GO-Forward aims to develop a novel methodological approach to make more accurate pre-drilling predictions of geothermal reservoir properties and thus reduce the mining risk. Key to the GO-Forward approach is to simulate geological processes for pre-drill assessment of reservoir structure and properties, calibrated to geological or geophysical data, rather than extrapolating the properties from those data with geostatistical methods. To this end, GO-Forward focuses on extending and further developing, testing and demonstrating the added value of forward modelling methods originally developed for hydrocarbon exploration, including stratigraphic forward modelling (SFM), diagenesis forward modelling (DFM) and fracture network forward modelling (FFM), to be used for exploration in different geothermal settings of high relevance for Europe. First, the developed approaches will be tested and calibrated in areas with abundant subsurface information and production data, to prove conceptually the applicability of the methods and reproducibility of the results, to optimise and de-risk geothermal exploration. Calibrated model approaches are subsequently applied in areas with limited data availability to demonstrate their capability to increase pre-drill Probability of Success (POS). To support the workflow and further reduce exploration costs, GO-Forward advances ML-based and computational methods to enhance (existing) (sub)surface information for calibration, uncertainty quantification and data assimilation, and (upscaling) routines for flow simulation, DNSH, and techno-economic performance assessment for POS and Value of Information (VOI). In addition, GO-Forward addresses public awareness of geothermal developments already at the early stages of exploration. By including novel approaches to citizen engagement and stakeholder dialogue, we aim to increase the societal readiness level of geothermal exploration as the first step of geothermal developments.

SCARBOn (Space CARbon Observatory Next step) is the continuation of the Horizon 2020 SCARBO project. This multidisciplinary project is carried out by a gender-diverse team, through a consortium including the space industry, SMEs and scientific institutes. It is led from Toulouse, France by Airbus Defence and Space. The SCARBOn system is based on a constellation of small greenhouse gases (GHG) monitoring satellites, flying an innovative miniaturised CO2/CH4 instrument (NanoCarb) together with a coregistered compact aerosol sensor (SPEXone). Together, they will deliver twice-daily accurate global measurements to monitor the diurnal variations of fossil CO2 emission. The objective of the SCARBOn project is to mature the technical and industrial definition of the NanoCarb instrument and of the SCARBOn constellation, targeting an operational system availability before the end of the decade. The design of the NanoCarb instrument will be upgraded and refined following the outcomes of the previous SCARBO study, and its performances will be carefully modelled. An instrument breadboard will provide valuable data during an airborne campaign, which will be used together with modelled data to verify the instrument design. This will allow raising the instrument TRL to at least 5, targeting 6 by the end of the project. Data processing at levels L1 to L4 will validate the concept capability to monitor GHG plumes from space. The constellation concept will also be refined in view of a possible short-term industrial implementation. SCARBOn’s daily CO2 and CH4 anthropogenic emissions monitoring data, based on novel European breakthrough technologies, will be a valuable contributor to the European Commission’s endeavour to fight climate change. As an upside, the monitoring data will foster the development of added-value services and will represent a state-of-the-art European alternative to the burgeoning non-European commercial initiatives.

FlexGeo aims to develop innovative geothermal energy system designs for maximized systems performance and flexibility. Pathing the way for the market entry of commercial modular reversible ORC systems will be, together with advanced smart control strategies and operational tools, the backbone of our concept. The proposed key-innovations will make geothermal systems more flexible, more efficient, more economically viable and adaptable for an implementation and market update across Europe and beyond. A modular rev. 200 kWel ORC unit with advanced control strategies and operational tool will be installed and demonstrated at a real district heating system at the TUM Campus in Garching, Germany. The first-time demonstration of this innovative technology on a TRL 7 level will directly path the way to its market entry after the project, since due to the attractive modular approach, the demonstrator already has the same capacity as the future commercial product. Furthermore, innovative geothermal system designs considering high- and low-temperature Underground Thermal Energy Storage (UTES) systems, advanced closed-loop systems (AGS) and enhanced flexibility of district heating (DH) and district cooling (DC) networks (DHCN), are pathing the way to a broad spread of the FlexGeo solutions across Europe and the world, resulting in largescale CO2 emission reductions.

Geodata are datasets that have a spatial, temporal and thematic aspect to describe phenomena and processes in time, space and topic. Geodata, or geospatial data, are nowadays collected and produced with various sensors and techniques which provide for images, 3D point clouds, thematic maps, etc. Geodata are used in many Geosciences and for various applications such as urban planning, territorial management, damage assessment, environmental monitoring, 3D city modelling, renewable energy assessment, land registry, heritage documentation, etc. Despite a growing market, a large number of applications, a vast series of publications and various acquisition and processing techniques, there are still many unresolved research questions on the automation of processing procedures, and on how to make them more reliable, powerful and scale-invariant. Moreover, an efficient availability, access and use of geospatial data are often missing. This hinders the growth of new applications and societal welfares. Progress in provision of efficiently and effectively derived 3D geospatial information is thus the key to more comprehensive, faster and better exploitation of geodata, for the benefit of individuals and societies. Last but not least, new occupations are emerging in the geospatial industry which requires capacity building for developing new applications of geospatial technologies. The VOLTA project, through secondments, training activities and networking, will facilitate knowledge exchange and career progresses in the geospatial field. The project will develop innovative solutions to (i) automatically provide metric information from images, (ii) fuse heterogeneous data coming from various sensors, (iii) segment 2D and 3D geospatial data and (iv) process large geospatial datasets in the Cloud. The project will share and exploit the complementary expertise of the partners to produce and transfer new skills and innovative solutions for mapping agencies and geospatial companies.

The project aims at improving preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations by means of providing integrated tools to support efficient response planning and the building of realistic multidisciplinary scenarios. The project will design and develop a system for improving response planning strategies and scenario building (TRL 7 or 8) and facilitating organizational coordination among many actors, integrating a wide range of support tools to be used operationally by a large variety of stakeholders (firefighting units, medical emergency services, police departments, civil protection units, command and control centres). The devised system shall integrate existing and newly developed tools to enhance the cooperation between autonomous systems (satellite-, sea-, land- and air-based) from different agencies as well as to consolidate the methodology for cross-border scenario-building. The project shall investigate the currently existing tools and methodologies with the involvement of local author