The DEEP Project: Innovation for De-Risking Enhanced Geothermal Energy Projects

The Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 anticipates that by 2050 up to ~7% of the future energy production will come from deep geothermal energy. Likewise, many other countries worldwide are investigating the potential of harnessing deep geothermal energy as a renewable solution. However, seismic risk reduction and reservoir efficiency is the current major coupled problem faced by Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) reservoirs. Balancing risk and economic output is a key requirement in all EGS projects. The DEEP (Innovation for De-risking Enhanced geothermal Energy Projects) project is an international collaboration whose research-goal is to establish a full-scale protocol for real-time monitoring and risk analysis of potential seismicity triggered by EGS operations. To this end, the project will employ innovative seismic sensors, improved event-cataloguing techniques, fully probabilistic data-driven seismicity forecasts, and loss assessment strategies. In DEEP we plan to apply the so-called Adaptive Traffic Light System (ATLS) where forecasts are continuously updated with real-time data-feeds, providing an integrated and dynamic assessment of the seismic risk to the operators. Field test sites include the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) in Utah (USA), as well as at EGS sites in Germany and France. Parallel to the technology development, the project aims also at defining the next-generation good-practice guidelines and risk assessment procedures in order to reduce commercial costs and enhance the safety of future projects. Here, we will present an overview of the DEEP project to provide a framework for other DEEP presentations. We will also showcase a selection of results from new event detection and location algorithms based on machine learning and using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), as well as the results from a pilot test of the ATLS workflow for seismicity forecast models for the upcoming FORGE stimulation strategy.