DIAS Headquarters, 10 Burlington Road - D04C932 contact@dias.ie 00353 (0) 16140100

A major research project on geothermal energy has started at DIAS & UCC

A new project, DIG (De-risking Ireland’s Geothermal energy potential), has received €775,606 from Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) and Geological Survey Ireland under the SEAI Research, Development & Demonstration Funding Programme 2019.

Scientists from DIAS/iCRAG (Brian O’Reilly, Sergei Lebedev, Javier Fullea, Duygu Kiyan and Chris Bean) and UCC/iCRAG (Patrick Meere) together with their Irish and international project collaborators will aim to explore the potential for low-enthalpy geothermal energy on the island of Ireland.

The four-year research project will integrate multi-disciplinary, multi-scale geophysical, geological and geochemical data by means of joint analysis, interpretation, modelling and inversion.

The DIG team assembled for the project brings comprehensive knowledge of geophysical and geological methods. These include active and passive seismics, active and passive (i.e. magnetotellurics) electromagnetic methods, and integrated geophysical-petrological modelling together with Irish crustal geology and rock geochemistry.

More on this project can be read here