‘time to power.’ This dimension in geothermal development is particularly noteworthy in the United States, where data centers, utilities, and hyperscale industries need firm capacity sooner rather than later.
Matson, however, clarifies that Birch will move with both speed and thought. The goal is not to rush development, but make decisions early that will prevent projects from slowing down later.
A strong technical foundation
Supporting that strategy is a team deliberately assembled around subsurface science, engineering, project development, data and energy operations. Matson is joined by co-founders Matt Minnick, PhD, Chief Geoscientist, and Koenraad Beckers, PhD, Head of Engineering. The core team also includes Kai Shah, Geothermal Intelligence Analyst.
Beckers brings a particularly strong combination of geothermal modeling and reservoir engineering experience. Before joining Birch, he was Geothermal Engineering Lead at ResFrac, working with an integrated hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulation platform used by both oil and gas and EGS operators. Earlier, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, he developed GEOPHIRES, the open-source geothermal technoeconomic simulation model.
Minnick, meanwhile, brings experience from RESPEC and the Colorado School of Mines as well as geothermal project experience internationally – providing the company with expertise in geoscience and project development at a global scale.
Shah adds the data and computational component that Birch wants embedded throughout the organization, supporting the company’s ambition to apply machine learning and AI to its operations from the start.
The company’s advisors broaden that expertise further. Tim Duncan, former CEO of offshore energy company Talos Energy, serves as Executive Chairman; Michael O’Connor, PhD, serves as US Policy Advisor; and Kristie McLin, PhD serves as Science & Tech Advisor. McLin is Director of Research and Science at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute and managing principal investigator of Utah FORGE, the US Department of Energy’s flagship EGS field laboratory.
It is a team composition that reflects the broader thesis behind Birch: much of what is required to scale geothermal already exists, whether in oil and gas operations, reservoir simulation, geothermal research, data science or large-scale energy project development. The opportunity is to assemble those capabilities around a development model capable of translating technological progress into operating projects. Birch Geothermal is one of a growing group of companies betting that EGS can make that transition.
That growing ecosystem itself is encouraging for geothermal. More developers, technology providers, drilling companies, equipment suppliers, investors and experienced energy executives entering the sector means more approaches being tested and more opportunities to turn geothermal’s theoretical potential into repeatable projects.
Over recent times, the forecasts for geothermal have become increasingly ambitious. With political support and investment continuing to be funneled to geothermal, it seems like the industry’s momentum has grown significantly in the last several years. The demand is certainly growing, but the challenges are still there – capital can get still stuck in long development times, directly affecting the commerciality of a geothermal project.
Speed to market may seem like an overlooked success factor for geothermal projects, but this is exactly what Birch Geothermal is focusing on. For Birch, the objective is to make the transition from potential to execution happen as quickly as possible.
