Setting new standards for geothermal energy research and teaching

Geothermal energy may play a key role in the energy transition as part of mitigating climate change, but how do we run geothermal systems efficiently and safely? ETH Zurich along with three of its IDEA League partners – TU Delft, RWTH Aachen, and Politecnico di Milano – have been awarded a 3.4 million euro grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 programme to address this question.

The Project “EASYGO: Efficiency and Safety in Geothermal Operations” will enable 13 doctoral students from the consortium partners to conduct research into the full chain of geothermal operations, from production to power-plant engineering to injection. EASYGO will bring the IDEA League to another level of scientific collaboration.

Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Earth Sciences focus on CO2 injections for improving the heat extraction efficiency of geothermal systems. This work includes subsurface CO2 circulation tests and novel geophysical monitoring techniques in the Bedretto Underground Laboratory for Geoenergies (BULG) that ETH Zurich recently established.