GA Drilling: The Slovak Company Trying to Make Deep Hard-Rock Drilling Cheaper

GA Drilling is a private drilling technology company that began in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2008 under the name Geothermal Anywhere. Its goal, reflected in that original name, has been to make it economical to drill deep enough into hard rock to reach useful geothermal heat almost anywhere, not only in the volcanic regions where conventional geothermal power plants cluster. Over time the company has also targeted the oil and gas industry, where hard formations and very long wells pose similar problems.

The company is best known for two lines of technology. The first, PLASMABIT, breaks rock using high-energy electrical discharges rather than by grinding it with a mechanical bit. The second, which has become its flagship, is NexTitan, a downhole "anchoring and drive" system that grips the wall of the well near the bit and pushes the bit forward with its own thrust, instead of relying entirely on the weight and rotation of a long drill string from the surface.

GA Drilling is a small company, and most of its technologies are still being validated rather than deployed commercially. To understand why investors including the drilling contractor Nabors Industries and the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras have taken an interest, it helps to understand the problem it is trying to solve: drilling is the most expensive and risky part of geothermal energy, and it gets dramatically harder in deep, hot, hard rock. This article covers that background, the company's history, how its technologies are meant to work, the evidence so far, and the open questions.

The problem: why drilling decides the fate of geothermal energy

Drilling is the biggest cost

Geothermal power plants have no fuel bill, but they are expensive to build, and much of that expense is underground. Wikipedia's article on geothermal power states that drilling accounts for over half of capital costs. The US Department of Energy (DOE), summarizing its GeoVision analysis, says well construction can account for up to 50% of the total capital cost of geothermal energy production. A DOE technical objective page notes that casing and cement alone can be as much as 50% of the cost of a geothermal well, and an industry overview links 56% of the variability in geothermal well cost to well depth.

The details vary, but the message is consistent: whoever can drill geothermal wells substantially cheaper and faster changes the economics of the whole industry.

Hard rock drills slowly

Most oil and gas wells are drilled through sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, shale and limestone. Many geothermal resources, by contrast, lie in hard crystalline rock such as granite, gneiss and basalt. The DOE says most geothermal wells are drilled with hard-rock roller bits, that hard, fractured rock is more difficult to drill than typical oil and gas formations, and that geothermal well construction is often hampered by low drilling rates, on the order of 125 to 150 feet per day. The DOE also estimates that doubling the average daily drilling rate could save 10% to 15% of the total cost of a geothermal well.

Hard rock wears out drill bits quickly. Every time a bit wears out, the entire drill string has to be pulled out of the hole, the bit replaced, and the string run back in. This round trip, called "tripping," can take many hours in a deep well, and during that time no new hole is being made.

Deep and hot is harder still

To generate electricity from hot rock away from volcanoes, wells may need to go very deep. GA Drilling has said its technology could enable geothermal wells about 5 miles (roughly 8 km) deep. For comparison, the deepest hole ever drilled, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, reached 12,262 m in 1989 and still holds the depth record; temperatures near the bottom were about 180°C, and heat was the main obstacle that stopped the project short of its 15,000 m target.

A more recent example of a deep geothermal well is the St1 Deep Heat project at Otaniemi in Espoo, Finland. The energy company St1 reported drilling its first well to a final depth of 6.4 km, with later company releases describing the wells as extending to more than 6 km. The project was intended to produce up to 40 MW of heat for district heating, covering up to 10% of Espoo's needs. Otaniemi became a reference case for GA Drilling's own performance estimates, discussed below.

At those depths, the problems compound: higher temperatures damage electronics and seals, the drill string becomes very long and heavy, the hole becomes harder to steer, and vibration and "stick-slip" (where the bit alternately sticks and then spins free) damage equipment and slow progress.

What a better drilling system would need to do

Taken together, the challenge suggests a list of requirements:

GA Drilling's technologies are attempts to tackle different rows of this table.

A primer: how a deep well is drilled

The company's products make more sense with a basic picture of conventional rotary drilling, which has dominated oil, gas and geothermal wells for generations.

