Zanskar repowers Lightning Dock geothermal facility in New Mexico to full capacity
Drilling rig at the Lightning Dock geothermal field, New Mexico (source: Nils Caliandro / Zanskar)
Carlo Cariaga
2 Jun 2025
Zanskar has now repowered the Lightning Dock geothermal power plant in New Mexico, with the full 15-MW capacity delivered by a newly drilled production well.
Following the report of a new production well drilled at the Lighting Dock geothermal field in New Mexico, Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals, Inc. (Zanskar) has now announced they are now powering the entire 15-MW power plant with just the single production well. This is a laudable milestone for the company, as it comes less than a year after their acquisition of the geothermal power facility.
Zanskar further provides details on their achievements in drilling the new production well, thereby validating the thesis that there are still conventional geothermal resources that are untapped and being overlooked. These included faster drilling using PDC bits, precision steering and oversized intermediate casing to allow the installation of a large-capacity line-shaft pump, deviated drilling, and stochastic resource modeling to plan for a wider range of possible reservoir conditions.
The new production well drilled a target depth of ~8000 feet (~2438 m) using PDC drill bits, resulting in 130% faster drilling compared to average drilling time without PDC bits at the Lightning Dock geothermal field. The vertical section was drilled over the first 1800 feet (548 meters), ensuring that there was very little deviation from the vertical to ensure that a line-shaft pump can be installed and operated with minimal issues. The team was successful in doing so, recording a maximum of around 1 degree of deviation over the the whole vertical section.
Drilling was then deviated over the course of 5000 feet (1524 m) to hit the reservoir target which was ~2000 feet (~609 m) away. This allowed the team to keep the wellhead close to the plant while still reaching the high-potential target zones, thus minimizing surface infrastructure.
Lastly, the team installed a 14-inch line-shaft pump, the largest geothermal line-shaft pump on the market. The decision came about due to a measured productivity index of ~50 gallons per minute per psi (~45.7 L/s/bar) on the production well. Assuming a brine outlet temperature of 50 C, this makes the new production well the more productive than any geothermal well in Nevada, and the most productive pumped geothermal well in the USA.
Source: Zanskar
