Schedule

The geothermal industry has long concentrated development around volcanic hotspots and well-characterized high-enthalpy systems, leaving vast thermal resources in low-permeability and sedimentary formations largely untapped. As decarbonization targets tighten and energy demand grows, the industry must broaden its definition of a viable geothermal reservoir — and look beyond what has already been found and mapped.

This session explores the strategies, technologies, and cross-disciplinary insights driving that expansion. AI-assisted reservoir modeling, thermal drawdown forecasting, and improved characterization of low-enthalpy systems are opening geographies previously deemed uneconomic. Repurposing legacy oil and gas wells — already drilled, cased, and characterized — offers a compelling near-term pathway to accelerate deployment while reducing costs and surface impact. Key challenges are addressed directly: induced seismicity, water supply sustainability, minimizing losses, and achieving competitive power density in moderate-temperature systems. Closed-loop configurations provide viable alternatives where open systems face resource or regulatory constraints. Stranded thermal resources, abundant but historically overlooked, are reframed as strategic opportunities through the lens of modern drilling, novel conceptual reservoir models, and long-term sustainability planning. By integrating lessons from oil and gas and applying advanced subsurface analytics, the geothermal sector can move decisively beyond the known and mapped — unlocking a far larger share of the Earth's thermal endowment.

This integrated session brings together advancements in the full geothermal-well construction and operations workflow, spanning high-temperature and high-speed drilling, advanced completions, stimulation, and real-time subsurface control to enable faster, safer, and more scalable geothermal deployment. It covers next-generation drilling technologies and modern completion and stimulation approaches required to build the geothermal wells of the future.

This session explores how geothermal surface systems are evolving beyond traditional balance-of-plant design into integrated thermal, electrical, and digital energy networks. Discussions will cover next-generation heat exchange infrastructure, district thermal systems, hybrid grid integration, thermal storage, and the role of geothermal assets in powering resilient, flexible, and decarbonized energy ecosystems.

This session examines the role of automation, remote diagnostics, digital shift, and AI in geothermal operations, from predictive maintenance of surface equipment to real-time monitoring of subsurface flow and heat. It also addresses workforce transition strategies, drawing from oil and gas skillsets and adapting them to the geothermal context.

The future of scalable geothermal relies on low-temperature Thermal Energy Networks (TENs) that can transform massive thermal loads—such as modern data centers—from liabilities into powerful, shared community assets. To achieve mainstream, district-scale deployment by 2035, this session tackles the critical socio-economic bottlenecks of public perception, infrastructure funding, and energy poverty. Join us as we define the commercial blueprints needed to deploy highly efficient, cooling-dominant thermal infrastructure across diverse urban landscapes