The drill string and the bit

A drilling rig lowers a drill string, a long column of steel pipe screwed together in joints, into the hole. At the bottom is the bottom-hole assembly (BHA): heavy drill collars that supply weight, stabilizers that keep the hole straight, measurement and steering tools, and finally the bit. The string is rotated, either from the surface or by a downhole motor driven by the drilling fluid, and the weight of the collars presses the bit into the rock. This downward force is called weight on bit.

Two bit families dominate. Roller-cone bits have cones studded with teeth or inserts that roll across the bottom of the hole and crush the rock. PDC bits (polycrystalline diamond compact) have fixed cutters faced with synthetic diamond that shear the rock like a plane shaving wood. As the DOE notes, most geothermal wells have historically been drilled with hard-rock roller bits, while the Utah FORGE work described by JPT showed that modern PDC bits and practices can drill hard rock considerably faster than older averages.

Drilling fluid

A fluid, usually called mud, is pumped down the inside of the pipe, out through nozzles in the bit, and back up the space between the pipe and the hole wall. It cools the bit, carries rock cuttings to the surface, and supplies pressure that keeps formation fluids from entering the well uncontrollably. In geothermal wells it also has to cope with very high temperatures. The flowing fluid is a source of energy too, which is why downhole motors and turbine generators, like the one GA Drilling tested in 2026, can draw power from it.

Casing and cement

As the well gets deeper, sections are lined with steel casing cemented in place, to keep the hole stable and isolate different rock layers. Each new section is drilled with a smaller bit through the previous casing, so a deep well narrows in steps like a telescope. Because geothermal wells need large diameters to move big volumes of hot fluid, casing and cement are a major part of their cost, as the DOE points out.

Tripping

When a bit wears out or a tool fails, the whole string has to be pulled out, unscrewed joint by joint (or in stands of several joints), stored on the rig, then screwed back together and run in again with the new bit. This is tripping. In a deep, hard-rock well, a large share of total rig time can go into trips rather than making new hole, which is why GA Drilling's estimates focus as much on the number and speed of trips as on penetration rate.

Coiled tubing

An alternative to jointed pipe is coiled tubing: a continuous length of steel tube stored on a large reel and straightened as it goes into the well. Because there are no joints to connect, it can be run in and out much faster, and the surface equipment is smaller than a full rig. Coiled tubing is widely used for well servicing, but it has limits for drilling: it cannot be rotated from the surface in the usual way, and because it is relatively flexible, it is hard to push a lot of weight to the bit in a long or horizontal hole. Those two limits are exactly what a downhole drive that grips the wall and supplies its own thrust is meant to overcome, which is why GA Drilling's designs are so closely tied to coiled or reeled tubing.

Vibration and stick-slip

Long drill strings behave like springs in both twisting and bending. In hard rock, where cutting forces vary sharply, the string can wind up and release torsionally (stick-slip), bounce axially, or whirl sideways. These vibrations damage bits and electronics, cut drilling speed, and can lead to failures that require extra trips. Anchoring a tool near the bit, as ANCHORBIT and NexTitan do, is intended to decouple the cutting process from the springy string above it.

Putting the pieces together

Seen through this primer, GA Drilling's products line up with specific weak points of rotary drilling:

Company history

Founding as Geothermal Anywhere (2008)

According to Wikipedia, the company was founded in 2008 in Bratislava as Geothermal Anywhere. The founders listed are Igor Kocis, Tomas Kristofic (chief technology officer), Dusan Kocis (chief operating officer) and Ivan Kocis (chief scientist). The name signaled the ambition: to make geothermal energy accessible in places without shallow volcanic heat, by making deep drilling affordable.

The company was renamed GA Drilling in 2013. Wikipedia lists offices in Houston (Texas), Gloucester (UK), Bratislava and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and identifies its industries as geothermal energy and oil and gas drilling.

PLASMABIT development and early partnerships

The company's earliest technology was PLASMABIT, which Wikipedia says was first developed for plugging and abandoning oil wells (a necessary step when a well reaches the end of its life) and then adapted for deep geothermal use.

Wikipedia records several early milestones:

• 2019: a service agreement with MOL Group, the Hungarian oil and gas company, to test PLASMABIT on onshore production wells. MOL, through its venture arm Lead Ventures, is a shareholder.
• 2020: Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency, funded a collaborative project with the University of Brighton, MTECH-UK Associates and Advanced Analysis Limited to develop a combustion-based system for PLASMABIT drilling.
• 2021: PLASMABIT received the Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label, an award for clean technologies.

The Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT), published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers, reported that GA Drilling published technical details of the technology in SPE paper 207852 in December 2021, and that a few months before Nabors' investment the company announced partnerships with Geo-X Energy, Sage Geosystems and Quaise.

Nabors investment (2022)

On 30 March 2022, Nabors Industries, which ThinkGeoEnergy describes as operating one of the world's largest drilling rig fleets, announced an $8 million strategic investment in GA Drilling. JPT reported that this complemented a pre-series round, bringing GA Drilling's total new investments above $20 million, and that the collaboration aimed to speed up commercialization by integrating the PLASMABIT tool into Nabors' automated drilling operations. ThinkGeoEnergy noted that GA Drilling joined a Nabors geothermal portfolio that already included investments in Sage Geosystems (June 2021) and Quaise Energy (August 2021).

JPT quoted Nabors chief executive Anthony Petrello as saying, "Given the expected sharp growth in global energy consumption over the next decades," and arguing that geothermal would be a key contributor to clean energy growth. It quoted Igor Kočiš as saying the agreement would help the company "move faster through the final stages of plasmabit development," and as referring to the company's promise of "geothermal anywhere."

ANCHORBIT demonstration (2023)

In April 2023, according to Wikipedia, GA Drilling publicly demonstrated ANCHORBIT at Nabors' technology center in Houston, where the tool gripped the wellbore wall in a test well. ANCHORBIT was the company's anti-stick-slip tool, described in more detail below.

Petrobras partnership and new funding (2024)

In July 2024, GA Drilling announced a technical cooperation agreement with Petrobras and its research and development center, Cenpes. JPT reported that the aim was to develop a new downhole drilling system based on GA Drilling's technology that could allow deep and complex offshore wells to be drilled from a light well intervention vessel rather than an expensive drillship or semi-submersible rig. The partners projected that the system could reduce overall well construction costs by as much as 30%; that figure is their own projection and had not been independently verified in the sources reviewed for this article. GA Drilling also said it would continue developing its geothermal technology at Petrobras facilities, including Cenpes in Rio de Janeiro, which JPT described as having more than 100 laboratories and pilot facilities.

JPT quoted Igor Kočiš, then cofounder and CEO, as saying the combined technologies bring "better efficiency, leading to lower costs," along with a smaller operational footprint and lower overall risk.

Earlier in 2024, JPT reported, GA Drilling and the Swiss startup ZeroGeo Energy announced plans for a 12 MW geothermal power plant in Germany, which would be the first deployment of the ANCHORBIT technology. Also in 2024, Wikipedia records, the company closed a $15 million financing round with Nabors, former EQT chief executive Thomas von Koch and Underground Ventures.

NexTitan field tests and the 2026 round

In early 2026, GA Drilling took NexTitan to the NORCE Ullrigg test facility in Stavanger, Norway, a full-scale drilling research rig. According to the company and Wikipedia:

• In February 2026, NexTitan's core anchoring and drive functions were demonstrated in an 8.5-inch (216 mm) hard-rock wellbore, with a measured thrust of 32,000 lbf. Grip and thrust worked in both steel casing and open hole.
• In April 2026, two coordinated Downhole Drive Units were deployed, drilling 66 feet (about 20 m) of hard phyllite, and a prototype downhole turbine generator was tested as an alternative to batteries for powering the tool.
• A May 2026 company update stated that "NexTitan now delivers continuous thrust in hard rock."

In March 2026, the company announced it had raised $44.1 million to fund commercial deployment of NexTitan. ThinkGeoEnergy, dated 3 March 2026, reported that the total comprised $24.7 million of new capital and $19.4 million converted from a SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) raised the previous year. The round was led by TomEnterprise, the investment platform of Thomas von Koch, with participation from Underground Ventures and Nabors as a strategic investor. ThinkGeoEnergy said the round ranked among the largest European funding rounds of late 2025 and among the top hardware and industrial technology rounds.

