Geothermal energy can provide a climate-friendly baseload for heat and power that is independent from wind and sun. However, the growth of geothermal energy lags behind EU targets. This is because geothermal energy projects have comparatively high technical and economic risks, which impacts public support negatively and holds back investment. Reliable exploration strategies that have inherently lower economic and technical risks and hence increase public support are key to drastically reducing these barriers. FindHeat develops a novel, conceptual model-based geothermal exploration workflow. A modular toolkit, the FindHeat platform, provides innovative software tools and geophysical exploration techniques at significantly lower costs than the state-of-the-art. The platform will be validated across eight geologically diverse geothermal plays to demonstrate its economic and technical benefits arising from faster turnaround times for exploration and appraisal of geothermal resources, making better use of legacy data and non-invasive geophysical techniques, and constraining uncertainties with respect to the size of the heat source and the range of possible heat production rates. The FindHeat exploration approach enables geologically-based resource assessments and will lead to a paradigm shift towards exploiting geothermal resources with inherently low technical and economic risks, thus improving exploration success and economic feasibility. Comprehensive social science research at the use cases will help to earn the public trust that the FindHeat approach will lead to a more efficient and sustainable exploitation of geothermal energy. FindHeat brings together extensive expertise and innovation from industry and academia, covering geology, geophysics, engineering, social science, economics, communication, and technical training. The industry partners of the consortium are direct end users of the FindHeat platform and will exploit the results in their daily operations.

The project consortium of DeepBEAT aims to develop ground-breaking technologies to use geochemistry for the detection of deep-seated land deposits. Transforming Europe's exploration sector by integrating cutting-edge technologies and sustainable practices will push Europe towards a climate-neutral and socially responsible economy. The exploration of deep land deposits should employ environmentally friendly, socially acceptable, and ultra-low impact methodologies to ensure the citizens that exploration activities can be conducted responsibly. Acceptance to exploration and mining will be a cornerstone towards cultivating a more resilient and inclusive European society. DeepBEAT final outcome will be a workflow which addresses these aspects by two means: I) DeepBEAT plans to engage with the local communities at the test sites to learn about concerns, hesitancy and what is the emotional core of these. Experiences from these events will be included in exploration workflow as an integral part, following the principles of free, prior, informed consent, which requires to interact with communities at a very early stage. II) DeepBEAT proposes ten novel technological developments, all designed to minimize impact on environment and maximise sustainability. These research and innovation developements have the potential to push the limits of surface geochemical exploration to an other level. They comprise a) new insights to ultra-high resolution analytical chemistry, b) increasing sampling strategy efficiency, c) introducing ground-breaking new concepts of dealing with elemental measurement data, d) reducing exploration costs by sample selection, e) testing novel phyto-geochemical media, and f) introducing UAV assisted biogeochemical sampling. Detailed understanding of the deposits complement the workflow to allow the understanding of the mineralizations as part of mineral systems and AI-assisted 3D mineral prospectivity modelling.

The MINEYE (Earth Observation techniques for MINe lifE cYclE monitoring using ML-based data fusion approaches) consortium consists of 13 partners from nine European countries and aims to strengthen EU autonomy in primary and secondary raw materials, at the same time as reducing environmental impact. This is done by development of innovative cost-effective, time-efficient and competitive Earth Observation (EO) based methodologies and technologies for the entire mining value chain. MINEYE will integrate EO data with other data sources such as EuroGeoSource, ProMine, EGDI and will collect new EO, remote sensing, geophysical and in-situ data. MINEYE aims at developing novel data fusion and processing algorithms for EO technologies for the mineral exploration, operational, closure and post-closure stages. MINEYE unlocks the potential of EO data, including Copernicus, commercial satellites, upcoming hyperspectral missions, airborne as well as in situ data. This is achieved by creating generic innovative machine learning algorithms tailored to solve specific needs within the mining value chain. MINEYE’s overall objective and ambition is to increase the access to critical and strategic minerals and metals in Europe with full consideration of environmental and social aspects, by providing the mining industry with proven and validated solutions for uptake of EO data and technology. MINEYE's final product is a web-interface, IPOP (Interfacing, Programming and Optimisation Platform) for providing data and result. IPOP has three outputs each covering a specific part of the mining value chain: (1) methods for Mineral Prospectivity Mapping (2) EO plugin for LiquidEarth software for 3D modelling, (3) evaluation and maps of re-mining potential and tailings characterization. In addition, ground stability assessment and environmental monitoring are included to support the development of a socially responsible mining. IPOP further serves as a multi-criteria decision-making tool.