Making the Most of Existing Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Geothermal Brine Resource Exploration

Summary With increased focus on green energy upscaling and diversification, geothermal energy is expected to play an increasingly significant role in the sustainable energy mix. As an energy source that is available virtually everywhere, geothermal resources can be used for power and heat for a range of applications. Additionally geothermal fluids can host high-demand elements, such as lithium, required for energy transition technologies. As part of Global Geothermal Resource Assessment and Global Lithium Brines projects, we collated, integrated, and analysed numerous publicly available datasets for geothermal exploration insights, including temperature, fluid chemistry and production data. An extensive amount of data is available for geothermal exploration and development. Integrating disparate datasets through robust data transformation and quality control processes allows us to construct comprehensive databases for analysis. Leveraging data-driven approaches on properly formatted data can provide valuable insights, validate models, and explain relationships and phenomena that may otherwise be poorly understood, for example when investigating temperature at depth in different areas, or predicting fluid properties. However, collating and using diverse datasets comes with inherent challenges concerning discoverability, accessibility, and transformation. Understanding and addressing these challenges, and establishing best practices for data-handling, can unlock the value of public data for geothermal developments.