ThinkGeoEnergy quoted chief executive Tony Branch: "This investment gives us the capital and confidence to move decisively from advanced development," and "NexTitan has the potential to materially reduce drilling costs." It quoted founder Igor Kocis: "Securing this level of investment validates both the technology and the long-term vision." The article also said the company had restructured its leadership to become more customer-facing and delivery-focused, and that it planned large-scale testing to bring NexTitan to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7, meaning a prototype demonstrated in an operational environment.

Timeline at a glance

People

Wikipedia lists the company's key people as Antony (Tony) Branch, chief executive; Liam Lines, chief engineering officer; Matus Gajdos, head of product; and Michal Novovesky, chief growth officer. Igor Kocis, who was described as cofounder and CEO in 2024 reporting, is described as founder in 2026 reporting.

The technologies

PLASMABIT: breaking rock with electrical pulses

The idea. Conventional drilling breaks rock mechanically: a roller-cone bit crushes it, or a polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) bit shears it. In hard, abrasive rock, both wear out. PLASMABIT instead fractures rock with energy delivered as short, intense electrical discharges, without the tool physically grinding against the rock.

JPT described PLASMABIT as a pulsed plasma tool that breaks rock without melting or evaporating it. Short, high-frequency, high-energy pulses rapidly heat the rock surface, causing thermo-mechanical stress that makes the rock disintegrate. The tool combines an electric arc with a chemically assisted plasma pulse, and laboratory tests showed it could break hard crystalline rock such as granite, quartzite and gneiss. A "ruggedized umbilical" was to carry power, plasma medium and fluids down to the tool, and the system was designed to run from coiled tubing units rather than conventional rigs.

Why it matters. If a drilling head does not rub against the rock, it does not wear out the way a mechanical bit does. That could mean far fewer trips. Continuous circulation of fluid carries away the rock fragments.

Where it fits. JPT noted that conventional drilling would still be used through softer sedimentary layers near the surface, where it achieves better penetration rates, with PLASMABIT targeting the crystalline basement rock below.

The Otaniemi comparison. In a hypothetical comparison based on the Otaniemi project in Finland, which targeted hot rock more than 20,000 feet below the surface, GA Drilling estimated:

JPT was careful to note that these figures were company estimates and had not been proven in the field.

Combustion variant. The 2020 Innovate UK project, according to Wikipedia, aimed to develop a combustion-based system for PLASMABIT drilling, an alternative way of generating the energy pulses.

ANCHORBIT: fighting stick-slip

Stick-slip is a common and damaging vibration in hard-rock drilling. The bit grabs the rock and stops while the drill string above continues to twist like a spring; when the stored torque overcomes the friction, the bit spins free violently. This damages bits and downhole tools and slows drilling.

Wikipedia describes ANCHORBIT as a downhole tool with two sets of extendable pistons that alternately grip the borehole wall and absorb the reactive torque. In effect, it gives the bit something solid to push against near the bottom of the hole, instead of relying on the long, springy drill string. The 2023 Houston demonstration showed the tool gripping a test well wall, and the 2024 ZeroGeo project in Germany was announced as its first planned deployment. Wikipedia describes NexTitan's anchoring system as ANCHORBIT's successor.

NexTitan: an autonomous downhole drive

The concept. In conventional drilling, the force on the bit (weight on bit) comes from the weight of heavy pipe near the bottom of the string, and rotation comes from the surface or from a downhole mud motor. In very long or horizontal wells, friction between the pipe and the hole wall makes it hard to transmit that weight to the bit. NexTitan instead grips the wellbore near the bit and generates its own thrust.

According to Wikipedia, NexTitan is an autonomous downhole drive system that works near the drill bit, gripping the wellbore and producing up to 30,000 lbf of thrust per unit. (For reference, 30,000 lbf is about 133 kN; 32,000 lbf, the figure measured at NORCE, is about 142 kN.) Onboard sensors monitor vibration and adjust the force to extend bit life and improve the rate of penetration in hard rock and long laterals. It is designed to be plug-and-play with other downhole tools.

The company's website lists claimed benefits by market:

These are company claims, not independently measured outcomes.

Coordinated units. The April 2026 test with two coordinated Downhole Drive Units suggests (this is an interpretation, not a company specification) that one unit can hold while the other advances, letting the assembly keep moving rather than stopping to reset its grip. The company described it as demonstrating continuous drilling with two coordinated units.

