The Geothermal Energy from Oil and Gas Demonstrated Engineering Project (GEODE) is a first-of-its-kind consortium led by Project InnerSpace and the Society of Petroleum Engineers and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) that aims to expand U.S. geothermal energy by leveraging technology and workforce from the oil and gas industry.
The GEODE effort is issuing a Geothermal Capability Mapping and Analysis Request for Information (RFI) to better understand the geothermal, oil, and gas capabilities of national laboratories and universities. The GEODE team will merge information collected from this RFI into a searchable online database powered by artificial intelligence. The data collected will include researcher expertise, experience, past work, available facilities and capabilities, and emerging interests of each lab.
The goal is to help the GEODE team better align existing capabilities with pain points in expanding the use of geothermal through technology or methodology. Examples include challenges related to drilling or capital costs, high-temperature drilling tools and drilling tool reliability, thermal energy conversion efficiency, and surface modeling.
Geoscience and engineering universities and National Lab Capability Analysis Working Groups will coordinate with GTO to ensure optimal integration with existing resources, such as the Lab Partnering Service, and establish key performance indicators to monitor the success of the web-based database and ensure continuity beyond the GEODE program timeframe.
RFI Process
The GEODE team will collect RFI responses from individual respondents and analyze the data from November 2024 to January 2025 to produce a report. Some RFI respondents may be contacted for follow-up interviews. Then, using the outputs of the RFI process, the GEODE team will work with a developer to construct the database. The GEODE Consortium plans for the database to be accessible to the public by June 2025.
GEODE Request for Information