State Geological Survey Contributions to NGDS Data Development, Collection and Maintenance

The NGDS State Geothermal Data Project will make large quantities of geothermal-relevant geoscience data held by the State Geological Surveys available via the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS). The project provides the data support, acquisition, and access to cyber infrastructure necessary to reduce cost and risk of Geothermal Technologies Office goals focused on the production and utilization of geothermal energy. The project is developing the knowledge and data foundation necessary for discovery and development of large-scale energy production and other practical applications such as direct use and residential/commercial ground source heat pumps.

December 2012 Milestone Update: 
National Geothermal Data System Reaches One Million Wells

NGDS just expanded to include data from more than 1 million wells. This includes more than 717,000 oil and gas wells, 414,000 water wells, and 9,300 geothermal wells across the U.S.

The wells are critical resources to aid in the exploration and development of the nation's geothermal energy resources, but are also invaluable for a wide variety of environmental and natural resource uses. The geothermal industry identified access to reliable scientific and technical data to the U.S. DOE as their most critical need. Each well is accompanied by geographical coordinates, county and state location, well status, total depth, and spud and end-of-drilling dates.  Some wells include some or all of the following: bore hole temperature, aqueous geochemistry, drillers log, and geophysical logs – typically porosity, resistivity and temperature logs. 

Data quantity at NGDS is burgeoning as hundreds of data providers - academic researchers, private industry, and state and federal agencies - deliver a continuous stream of fresh data, such as additional well and header data, geologic maps, geologic fault and seismic hypocenters, heat flow and thermal conductivity data, and thermal/hot springs chemistry and temperature data that are important for geothermal energy exploration and development.

To serve the geothermal exploration and research communities, the NDGS catalog portal provides fast and efficient data discovery via an interactive geographic map tool, ready data access, and analysis.  Map services of NGDS data mashup with an array of base maps and accommodate common GIS applications, including GoogleEarth, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Explorer, NREL Geothermal Prospector, Microsoft Layerscape, and the USGS' National Map Viewer, among others, assuring data consumers use of the platform of their choice for visualizing and analyzing data.

Objectives

Expand and enhance the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) by creating a national, sustainable, distributed, interoperable network of state geological survey-based data providers that will develop, collect, serve, and maintain geothermal-relevant data that operates as an integral compliant component of NGDS.

Targets/Milestones

• June 1, 2011 (MET): Receive and review data from at least 40 first-year subcontracts in preparation for review of Statements of Work for next cycle.
• October 1, 2011 (MET): Have content models reviewed and posted on stategeothermaldata.org for all Year 1 delivery data.
• December 1, 2011 (MET): Have at least 50 service instances conforming to AASG geothermal data content models running across the 4 system hubs and state partners hosting their own services.
• April 1, 2012 (MET): All Year 1 data online and operational, some data from all 50 states live online.
• December 2012 (MET): Provide access to at least 1 million wells. Include well data from more than 717,000 oil and gas wells, 414,000 water wells, and 9,300 geothermal wells spread broadly across the nation.
• December 2013: Provide access to an additional 2 -3 million wells.

Impacts

• Enhance state's abilities to preserve and disseminate geothermal data;
• Facilitate geothermal resource characterization and development efforts;
• Fxpand the scope of data available to the geothermal community;
• Foster new services and applications built by third-parties to take advantage of the system's capabilities and content;
• Contribute materially to creation of a national geoinformatics system through implementation and deployment of NGDS.

As a result the geothermal industry, the public, and policy makers will have access to consistent and reliable data, which in turn, reduces the amount of staff time devoted to finding, retrieving, integrating, and verifying information.  With easier access to information, the high cost and risk of exploration drilling is reduced.