Energy Department Announces $31 Million for Initial Phases of Enhanced Geothermal Systems Field Observatory (DOE)
As part of the Administration's all-of-the-above energy strategy, the Energy Department today announced up to $31 million to establish the initial phases of the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE), a field laboratory dedicated to cutting-edge research on enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). EGS are engineered reservoirs, created beneath the surface of the Earth, where there is hot rock but limited pathways through which fluid can flow. During EGS development, underground fluid pathways are safely created and their size and connectivity increased. These enhanced pathways allow fluid to circulate throughout the hot rock and carry heat to the surface to generate electricity. In the long term, EGS may enable domestic access to a geographically-diverse baseload, and carbon-free energy resource on the order of 100 gigawatts, or enough to power about 100 million homes.
The FORGE initiative is comprised of three phases. The first two phases focus on selecting both a site and an operations team, as well as preparing and fully characterizing the site. In Phase 1, $2 million will be available over one year for selected teams to perform analysis on the suitability of their proposed site and to develop plans for Phase 2. Subject to the availability of appropriations, up to $29 million in funding is planned for Phase 2, during which teams will work to fully instrument, characterize, and permit candidate sites.
Subject to the availability of appropriations, Phase 3 will fund full implementation of FORGE at a single site, managed by a single operations team. This phase will be guided by a collaborative research strategy and executed via annual R&D solicitations designed to improve, optimize, and drive down the costs of deploying EGS. In this phase, partners from industry, academia, and the national laboratories will have ongoing opportunities to conduct new and innovative R&D at the site in critical research areas such as reservoir characterization, reservoir creation, and reservoir sustainability.
The Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) funds more than 150 geothermal research, development, demonstration, and analysis projects. Follow our progress with the 2013 Peer Review Report or view program achievements in the 2013 Annual Report. Data from this project and other GTO-funded research will be made publicly available via the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) on an open-source platform. Find out more about this free information tool here. View the full funding announcement here or visit the new FORGE website.
