Geothermal – CCS – Hydrogen – Hydrocarbon Cross Over Workshop

The Earth is hot, very hot, it has been hot for four and a half billion years and will continue to be hot for at least as long again. The heat of the Earth – geothermal energy, is a sustainable, clean, environmentally friendly energy source that exists for every country on the planet and yet has been developed by only a few nations. Geothermal energy can be harnessed to generate power, heating and cooling and be used for processes which require copious quantities of heat be that high or low enthalpy.

Extraction and utilisation of geothermal heat requires the same skills, knowledge and infrastructure as that used for petroleum. Indeed, the petroleum industry is the ideal agency that could make geothermal energy one of the key energy sources for a sustainable future but the energy contained within a barrel of hot water is significantly less than that contained in a barrel of oil.

Carbon capture and geostorage also plays a critical role in decarbonising the world’s energy supplies. It is the only industrial scale process that can remove carbon dioxide from power generation and other industrial processes such as hydrogen generation, steel manufacture and especially cement production at the point of generation and before it enters the atmosphere. The ability and skills required to transport and inject CO₂ into the subsurface for long term safe storage also lie with the petroleum industry. Like geothermal energy the key to global success in CCS will require legislation to create the framework and then what is now the petroleum industry to execute the programmes.

In simultaneously considering both geothermal energy and carbon geostorage a new opportunity arises to utilise stored CO₂ within closed system thermosiphon heat harvesting – so called CO₂ plume geothermal (CPG) and process that can be used for power generation and thus for the first time monetise CO₂ at large scale.

This meeting will examine the political, technical and social barriers to developing both geothermal energy and CCS how they might be overcome with particular emphasis on how the petroleum industry might use its 100+ years of knowhow and project management to deliver a cleaner, sustainable future.