Science4Parliament – Episode nine – Dr Aoife Braiden – Geoscience

Welcome to the Science4Parliament podcast. 

This is the first podcast that aims to foster the relationship between science and decision-makers and show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. 
 
 It is presented by Dennis Naughten, a directly elected Member of Parliament in Ireland for nearly three decades, who has served as an Irish cabinet minister and on the Council of the European Union ministers. He is chairperson of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Working Group on Science and Technology, based in Geneva, which aims to inspire global parliamentary action through legislative work in the field of science and technology. 
 
The podcast aims to highlight the work of innovative people in the world of science and to get their perspective on what needs to be done to bring the world of science and policy closer together. 
 
To add something different to the conversation, each guest is asked to pick two numbers, each related to one of 10 random questions, some of which will be asked during the interview. 
 
 On today's show, Denis talks about geoscience and geothermal energy with Dr Aoife Braiden,  a geoscientist and research manager with the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI).

You can find out more about some of Aoife’s work here: https://www.era-min.eu/news/new-research-paper-publication

The Geological Survey Ireland (GSI )policy paper that Aoife spoke about is here: https://gsi.geodata.gov.ie/downloads/Geoenergy/Reports/GSI_Assessment_of_GeoDH_for_Ireland_Nov2020_v2.pdf

To contact Denis Naughten in relation to this podcast or any other matter, please email him here dnaughten@gmail.com or visit his social media:
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-naughten
X:              https://x.com/DenisNaughten
Blog:         https://substack.com/@denisnaughten
Web:         https://denisnaughten.ie/

For more information on GSI
Website:     https://www.gsi.ie/en-ie/Pages/default.aspx
X:                 https://twitter.com/geolsurvie
LinkedIn:    https://ie.linkedin.com/company/geological-survey-ireland

Transcript

Science4Parliament Podcast – Episode 9 – Geoscience with Dr Aoife Braiden

SPEAKERS

Denis Naughten, Dr. Aoife Braiden 

Denis  00:00

Welcome to the science4Parliament podcast. This is the first podcast that aims to foster a relationship between science and decision makers to show how research and innovation are vital to equitable and sustainable functioning of both our societies and our economies. My name is Denis Naughten, and I'm your host. This podcast aims to highlight the work of innovative people who are trying to bring the worlds of science and policy closer together. Today I'm talking with Dr. Aoife Braiden, geoscientist and research manager with the Geological Survey of Ireland. Dr. Braiden has more than 20 years’ experience in geoscience research, and in the last few years has been focusing on how we can use research to directly support policy and legislation, for example, in the whole area of geothermal energy, a subject which Dr. Nick Vafas spoke to us about in an earlier episode, I'm also going to talk to her about the European geosciences union 2024 General Assembly, which took place recently, and the outcomes from the panel discussion on critical raw materials that she convened, and the new legislation in this whole area. 

Aoife, you're very welcome, and thanks for coming to talk to us about science. So before we get into the details in relation to science, I am going to ask you something a little different for our conversation, I ask my guests to pick two numbers, each of which are related to one of 10 Random lighthearted questions, some of which will be asked during the interview. So if it can you pick two numbers for me,  

Aoife 01:33

I'll  go for three and six, three, and six.  

Denis 01:37

Great. So what's this term geoscience? What's it all about? And how did you get interested in 

Aoife  01:43

I liked science in school, but the idea of being in a lab and a white code and goggles really put me off, but I liked problem solving. I liked how things worked, liked figuring things out, but didn't want to be stuck in a lab. And I thought that would just …no couldn’t do that. So, I didn't actually do geography for leaving cert, I did sciences. And then from there, I went on to Galway and did earth sciences as it was at the time. And yeah, it was a whole new world. It was being able to apply that rigour and knowledge and figuring things out and problem solving to an entirely different area that I hadn't known anything much about. But it is a scientific discipline. And it does require that kind of I'd say doggedness, other people would say stubbornness, on my part, to really get to the answers. And in particular in geosciences, because you very, very rarely, if ever, have all of the evidence in front of you. So a lot of it is trying to figure out how things have come to be or evolved or understand the world around us without actually being able to test every theory, you can, you know, write a equation that you can then go and test you can't do it, you can always do some kind of a lab experiment, you know, we do that. And then we model it and then we model it in reverse, and we try and figure it out. And we do a lot of interpretations and analysis and try and fill in the gap. Or… 

Denis  02:58

What is geoscience itself? Like, we know what chemistry and physics is. So geosciences isn't one that rolls off the tongue. 

