Our Progress and Plans

Join us at 10:00 am to learn more about our teams’ progress and plans.

Invited Talk: GeoTGO: Equitable and inclusive tool for community-based geothermal development

Our monthly meeting Saturday, July 8th 10:00 am will feature a presentation by Dr. Velimir V Vesselinov, lead for the technology development at EnviTrace LLC and  Trace Kliphuis, CEO of EnviTrace LLC

Summary: For effective and equitable outcomes in achieving the national goal of net-zero carbon emissions, communities must be included and even lead the implementation of innovative green-energy technologies. Collaborations with communities should happen through informed decision-making, community-centered research, and engagement of stakeholders at the local, state, and regional levels. Community-led research and implementation are fundamental to achieving success. These collaborations include rule makers, environmental regulators, clean energy industries, and technology researchers and developers. Unfortunately, many green infrastructure initiatives still adhere to a top-down and expert-driven process of site selection and design without awareness and acknowledgment of public engagement needs. This can lead to costly delays, including lawsuits, and ultimately less than desired or lacking outcomes and missed opportunities.

Geothermal, like many new technologies whose social and economic impacts are not fully understood, often cause disproportionately high adverse effects on disadvantaged communities. These effects can be related to human health, environmental, climate, and other cumulative impacts, as well as the accompanying economic challenges of these impacts. We are focusing our work on the needs of the New Mexico Native American Pueblos and Tribes (NMP&T).

We are developing a novel web-based interactive software and user-friendly interface called GeoTGO (https://geotgo.com) to address these needs. It provides everything communities need to understand and develop their geothermal resources. We will bridge the gap between technology advancements and community needs by facilitating the interactions between the geothermal industry, regulators, stakeholders, and end-users. GeoTGO can merge data, software (including data analysis, text mining, artificial intelligence, and modeling tools), knowledge, expertise, and experience to provide fast processing and dissemination of the latest information about cutting-edge geothermal technologies to users and communities.

Bios

Dr. Velimir V Vesselinov (webpage; LinkedIn), lead for the technology development at EnviTrace LLC. His technical experience and capabilities include a Ph.D. in engineering hydrology with a minor in applied mathematics. Over the years, he has been the PI of 6 multi-year, multi-million, multi-institutional research and code-development projects. Some of these projects addressed research problems related to geothermal exploration. One of his codes (SmartTensors) has just received 2 R&D100 awards. He also holds a recently-released ML patent and is the lead author of a series of ML research papers. He authored more than 100 papers with an h-index of 28. He was the PI for a geothermal project that applied SIML techniques to data collected in a study area in southwestern New Mexico and found unique signatures. ML analyses identified an association between New Mexico’s geothermal data with different geothermal provinces and established associations that enabled artificial intelligence to discover unknown geothermal resources in New Mexico.

Trace Kliphuis (LinkedIn), CEO of EnviTrace LLC. She has over 20 years of technical and management experience in environmental regulation and restoration (e.g., CAA, CERCLA, CWA, NRDA, RCRA). This includes leading, managing, coordinating, and communicating between industry, State and Federal agencies (BLM, DOE, DOI, EPA), Congressional delegation, State legislators, and a wide range of stakeholders. She has a chemical engineering degree from Tufts University and was the Executive Director of the New Mexico Office of the Natural Resource Trustee and as Water Protection Division Director at the New Mexico Environment Department.

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