US DOE announces prize challenge for discovery of hidden geothermal systems

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Geothermal (OG) with the support of the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) has announced a competition where participants will be challenged to develop, train, and test algorithms that support the identification of new, commercially viable hidden geothermal systems. The competition has a total prize pool of USD 300,000. Submissions are due on 3 December 2026.

The Geologic Enhanced Mapping System (GEMS) Prize aims to help identify hidden geothermal systems by using geophysical data to identify faults and structures that are indicative of geothermal resources. Participants are tasked with developing models and algorithms that provide accurate information about the presence of such structures. The challenge is to address incomplete and potentially inaccurate ground truth data, thus encouraging participants to submit predictions for what they truly believe are faults in the region as opposed to simply optimizing for the existing labels.

The challenge focuses on the region covered by the Geoscience Data Acquisition for Western Nevada (GeoDAWN) study. For this competition, the sponsors have compiled a set of newly identified faults in the GeoDAWN region that are not included in the existing United States Geological Survey  (USGS) fault database. These new faults have been manually labeled by fault experts and comprise the test dataset for the competition.

The GeoDAWN region is chunked and split into a public test set and a private test set. Competitors’ performance against the public test set is shown on the public leaderboard during the competition.

The same submission is scored twice – once against a private expert-labeled test set for the Initial Prize Round, and again against an expanded label set built from expert review of all submissions for the Final Prize Round. Only the top five participants from the Initial Prize Round will move on the Final Prize Round.

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Source: Driven Data