CORNELL UNIVERSITY, (WETM) — Cornell alumnus Bill Nye was in Ithaca on Thursday taking part in a project that could eventually heat Cornell’s entire campus.

The Earth Source Heat project is Cornell’s version of a deep geothermal system that would use heat from the earth to warm Cornell’s campus without the use of fossil fuels.

A video released to Cornell’s Youtube page on Thursday shows Nye at the staging location where the drilling will happen.

Nye explained the project of drilling down two miles into the ground to gain access to the earth’s heat in order to use it and heat the campus.

“You have to go down very deep to get to this, not quite boiling, 90-degree celsius rock,” Nye said in the video, “and then that will be enough heat to heat the whole campus,” he added. “If this works…you’d have about five pairs of wells around campus that would heat the whole place,” he said.

Drilling for the project hasn’t begun just yet but is bound to start in the near future. That next step will be called the Cornell university Observatory Borehole, or CUBO. Drilling this hole will allow scientists to further explore deep surface rock conditions and the heat output.

If you’d like to keep track of the drilling project, you can do so by visiting Cornell’s website.