I started to post in some detail but fortunately, a comment by Stever at the article summed it up nicely, Sloppy research and writing. WSJ should pull the article rather than have such inaccurate info on their pages.
All that said, I do like geothermal energy at commercial and residential scales. These two applications are at opposite ends of the complexity scale.
I haves only had first hand exposure to commercial geothermal one time and this was at a geothermal power plant in the Salton Sea area of California. On paper, the unit operations are pretty much the same as a natural gas or coal generating plant except the geothermal plant does not have boilers. That plant “mined” hot brine under pressure then flashed it to steam to drive turbines. Devil is in the details. The inorganic contaminants in the brine are corrosive and scale surfaces heavily so expensive scale and corrosion inhibitor additives are required along with very expensive metallurgy.
For residential use, things are simpler. Trench the backyard to lay in a racetrack pattern of polypropylene pipe that is a closed loop to a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger replaces the fan and coils on the home's heat pump. One of the commenters at the WSJ article said he has a 30yo system using pumped water from the lake at his backyard - This would work fine as well if you have a lake in the back yard.