Aoife  03:05

It's not and I would probably describe it as an application of all of those. So if you take your basic science, so say your physics, chemistry, maths, now you can add in your computation, modelling, biological sciences, any area of those, you can apply those to earth sciences. So for example, right after I did my degree, and different parts of that would have included different elements of the other sciences, but in the context of say, fieldwork or earth sciences or environmental sciences. And my PhD then was in Paleobiology, so I went to the kind of the biological route. After that then I worked with geophysicists who were working on volcanoes, seismology, and trying to use geophysics and seismology to figure out how volcanoes work. So it's the application of those other sciences to the world around us, really, I suppose is probably the  shortest way to describe it. 

Denis  03:51

And mainly the world under us that we walk on?  

Aoife  03:55

Yes, that we walk on but geosciences has kind of broadened out. So I suppose the more traditional version of it would be geology, which would be the solid earth part. Geosciences is probably a little bit broader, and it incorporates now things like hydrogeology and your groundwater resources, your marine ocean sciences, it interacts with atmospherics and more and more in geosciences, we're now working with other disciplines, because you can't do any of these things in isolation. So for example, you could be studying the solid earth but without understanding how it interacts with the atmosphere or with the hydrosphere, then working on just the Geosphere on its own doesn't make a lot of sense. And that's also what makes it very complex is that we're dealing with lots of different types of sciences, lots of different physical scenarios and physical spaces that are all interacting with each other. And it yeah, it's complex. 

Denis  04:42

But has climate change really brought around this expansion of Geosciences from geology that we're not just talking about, you know, the solid earth now, we're talking about that interaction with the atmosphere, soils and carbon leakage and all of that.

Aoife  04:57

Yes, absolutely. And it had evolved probably to kind of earth and environmental sciences. And even a lot of the degrees have gone down that road now and some, in some cases bringing in engineering, but certainly it's gone that step further in terms of the climate change. And as it should be, I mean, we we need to work with those other disciplines. And we need to be working with the climatologist and meteorologists and modellers and all of the people in in that space to really understand not only where we've been, which is maybe what the geologists and geoscientists looking, you know, taking a lot of the experience, I suppose that the that the Earth has had over its lifetime and the paleo, that paleo elements, so the older geological timescale, and then bringing that forward, and what's that going to look like into the future? And can we forecast what might happen? And if we're working with the climatologists, for example, who say, well, this is the effect we expect to see, we can then say, well, this is how we have seen it in the past, because in our very long history of the Earth, those, some of those scenarios have happened before, never at a rate we've seen now, because the Earth has been through, shall we say, some trauma past, that doesn't mean that what we're going through at the moment is okay, because what we're going through at the moment is on a scale, like we've never seen before and at a rate that we've never seen before. And because of things we've never seen before, because it's largely anthropogenic and caused by us. So yes, we can bring our knowledge and work with those other disciplines to say, well, this is this is what we think is gonna look like and more complicated than that, then how do you mitigate that? How do you adapt for it? Can you change it? Can you prevent it? 

Denis  06:23

So just on that, about changing and preventing it, like geologists have a lot to answer for in terms of the problems that we have with fossil fuels today, because they were a lot of the people that identified them in the first place and sourced them and extracted them. But geoscience is taking this now and looking at, well, how can we, so to speak, put the genie back in the box, and use geology and technology to solve some of the of the climate challenges that we have? And one of those is the whole area of geothermal energy. So what is geothermal energy? And how can it help us?

Aoife  06:58

So geothermal energy, that kind of general definition is the heat that we can extract from the earth and that can be at a very shallow level that can be for example, solar energy, that's that you collect in the soil, and people made all of that from their geothermal heating systems that they might have in their own residential homes. But then deeper than that, you can also get heat that's coming up through the crust. And that's from geological processes, depending a little bit on where you are in the world, how deep you have to go to hit those resources. And to get those temperatures can vary and what those processes are, but it's heat that's coming from directly from the solid, or from the geology that's coming up through the crust.

Denis  07:33

So this heat can be coming from either source from the sun, heating the sign, and we're extracting the heat out of that, or coming up from the core of the earth.

Aoife  07:43

The heat in the soil is that shallow, very shallow type of geothermal energy is lower temperature. So that's why it's okay for maybe an individual house or an individual building, or where you don't have a very high heat demand. But once you want to get a little bit higher than that, and higher temperatures, and you're trying to heat something bigger or more complicated or generating electricity, then you want higher temperatures.

Denis  08:03

And, just on that if we can develop it a bit further for a second. And that is, you know, in Ireland, we are very reliant on oil fired central heating and warm homes, in many parts of rural Ireland, where 37% of our population live in individual houses, not in clusters. So, you know, can geothermal energy be used as an alternative to an air source heat pump, which is the real technology that has been developed in this area? And then how would you apply it to clustered housing in terms of district or industrial type heating? 

