Ever is a long time. Nuclear, coal, and natural gas are generally far cheaper than hot water or steam supplied from geothermal wells - even for small volcanic islands far from natural gas sources . Of course, if the interest is 'energy independence', then geothermal is what small volcanic islands have (New Zealand might be an exception).
I haven't paid much attention to the geothermal industry for many yrs. there were several small companies drilling fairly shallow, moderately high temperature wells in Nevada within the past 10 yrs. I'm assuming there are recharge or reservoir problems.
Geothermal wells with bottom hole temperature in the neighborhood of 350 C were being drilled in the Salton Sea CA field in the late 1960s and early 1970s (depths around 5000 ft). So the drilling technology existed then and those were before the oil embargoes so I doubt that they were entirely funded thru subsidies.
I suspect that the biggest problems in high temperature water fields are maintaining consistent flow and corrosion rather than drilling. Steam fields such as the Geysers, CA field are much better but they have 'draw down' problems that are somewhat similar to shale gas fields.
New Zealand and the Phillipines were probably the most aggressive countries in geothermal power development but that was in the 1970s to 1980s and those efforts seem to have withered and those countries have refocused their efforts toward developing more conventional domestic energy resources. California has abundant geothermal resources but that industry seems to be on subsistence level support even though the state is obviously gangrenous when it comes to non-carbon based power resources. Those should serve as indicators.
The hyper sciences stuff is BS. I looked over their patent. For drilling wells, it's a joke. She'll may get some benefit out of the technology but it won't be for creating wells.
