ARPA-E announces $30M funding opportunity for superhot geothermal in the US
Notice of funding opportunity for technologies to developer superhot geothermal systems from ARPA-E (source: US DOE)
Carlo Cariaga
17 Jan 2025
The ARPA-E under the US DOE has announced a $30 million funding opportunity for research and development of technologies to harness superhot geothermal energy.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has announced a USD 30 million funding opportunity for research and development of technologies that enable the production of geothermal energy from superhot reservoirs (>375 °C and >22 MPa) for 15 years or more.
Concept papers for this funding opportunity need to be submitted by 19 February 2025. There is no announced deadline yet for full submission. For more details and documents relevant to the funding opportunity, please visit the ARPA-E eXchange website.
This program seeks to fund the development of novel technologies for well construction, enhance testing facilities, and optimize reservoir heat extraction to make super-hot geothermal production a reality. The program will have two categories:
- Technologies related to the construction of robust super-hot wells and validation services for quality assurance of new well designs and materials. This focus will involve new materials, novel well solutions, and state-of-the-art testing facilities to assess these new approaches; and
- Technologies related to the extraction of heat from the reservoir to the well. The focus of this category is to develop fracture based and non-fracture-based methods for extracting heat from a super-hot reservoir (potentially composed of ductile rocks) to a working fluid in a well.
The SUPERHOT program builds on ARPA-E’s history of support for enhanced geothermal projects. ARPA-E’s work in this area includes supporting industry leaders Fervo Energy, AltaRock Energy, and Eden Geopower. The funding opportunity announcement follows on last year’s RFI for novel approaches to superhot enhanced geothermal power.
“Geothermal is a reliable and secure baseload power source, but today we are only able to access a fraction of the energy it can provide,” said ARPA-E Director Evelyn N. Wang. “SUPERHOT projects can change that and allow access to hotter reservoirs to create more domestic flow of energy onto America’s grid.”
Source: ARPA-E
