A potentially game-changing and largely unexplored energy jackpot lies beneath the ocean floor, according to a whitepaper from geoscience tech consultancy CGG. Unique conditions under the sea bed promise cheaper and more accessible geothermal power.

Solar and wind can't get us to a clean energy grid alone. Geothermal is a dream source of clean energy in many ways; the hot rocks under our feet hold more energy than humanity could use in a million years... Although just to be clear, that's not a challenge... I'm looking at you, OpenAI and Bitcoin miners. Bring it up to the surface, and you can directly use the heat, or harvest electrical energy from it. The energy's there 24/7, unlike solar and wind, the infrastructure costs aren't terrible, and it's available right underneath us, anywhere on the planet.

And yet, it represents less than 1% of global energy production, because while there are hot rocks somewhere under your feet wherever you're standing, they're much easier to get to in some places, where they're closer to the surface, than in others, where they're buried so deep they're virtually impossible to get to economically. Well, at least until the particle beam drills are ready.

What's more, geothermal exploration drilling is relatively expensive, and not always successful. So companies have tended to stick to areas they're relatively sure will deliver – like the Indo-Pacific "Ring of Fire," a tectonic belt that runs all the way up the West coast of the Americas, across to the Eastern tip of Russia, down through East Asia and across to cover New Zealand. Essentially, where there are volcanoes, the geothermal industry is getting better at developing them as energy resources.

But according to renewable energy tech consultancy CGG, these volcanic areas are quite complex and varied, requiring bespoke approaches to each one, and temperatures rapidly decrease as you move away from the volcano.

On the other hand, there's a vast and much more consistent resource we could be targeting, says CGG, on the sea floor, right where the tectonic plates are constantly moving away from one another and generating new chunks of crust in a process called "seafloor spreading."

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