On 19th June 2018, three members of the CHPM2030 Team participated in the Annual Conference of the European Technology and Innovation Platform on Deep Geothermal (ETIP-DG) that took place in Brussels.
The ETIP-DG is an open stakeholder group with the objective to enable deep geothermal technology to reach its full potential in the European Union. Endorsed by the European Commission under the Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan), it covers the entire deep geothermal energy exploration, production, and utilisation involving actors from industry, academia, research centres, and sectoral associations.
During this full day event, the work carried out by the platform and the development of the Strategic Research Agenda was presented.
Filippo Gagliardi, from the European Commission, presented the status of Horizon Europe (FP9), which is the framework programme that will succeed Horizon 2020 and will start in January 2021. The new framework will be mission-oriented and will be based on 3 pillars: open science, global challenges and open innovation.
CHPM2030 was part of the session “H2020 Lessons learnt and project results”. As moderator of this session, Philippe Dumas, EGEC’s Secretary General gave a general introduction about geothermal energy in relation to Horizon 2020 projects. Following this, several Horizon 2020 projects working on geothermal were presented: CHPM2030, ThermoDrill, Matching, SURE, Destress and MEET.
The CHPM2030 project was presented by Tamás Madarász from the University of Miskolc. After the presentations, there was an interesting roundtable discussion in which the representatives from the different projects exchanged ideas. The topics discussed were project implementation, technology readiness level monitoring and dissemination activities, among others.
The last session of the conference was dedicated to the different geothermal working groups: Exploration, Deep Drilling, Production, and Surface Systems. Ben Laenen, CHPM2030 participant from VITO, was the chair of the session. The specific items for the Strategic Research Agenda were discussed.
The Annual Conference allowed the CHPM2030 team members to meet key actors in the geothermal sector and to exchange ideas with other geothermal project’s representatives.