A Novel Exploration Toolkit for Finding Geothermal Heat Efficiently and Sustainably

Geothermal energy can provide a climate-friendly baseload for heat and power that is independent from wind and sun. However, the growth of geothermal energy lags behind EU targets.

This is because geothermal energy projects have comparatively high technical and economic risks, which impacts public support negatively and holds back investment.

Reliable exploration strategies that have inherently lower economic and technical risks and hence increase public support are key to drastically reducing these barriers.FindHeat develops a novel, conceptual model-based geothermal exploration workflow.

A modular toolkit, the FindHeat platform, provides innovative software tools and geophysical exploration techniques at significantly lower costs than the state-of-the-art.

The platform will be validated across eight geologically diverse geothermal plays to demonstrate its economic and technical benefits arising from faster turnaround times for exploration and appraisal of geothermal resources, making better use of legacy data and non-invasive geophysical techniques, and constraining uncertainties with respect to the size of the heat source and the range of possible heat production rates.

The FindHeat exploration approach enables geologically-based resource assessments and will lead to a paradigm shift towards exploiting geothermal resources with inherently low technical and economic risks, thus improving exploration success and economic feasibility.

Comprehensive social science research at the use cases will help to earn the public trust that the FindHeat approach will lead to a more efficient and sustainable exploitation of geothermal energy.FindHeat brings together extensive expertise and innovation from industry and academia, covering geology, geophysics, engineering, social science, economics, communication, and technical training.

The industry partners of the consortium are direct end users of the FindHeat platform and will exploit the results in their daily operations.