European Geothermal Congress 2019 Den Haag, The Netherlands, 11-14 June 2019 1 DEEPEGS project management - Lessons learned Sigurdur G. Bogason 1 , Gudmundur Ómar Fridleifsson 2 , Hjalti P. Ingolfsson 1 1 GEORG Geothermal Research Cluster, Grensásvegur 9, 108 Reykjavik, Iceland 2 HS Orka hf, Svartsengi, 240 Grindavik, Iceland sigurdur@georg.cluster.is Keywords: Deep drilling, geothermal, enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), H2020 funded project, DEEPEGS, licensing, lessons learned. ABSTRACT The DEEPEGS Horizon 2020 Innovation action project “Deployment of deep enhanced geothermal systems for sustainable energy business” was selected for funding in 2015, and its official launch was in December 2015. The project’s total budget of 44 million Euro received an EU grant of about 20 million Euro for its four years duration, making this one of the larger publicly funded H2020 projects. The consortium of 10 partner organisations is from the geothermal industry, technical and oil- and gas sectors, and research organisations coming from five European countries. The main objective was to test and demonstrate Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) technology in three different geothermal systems and geological settings with the goal of facilitating the transferability of the expected results to other deep geothermal sites throughout Europe and worldwide. The project has over its life cycle encountered several hurdles that have needed to be addressed by the consortium management. Number of these directly link to policy actions or sometimes inaction or slow administrative processes that clearly do not facilitate evenly the successful implementation across the European Economic Area (EEA), and market considerations are not equal across the common EEA market zone. 1. INTRODUCTION The project management lessons learned from the DEEPEGS project will be addressed in this paper. Project management perspective from within a complex collaborative international publicly funded research and innovation action will be shared, as well as insights gained from the policy environment. The aim is to share the experience gained and discuss how the barriers encountered might be addressed to enable geothermal developments to be deployed more widely. The knowledge and technical developments from DEEPEGS need to be more actively facilitated and transferred to the geothermal sector across Europe and around the world. The public research funding for this and other geothermal projects makes it an obligation to exploit the innovations developed, and share lessons learned in the project. The successful drilling in Reykjanes for the deep well is thoroughly described by G. Ó. Fridleifsson et. al (2017, 2018), and the background geology and structure of the volcanic Reykjanes system in Iceland by K. Sæmundsson, et al. (2018). The drilling of the well began in August 2016 and the well was completed at a depth of 4659 m MD (Measured Depth, 4.5 km vertical depth) in January 2017. Supercritical conditions were encountered at the bottom (measured temperature: 426 °C and estimated to be around 500– 530 °C at 340 bar pressure (Fridleifsson et al., 2017; Stefanson et al., 2017). The high-enthalpy well in DEEPEGS, is commonly referred to as RN-15/IDDP- 2, and a recent paper from Peter-Borie et al. (2018) describes the borehole damaging under thermo- mechanical loading. The research work at Reykjanes well site provided the project consortium with opportunities to deploy monitoring tools at the geothermal field and improve the knowledge base for future work and other projects (Darnet et al., 2018). Fridleifsson et al (2019) discusses the impacts generated from the deep IDDP-2 (DEEPEGS) well in Reykjanes and how this work provides improved understanding of the geothermal reservoir and connectivity to the other production wells in the geothermal field. This paper presents a current overview from an ongoing active project, and the following list of issues and lessons learned are among those that can be presented and discussed now by this paper: • Licensing of geothermal projects under different policy regimes, • Project management and disruptive decision- making barriers, • Funding mechanism, partner commitments and lessons learned, • Transparency and trust among actors, • Public relations and outreach communications.