Power downhole. Powering an autonomous tool deep in a well is difficult; batteries have limited capacity and temperature tolerance. The prototype downhole turbine generator tested in April 2026 would use the flow of drilling fluid to generate electricity in the tool.

NexTitan Pulse. Wikipedia describes NexTitan Pulse as combining the plasma-based rock fracturing of PLASMABIT, using high-energy electrical discharges, with mechanical drilling, so that the rock ahead of the cutters is weakened before they reach it. The company's website lists the product but gives no technical details.

Reeled drilling for offshore wells

The Petrobras cooperation adds another concept. JPT described the anchoring and drive system as the planned "cornerstone" of an autonomous reeled drilling system, using reeled continuous tubing instead of conventional jointed drill pipe. Reports on the agreement said the system would include drilling automation and control systems and real-time wireline communications to the surface, moving drive and control decisions to the rock face.

The logic is that if thrust comes from a downhole drive rather than the weight of a drill string, the surface equipment can be much lighter. That is what would make it possible to drill from a light well intervention vessel, a ship normally used for maintenance on existing wells, rather than a full drilling rig. Reeled tubing also avoids the need to screw and unscrew pipe joints during trips, which the companies said reduces pipe handling hazards, tripping time and well control risk.

Patents

Wikipedia states that GA Drilling has been granted patents in the UK and Europe for drilling and rock disintegration technologies, with applications pending in the US, Canada and Brazil.

Other projects

Wikipedia also records a project in Alberta, Canada, funded in part by Emissions Reduction Alberta, to develop NexTitan for extended-reach, low-emission well construction, with a final phase demonstrating coiled tubing drilling for oil, gas and geothermal.

The company's website shows logos of organizations it describes as trusted partners, including NOV, SBO, Smurfit Westrock, Vallourec, TNO, NREL and the Fraunhofer Institute. The nature of each relationship is not detailed there.

Worked examples

The following examples are hypothetical. They use figures from the sources above to show how drilling speed and tripping translate into time, which is the main driver of drilling cost. Real wells vary enormously.

Example 1: penetration rate through a hard section

Suppose a (hypothetical) well has a 1,000 m section of hard granite. That is about 3,281 feet.

• At the roller cone average of about 7.7 ft/hr cited by GA Drilling: 3,281 ÷ 7.7 ≈ 426 hours of on-bottom drilling, about 17.8 days.
• At the PLASMABIT estimate of 23 ft/hr: 3,281 ÷ 23 ≈ 143 hours, about 6 days.
• At the 20 ft/hr that JPT says improved PDC drilling methods achieved at the Utah FORGE site: 3,281 ÷ 20 ≈ 164 hours, about 6.8 days.

The third line is important: it shows that improvements in conventional bits and practices can close much of the gap that a new technology promises to open.

Example 2: the cost of tripping

Suppose the hard section starts at a depth of 4,000 m and ends at 5,000 m. Tripping out and back in from an average depth of 4,500 m (about 14,764 ft) means moving about 29,528 ft of pipe.

• At a hypothetical conventional trip speed of about 1,070 ft/hr (one-third of the coiled tubing figure): 29,528 ÷ 1,070 ≈ 27.6 hours per round trip.
• At 3,200 ft/hr: 29,528 ÷ 3,200 ≈ 9.2 hours per round trip.

Now combine with the number of trips from GA Drilling's Otaniemi comparison:

• 11 conventional trips × 27.6 hours ≈ 304 hours, about 12.7 days.
• 3 coiled-tubing trips × 9.2 hours ≈ 28 hours, about 1.2 days.

In this illustration, tripping alone accounts for more than eleven days of difference. This is why fewer bit changes and faster trips are such a large part of the value proposition, and also why the claims need to be verified in real wells.

Example 3: what doubling the drilling rate is worth

The DOE estimates that doubling the average daily drilling rate saves 10% to 15% of total geothermal well cost. If a (hypothetical) deep well cost $20 million, that would be $2 million to $3 million per well. A geothermal power project needs many wells, both producers and injectors, so the savings multiply across a field. The DOE estimate also shows that drilling rate is only one part of the cost: casing, cement, rig rental, mobilization and completion all remain.