Aoife  08:38

Yes, so there's a few different things there. So there is to make it as efficient as possible, you want as high a density as possible, which is why largely across Europe, so I should say, we're quite behind the curve here in Ireland in doing this kind of really rolling out geothermal, at scale, or geothermal energy at scale. But the density is becomes a factor in the economics of it. So, for example, if you have a large apartment block, or something like that, you can. And in Denmark, for example, they have small residential areas that might have 60 houses on a small heat network. So, you can do it, it comes down to the economics, largely, it's not a technological problem, we know how to do it, it's just about at what point that becomes efficient, largely, what we probably target in the first instance will be things like large heat users. So, for example, hospital, the heat demand for a hospital is enormous, you know, when you think of it as a building, and for those kinds of individual buildings, they don't, they might have a small heat network, I should say the definition district heating is where you have multiple users on the same network. So different people can, can connect to your network, you can have smaller heat networks where you might have one user but multiple buildings. So a hospital campus, a university campus, something like an IDA Park, something where you might have, you know, several different buildings on the same network. So those are to me, I see as low hanging fruit. They're big heat users, they have their own network, therefore, we can start with those because it's less complicated, you're talking, you know, you're dealing with one user, they own the network, all they're doing is extracting the heat from the subsurface. The next level, I suppose, of complication is when you get a district heating, and then you are delivering heat to multiple users on that network. And again, this has been done in Europe for decades, they've been doing this in Paris since the 70s, you know, with these kinds of heat networks. So, this is where you're using geothermal energy directly for heating, as opposed to generating electricity. 

Denis  10:26

So it's direct use. And I'm going to come to the policy end of this, because you've been focusing on this, but I'm going to ask you one of these questions. So question number three. What did you want to do when you were in school? 

Aoife  10:39

Oh, in school, I wanted to be in the film industry, I want to do I want to do special effects. I actually I had it on my on my non degree to do list. Yes.  

Denis  10:55

Very impressive. You're making the point in terms of district heating versus domestic heating, that really it's down to it's a technological problem. And the cost in terms of doing that. Now we've seen in relation to solar panels, costs have come down dramatically in terms of solar energy. do you envisage this happening in this field as well?  

Aoife  11:18

Yes, absolutely. So like, at the moment, across Europe, there's about almost, 400, district heating systems, and there's more being rolled out every year. So, I think in the coming year, there's another 17, or 18. And they would be at scale, like they're large enough to report international statistics. So these are systems that are being rolled out and being built. In Europe, there is a tradition of district heating networks, which we don't have. So that is an extra complication that we have. But for us, it's just about collecting enough information that we can do risk analysis and that goes with the cost. So what's expensive about geothermal energy, whether it's a residential system or a larger scale system, you want to put that into a hospital, is the upfront cost. Because it's th, it's the front end of it that's the most expensive. It's the drilling, and it's putting in the infrastructure under-ground. And the reason that's so expensive is because once you start drilling underground, and you're not entirely sure of what's there, It's very difficult to de-risk that environment. For example, if you're putting up a wind farm, you can go to the top of the hill, measure the wind on average over a year and say, Okay, this is what I think my resource will be. And you work out your numbers based on how much electricity you think you'll generate, at that point, in a given year, on average. 

For geothermal energy, because everything is subsurface, as soon as you start trying to get down there, it gets very expensive, very quickly and quite complicated. And although my colleagues in the Geological Survey, and in the research organisations are very good at what they do, we can only de-risk it so much without actually just getting in underground and drilling. So, we can make a best guess based on the evidence that we see at the surface. But until we start drilling down and figuring out what's down there, that will determine the price for the drilling, which is the real upfront cost, which is why geological survey Ireland have been trying to roll out a new programme. So we have a new geothermal database that we're rolling out. And as part of that collecting subsurface data, so we've drilled several bore holes down to one kilometre, just as tests to see what kind of rocks are down there? Is it what we expect? What's the water flow like? What's the temperatures like so we can put down probes and measure all these things, and work out exactly what's down there? Ideally, you want to go a bit farther than that. So for example, we're having one of the universities with a project and they're looking at heating their local network to hit the university buildings. So they will probably need to go to about two and a half kilometres 

Denis 13:28

Two and a half kilometers?  

Aoife 13:30 

Yeah, yes. Which to some people might sound deep, but actually, it's not. 

Denis  13:35

And what the geological survey are doing then is doing a map around, effectively a heat map in terms of where he says, but can I ask you like in different parts of the world, he doesn't a problem in terms of trying to heat homes or buildings, it's the other way around, is trying to cool homes and buildings, can do a thermal technology be used in the cooling process? Or in actually generating electricity? Or is it purely for a source of heat? 

