DOE to Establish a National Geothermal Data System

Energy experts agree the U.S. should be using more geothermal power.

One of the Federal government’s responses to this challenge is to ensure access to the best information about geothermal resources. The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Boise State University a grant of $4.9 million over the next five years to establish a National Geothermal Data System (NGDS).

Accurate data is vital to science and engineering, the basis for investment decisions, and crucial for land and natural resource management. But existing geothermal data has not been gathered into a system that would provide organized, widespread access. The NGDS will consist of a core database and services developed and housed at Boise State and a network that will link partner data sites to facilitate the exchange of data.

“The interest in geothermal is just ratcheting up, and Boise State is a national leader,” said Walter Snyder, NGDS director and professor of geosciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boise State.

Compared to coal, crude oil, and natural gas, geothermal has almost no carbon footprint, and unlike wind and solar, it never goes offline. Unfortunately, the International Energy Agency recently found that less than 1 percent of the world’s energy is supplied by geothermal power. A comprehensive data system is essential to improving that percentage, but building one is expected to take up to five years.

“More than a database, the NGDS will be a data system,” Snyder said, “because it requires an incredibly broad range of data types and has to deliver information in a format that’s useful to the public, schools, researchers, industry, financial institutions, state and federal agencies, and state and federal lawmakers.”

The NGDS will actually be a network of databases that collectively will build a system for acquisition, management, and maintenance of geothermal and related data. Access to the information will be provided through a desktop application and via the web sites of member databases. Users of the system will include federal and state agencies, researchers, the public, educational institutions, and the geothermal industry and financial institutions.

The NGDS will contain data about geothermal site attributes, power plants, environmental factors, policy and procedure data, and institutional barriers (e.g., transmission infrastructure access, risk mitigation). It will provide resource classification and financial risk assessment tools to help encourage the development of more geothermal resources by industry. It will be an easy-to-use system that meets the needs of both professional and public users for information on geothermal resources.

Boise State will spearhead a consortium of government agencies, and academic institutions. Major participants in the NGDS are: Energy & Geosciences Institute (University of Utah); Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy (University of Nevada, Reno); Geo-Heat Center (Oregon Institute of Technology); Stanford Geothermal Program, (Stanford University); U.S. Geoscience Information Network, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management; and the Geothermal Energy Association. Two key geoinformatics systems, CoreWall  and Geoinformatics for Geochemistry, will be working with the NGDS team to share technology, tools and participate in standards development and adoption.