In order to move the nearly stagnant U.S. geothermal market along, the industry needs help identifying viable resources. The Department of Energy (DOE) has been hard at work developing a tool that will help this process, and recently announced the official launch of its National Geothermal Data System (NGDS).
NGDS is part of President Obama's Open Data Policy initiative and was released during the White House Energy Datapalooza in Washington, D.C., which "highlight[s] private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators that are using freely available data from the government and other sources to build products, services, and apps that advance a secure and clean energy future."
In what the DOE hopes will “change America’s energy portfolio" and accelerate the geothermal industry, NGDS aggregates state geological surveys from across the country into an organized information hub. This data includes more than 650,000 well logs, 530,000 borehole temperatures, and 1.7 million oil, gas, water and geothermal well headers from all 50 states.