How GA Drilling fits into the wider landscape

GA Drilling is one of several companies trying to change how deep hard-rock wells are drilled. The different approaches can be grouped roughly as follows:

The DOE frames the broader goal as enabling enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), closed-loop systems and "superhot" resources above 375°C. Its 2019 GeoVision analysis projected at least 60 GW of US geothermal by 2050 with EGS advances, and a later DOE analysis raised that to at least 90 GW. Cheaper, faster deep drilling is a prerequisite for those numbers.

Evidence, limits and skepticism

What has been demonstrated

From the sources reviewed, GA Drilling's public evidence includes:

• Laboratory rock breaking of hard crystalline rock with PLASMABIT (JPT).
• An ANCHORBIT demonstration gripping the wall of a test well in Houston (April 2023).
• NexTitan grip and thrust in both casing and open hole at NORCE Ullrigg, measured at 32,000 lbf (February 2026).
• Two coordinated drive units drilling 66 feet of hard phyllite, and a prototype downhole turbine generator (April 2026).

What has not yet been demonstrated

• Commercial operation. The company website says customers can pre-order NexTitan but commercial deployment had not yet begun. The 2026 funding was explicitly for moving to commercial deployment.
• Full-depth field performance. The Otaniemi-based PLASMABIT comparison was a hypothetical estimate. In 2022, JPT noted that the figures had yet to be proven in the field, and that GA Drilling planned to test by deepening existing wells in projects scheduled for 2023. No public results of those tests were found for this article.
• Cost reductions. The 30% offshore well cost reduction is a joint projection by GA Drilling and Petrobras. The company says NexTitan "has the potential to materially reduce drilling costs," but did not publish specific savings figures in the sources reviewed.

Fair comparisons

JPT pointed out two problems with comparing GA Drilling's projections with conventional drilling. First, the conventional drilling data GA Drilling cited were historical averages that may not reflect recent improvements; a Texas A&M paper (SPE 208798) described PDC bits and a faster drilling method, originally developed by ExxonMobil, that achieved over 20 ft/hr at the DOE's FORGE site in Utah, close to the PLASMABIT estimate. Second, the Finnish granite at Otaniemi is nearly twice as hard as the granite at FORGE, so the two results may not be directly comparable.

Technical risks

Any downhole tool for deep geothermal wells must survive high temperatures, abrasive fluids, shock and vibration, and must be powered and controlled from kilometers away. Plasma and pulse tools need power delivered through an umbilical or generated downhole. Gripping tools need to anchor reliably in fractured rock without damaging the hole. These are solvable engineering problems in principle, but they are why the path from lab to commercial product is long.

What to watch next

Several milestones would show whether GA Drilling's approach is working outside test rigs:

1. Reaching TRL 7. The company's stated goal after the 2026 round is large-scale testing that demonstrates NexTitan as a prototype in an operational environment.
2. First commercial wells. Pre-orders turning into paid deployments with geothermal developers or oil and gas operators, with published results on penetration rate, bit life and trips.
3. The Petrobras system. Whether the reeled drilling concept progresses from cooperation agreement to offshore trials from an intervention vessel, and whether the projected cost reduction holds up.
4. The ZeroGeo plant in Germany. Whether the 12 MW project announced in 2024 goes ahead as the first deployment of GA Drilling's anchoring technology.
5. Independent data. Peer-reviewed or operator-published field results, rather than company estimates, comparing NexTitan-assisted wells with modern conventional drilling in similar rock.

Common misconceptions

"GA Drilling melts its way through rock." According to JPT's description, PLASMABIT breaks rock thermo-mechanically with short pulses, without melting or evaporating it.

"PLASMABIT is GA Drilling's main product." It was the company's earliest technology, but by 2026 its flagship product was NexTitan, a downhole anchoring and drive system that works with conventional bits. NexTitan Pulse combines pulse rock fracturing with mechanical cutting.

"The technology is already in commercial use." As of the 2026 sources, NexTitan was available for pre-order and moving toward commercial deployment, with a goal of reaching TRL 7 through large-scale testing.

"Faster drilling alone makes geothermal cheap." The DOE estimate that doubling the drilling rate saves 10% to 15% of well cost shows that drilling speed is important but not the only factor. Casing, cement, rig time, trips and completion all matter, which is why GA Drilling targets tripping, vibration and rig size as well as rate of penetration.

