Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Department of Earth Sciences recently developed a new method that could potentially extract heat from below the Earth's surface to produce renewable energy.

According to United Press International, the new method, which is called a CO2-plume geothermal system (CPG), could also lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

While current techniques for obtaining electricity from the heat under the Earth's surface typically involve the extraction of hot water from rocks, the CPG system would reportedly use high-pressure CO2 instead of water.

Jimmy Randolph, a graduate student at the university who helped come up with the new method, told R&D Magazine that CPG offers a number of advantages over previous geothermal techniques, including the fact that CO2 is able to pass through porous rock better than water, meaning heat can be extracted more efficiently.

"Part of the beauty of this is that it combines a lot of ideas but the ideas are essentially technically proven, so we don't need a lot of new technology developed," Randolph explained.