Horizon Geothermal: Deep Reservoir Assessment
Funds four €4.5M projects that develop methods to find and assess deep, low-permeability geothermal reservoirs between 2,000 and 6,000 metres.
There's a lot of heat sitting deep underground that nobody has ever mapped properly. Oil and gas companies drilled past deep sedimentary and basement rock for decades because it's expensive to reach and usually too tight — too low in natural permeability — to produce anything through a conventional well. That left a real data gap exactly where a newer generation of geothermal technology, Enhanced …
Developing and validating advanced methods, technologies and conceptual models that find and characterise deep sedimentary and basement geothermal reservoirs — typically low-permeability, historically ignored by oil and gas exploration, at depths between 2,000 and 6,000 metres — to unlock sites for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) or closed-loop geothermal, raise drilling success rates and cut induced-seismicity risk. Proposals also have to assess the environmental and social impact of the resulting development, with real social-sciences-and-humanities input and inclusive community engagement built in, not added afterward. Activities are expected to reach TRL 4-5 by the end of the project, from whatever TRL the work starts at.
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