"GA Drilling only works on geothermal." The company started with a geothermal mission, but its partnerships with MOL, Nabors and Petrobras, and its Alberta project, are aimed at oil and gas wells as well as geothermal.

"Deep geothermal anywhere is just a matter of drilling." Even with cheap wells, a deep geothermal project needs enough permeability or an engineered reservoir to circulate fluid, and must manage induced seismicity. The St1 Otaniemi project, for example, used a seismic monitoring network during stimulation and kept vibration within limits set by Finnish authorities.

Frequently asked questions

What is GA Drilling? A drilling technology company founded in 2008 in Bratislava, Slovakia, originally named Geothermal Anywhere and renamed in 2013. It develops tools for drilling hard rock in geothermal and oil and gas wells.

What is NexTitan? An autonomous downhole drive system that grips the wellbore near the bit and generates up to 30,000 lbf of thrust per unit, with sensors that adjust force to reduce vibration and improve penetration. A thrust of 32,000 lbf was measured in testing in Norway in February 2026.

What is PLASMABIT? GA Drilling's earliest technology, which fractures rock with high-energy electrical pulses rather than mechanical grinding. It was first developed for oil well plug and abandonment and then adapted for deep geothermal drilling.

What is ANCHORBIT? A downhole tool with two sets of extendable pistons that alternately grip the borehole wall to absorb reactive torque and reduce stick-slip vibration. It was demonstrated in Houston in 2023, and NexTitan's anchoring system is described as its successor.

Who has invested in GA Drilling? Sources name MOL Group (through Lead Ventures), Nabors Industries ($8 million in 2022 and participation in later rounds), Thomas von Koch and his TomEnterprise platform, and Underground Ventures. The March 2026 round totaled $44.1 million.

What is the Petrobras partnership? A technical cooperation agreement announced in July 2024 with Petrobras and its research center Cenpes to develop an autonomous reeled drilling system for offshore wells drilled from light well intervention vessels, which the partners projected could cut well construction costs by up to 30%.

How deep could GA Drilling's technology drill? The company has said its technology could enable geothermal wells about 5 miles deep. That remains a goal rather than a demonstrated result.

Why does hard-rock drilling matter for geothermal energy? Drilling can account for around half of a geothermal project's capital cost, and many deep heat resources lie in hard crystalline rock where conventional bits drill slowly and wear out quickly.

Summary

GA Drilling is a small company with a big target: the cost of drilling deep, hard, hot rock, which stands between geothermal energy and much of its potential. Founded in Slovakia in 2008 as Geothermal Anywhere, it first pursued PLASMABIT, a pulse-based rock-breaking tool, then ANCHORBIT, an anti-vibration gripping tool, and now NexTitan, an autonomous downhole drive that pushes the bit from inside the well. Backed by Nabors, MOL, Petrobras and private investors, it raised $44.1 million in 2026 after field tests in Norway demonstrated grip, thrust and coordinated drilling in hard rock.

The evidence so far is promising but early. Key performance and cost figures remain company projections, conventional drilling has improved in the meantime, and the step from a test rig to routine commercial wells is where many drilling innovations stall. Whether GA Drilling succeeds or not, the problem it is working on, making deep hard-rock wells faster and cheaper, is one of the central challenges for the next generation of geothermal energy.

Sources

• GA Drilling (Wikipedia)
• GA Drilling company website
• JPT: Nabors investment seeks to bring plasma drilling to forefront of geothermal developments
• JPT: GA Drilling and Petrobras light drilling technology to reduce offshore costs
• ThinkGeoEnergy: GA Drilling secures $44M investment to bring pioneering geothermal drilling tech to market
• ThinkGeoEnergy: Nabors invests in ultra-deep geothermal drilling tech firm GA Drilling
• Offshore magazine: GA Drilling, Petrobras partner on downhole drilling system advances
• U.S. DOE: Subsurface Accessibility (geothermal drilling)
• U.S. DOE: Geothermal Electricity Generation
• Geothermal power (Wikipedia)
• St1: Final phase of drilling the world's deepest geothermal heat wells in Otaniemi
• ThinkGeoEnergy: Developer successfully drills 6,400 m well for geothermal heating project in Finland
• Kola Superdeep Borehole (Wikipedia)