Europe is confronted with significant changes arising from globalisation and the currently political challenges. This means for example based on the latest developments in Ukraine and exceptionally strong European dependency on gas from Russia, deep geothermal energy particularly based on engineered geothermal systems is becoming even more important to care for Europe`s energy security. If deep geothermal energy from EGSs becomes a significant cornerstone in future energy strategy, there is an urgent need to provide cost-efficient and novel drilling technologies and concepts in order to open up new European geothermal reservoirs for energy exploitation. Therefore the overall goal of ThermoDrill is the development of an innovative drilling system based on the combination of conventional rotary drilling with water jetting that will allow at least 50% faster drilling in hard rock, a cost reduction of more than 30% for the subsurface construction and a minimized risk of induced seismic activity. In order to achieve these goals ThermoDrill will mainly address the following research and development topics: • enhanced water jet drilling technology for borehole construction and replacement of fracking; • HT/HP crystalline rock jetting and drilling fluids; • systematic redesign of the overall drilling process, particularly the casing design and cementing; • evaluation of drilling technologies and concepts in terms of HSE (health, safety and environmental) compliance. A challenging project such as ThermoDrill can only be addressed by joint and concerted actions of outstanding experts. This means that the ThermoDrill consortium partners belong to Europe`s leading experts in the field of deep drilling technologies/designs, drilling fluids, simulation, optimal shaping of tools like rockbits, etc. The consortium is already well connected through a variety of long standing research partnerships and won’t need great efforts to adjust and synchronize quickly.

Geothermal drilling industry faces various challenges such as poor overall drilling confidence and performance, and lack of bottom hole awareness resulting in NPT, tripping time etc. OPTIDRILL concept was born to address and solve problems in drilling for geothermal resources that increases uncertainty and well construction costs. OPTIDRILL ´s innovative drilling advisory system is based on a combination of enhanced monitoring systems, multiple data-driven ML modules, each being responsible for either analysis, prediction, or optimization of one aspect of drilling or completion process. OPTIDRILL consortium, brings together highly experienced drillers, drilling project managers, engineers and operators, each having a different, yet complementary set of expertise in differing geological conditions, operating parameters and production end-goals. They will be providing data from various wells around the world. An enhanced monitoring system will be developed based on real time MWD systems as well as acoustic and vibration sensors. The automated machine learning analysis method will predict drilling parameters, using a real-time monitoring and optimization tool, as a unified system combining existing data and the newly developed methods, and finally, a coupled drilling optimization models to reduce overall geothermal drilling and production cost. The goal is to advise and support drilling operators in making informed decisions through real-time data, reducing many of uncertainties associated with drilling, which in term leads to less NPT, as the drilling can be more readily optimised to maintain good ROP, borehole control and address possible drilling issues, before they could impact operation. The OPTIDRILL Advisory System is NOT an attempt to just fully automate drill rig operations, but rather to enhance and digitize decision making and reporting, instrument and optimize the drilling process, and share and transfer this learning across subsequent future application.