Monday, February 25, 2013

USA:

New Geothermal Data System Could Open Up Clean-Energy Reserves  (Scientific American)

Forgotten and filed away decades ago, millions of documents on geothermal research are now helping scientists to make harvesting the Earth’s energy affordable

A wealth of geologic data from all 50 states and the Gulf of Mexico has been sitting unused in state and federal filing cabinets for decades. The Arizona Geological Survey is leading a coalition of universities and federal agencies on a nationwide treasure hunt to find and digitize these legacy data in a National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) to eliminate some of the financial risk face while prospecting for geothermal resources. Since the project's inception in 2008 under $35-million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office, collaborators have digitized information from over 1.25 million oil and gas, water, and geothermal wells and expect to have as many as three million wells in the system by the end of the year.

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