Since 2015, the University of Utah's Energy & Geoscience Institute, Utah Governor's Office of Energy Development and other key partners have been leading an effort through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) program to develop an innovative underground geothermal laboratory near Milford, UT.
In 2016, the DOE announced $29 million in phase 2 funding for the University of Utah and Sandia National Laboratories in Nevada. Each team has until Spring 2018 to fully instrument, characterize and permit candidate sites for an underground laboratory to conduct cutting-edge research on EGS.
