Geothermal energy can provide a climate-friendly baseload for heat and power that is independent from wind and sun. However, the growth of geothermal energy lags behind EU targets. This is because geothermal energy projects have comparatively high technical and economic risks, which impacts public support negatively and holds back investment. Reliable exploration strategies that have inherently lower economic and technical risks and hence increase public support are key to drastically reducing these barriers. FindHeat develops a novel, conceptual model-based geothermal exploration workflow. A modular toolkit, the FindHeat platform, provides innovative software tools and geophysical exploration techniques at significantly lower costs than the state-of-the-art. The platform will be validated across eight geologically diverse geothermal plays to demonstrate its economic and technical benefits arising from faster turnaround times for exploration and appraisal of geothermal resources, making better use of legacy data and non-invasive geophysical techniques, and constraining uncertainties with respect to the size of the heat source and the range of possible heat production rates. The FindHeat exploration approach enables geologically-based resource assessments and will lead to a paradigm shift towards exploiting geothermal resources with inherently low technical and economic risks, thus improving exploration success and economic feasibility. Comprehensive social science research at the use cases will help to earn the public trust that the FindHeat approach will lead to a more efficient and sustainable exploitation of geothermal energy. FindHeat brings together extensive expertise and innovation from industry and academia, covering geology, geophysics, engineering, social science, economics, communication, and technical training. The industry partners of the consortium are direct end users of the FindHeat platform and will exploit the results in their daily operations.

The project consortium of DeepBEAT aims to develop ground-breaking technologies to use geochemistry for the detection of deep-seated land deposits. Transforming Europe's exploration sector by integrating cutting-edge technologies and sustainable practices will push Europe towards a climate-neutral and socially responsible economy. The exploration of deep land deposits should employ environmentally friendly, socially acceptable, and ultra-low impact methodologies to ensure the citizens that exploration activities can be conducted responsibly. Acceptance to exploration and mining will be a cornerstone towards cultivating a more resilient and inclusive European society. DeepBEAT final outcome will be a workflow which addresses these aspects by two means: I) DeepBEAT plans to engage with the local communities at the test sites to learn about concerns, hesitancy and what is the emotional core of these. Experiences from these events will be included in exploration workflow as an integral part, following the principles of free, prior, informed consent, which requires to interact with communities at a very early stage. II) DeepBEAT proposes ten novel technological developments, all designed to minimize impact on environment and maximise sustainability. These research and innovation developements have the potential to push the limits of surface geochemical exploration to an other level. They comprise a) new insights to ultra-high resolution analytical chemistry, b) increasing sampling strategy efficiency, c) introducing ground-breaking new concepts of dealing with elemental measurement data, d) reducing exploration costs by sample selection, e) testing novel phyto-geochemical media, and f) introducing UAV assisted biogeochemical sampling. Detailed understanding of the deposits complement the workflow to allow the understanding of the mineralizations as part of mineral systems and AI-assisted 3D mineral prospectivity modelling.

PUSH-IT will showcase full-scale application of high temperature heat storage (up to 90°C) in geothermal reservoirs using 3 different technologies at 6 different sites. The 3 technologies addressed in PUSH-IT are relevant for different reservoir types, which are available everywhere in Europe. In PUSH-IT we will develop, deploy and test our technologies for a variety of configurations of heat sources, heat storage technologies, geological conditions, distribution systems, stakeholder populations and market and legal conditions. Hence, PUSH-IT provides a unique scope on demonstration, integration and advances for seasonal heat storage that are relevant across Europe. These results will enhance the utilisation of sustainable energy and create a balanced system for sharing benefits and burdens tied to sustainable heat generation, storage and distribution activities. We will reduce environmental impact, levelised cost of energy and risks and improve performance and robustness via development and demonstration of several enabling technologies, i.e., newly developed monitoring and water quality control and novel drilling and completion and novel control systems. Societal engagement is a key element and achieved via citizen engagement, analysing motivations and perceptions of heat storage, and investigating governance policies and business models that engage citizens in decision making regarding urban heating systems including storage. The PUSH-IT consortium combines heat suppliers, well drillers, public planning offices and academic partners. These cover all required technical and societal know-how and background for heat systems. We will realise operational projects and use these to generate generic solutions and practices relevant across Europe. All activities will be monitored and reported, yielding a valuable comprehensive dataset on the technical and social real-world performance.