To access an estimated 100+ GW of clean, baseload energy via enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), the Geothermal Technologies Office funds technology research & development (R&D) to reduce barriers and upfront costs of geothermal deployment. One of our recent R&D projects, the PNNL Code Comparison Study, is currently wrapping up and presenting their final findings at the 2017 Stanford Geothermal Workshop, February 13-15, 2017.

Over the past 3 years, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has supported the GTO in organizing and executing the first-of-its-kind geothermal code comparison study. This project sought to test, improve, and diagnose differences among a worldwide collection of cutting-edge numerical simulators available to support geothermal energy development.

Renowned modeling experts from the national laboratories and universities, 11 institutes in total, were gathered in order to benchmark current codes, enable improvement and verification, build confidence in the suite of available numerical tools, and ultimately identify critical future development needs for the geothermal modeling community to accelerate the development of understanding the subsurface for optimizing EGS development.

Take a look at the effort’s technical reports and other materials here.

Participating teams on the study are principally from the United States and include those from universities, industry and DOE National Laboratories:  Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Pacific Northwest National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Idaho National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, Oakridge National Lab, University of Oklahoma, University of Nevada- Reno, Stanford University, Penn State University, University of Texas at Austin, and Itasca Consulting Group.