Aoife  14:05

Yes, so there's several things there. So, to generate electricity use, it's still heat that's used. So on average, globally, the further you go down, vertically down in the crust as temperature increases by about 30 degrees per kilometre. In places where you have volcanoes, that's a lot less because the magma is near the surface. And so therefore, you'll get those temperatures much more easily, and largely like Iceland, and that's exactly Iceland, Italy, New Zealand. So, they are the places that have been ahead in terms of geothermal energy use for a long time, because it's been easy. It's been easy for them to get to it. What's happened in the last couple of decades, and the reason that we're now looking at it in Ireland much more carefully, is that the technology has moved on such that it's now easier to get to the temperatures that we need for any of these applications. So, when I say drilling two and a half kilometres, that's not actually that out of the ordinary. Certainly, across Europe, there are standard drill rigs that can do that kind of work. And actually, although I know you mentioned about the oil and gas industry, and I should say, that's a small number of geoscientists, we can't all be blamed for climate change! It's interesting to see the people that are actually pivoting from the oil and gas industry now to geothermal because a lot of the skill sets are actually very similar. You're talking about drilling, you're dealing with fluids, you deliver complex media, all of those things. In a good way. And they want to do that, and a lot of them want to change. And they're really driving that whole change from the kind of oil and gas sector. But in terms of the heat, so you're asking about the heating and cooling. So for, things, like in Ireland, if you're talking about direct heating, for things like a campus or a hospital or you know, a district heating network, you might be looking at something like 70 or 80 degrees that you want to take up into your system. And that's where you're getting to kind of took two and a half kilometres ish. 

To generate electricity, you need to be over 100 degrees. And so effectively, what you're doing is you're generating steam, and you can use these these rankincycle systems where again, they have become much more efficient. So, you know, don't need a volcano, you just go a little bit deeper, because your temperature your gradient is increasing as you go down through the crust. And that's the difference now, and that's why it's really being rolled out. And that's why for example, European Parliament came out last year with a statement on this and that it really should be rolled in, you don't often hear of geothermal included in many discussions when they talk about renewable sources, renewable heat, and particularly things like district heating. So there's kind of just kind of two things that happening with the cooling one is where you can have direct cooling, for example, somewhere in Asia, you might have that where you have quite higher temperatures outside, and therefore the ambient, external air temperatures are higher than the ground. So, the ground temperatures are pretty consistent all year round. Yeah, no matter how much heat they get from the sun, and therefore if your air temperatures are higher, it works almost like a reverse bridge. So you can store the heat, you have that differential between the air and the ground, you can

Denis  16:56

You can take the heat out of the air and put it back into the ground effect 

Aoife  17:00

Exactly. The other thing you can do is and actually your neighbours can then use that later on if they need it as well. So in Germany, for example, they are putting in heat during the summer when they don't need it, and they store it on the ground. And then they extract it in the winter when they do want it. So you can have those kinds of systems. The other thing you can do is use geothermal for I guess what you would call indirect cooling, where you're generating electricity, which is used for, for example, say your data centre that you want to take off the grid. Yeah, so they can then generate their own electricity to run their systems, or there's a new technology that's coming as not as well developed adsorption, where they're using direct cooling in the buildings. As I say, that's not the moment, most of the people that are using cooling are in hotter countries where you can do the reverse. Here with  our external temperatures, it would need more research to really figure out what we could do with it and how effective it could be.

Denis  17:48

But it is a technology that could be applied then in other parts of the world. And I suppose certainly the challenges that that we have in Ireland are very similar to challenges that are in what is traditionally known as the global south in terms of dispersed communities, with maybe not the same infrastructure in place. But in order for us as either policymakers or decision makers to develop this, we need to put some type of a strategy in place. Now you've been involved in developing a strategy as part of the Irish government in the whole geothermal area. But before I'm going to ask you about that, I'm going to come to your second question. The second question is, what do you consider the most life changing piece of technology? Oh,

Aoife  18:36

Oh, wow. Life changing piece of technology, I suppose it depends on how technological you want to get, I'd say something like a toilet. My friends, I should say, would describe me as a total Luddite. So when you say technology to me, I think you know, so many disciplines.  

Denis  18:53

Oh, absolutely. It's a broad church. I'm talking with Dr. Aoife Braiden from the Geological Survey of Ireland, we’ve be talking about geothermal energy and potentially geothermal cooling, the opportunities that are there, how it can be applied. And this is a technology that can be used, not just in the Global North, but also there's opportunities in Global South in relation to it. But I wanted to ask Aoife, about how, from a policy maker and a decision makers point of view, how can we drive this particular industry forward? And you've been involved with this Aoife, with the Irish government developing the whole policy for geothermal science? So can you tell us a bit about what you've been doing? And how this will will drive this technology forward? In an Irish context?  

Aoife  19:42

Yeah, so we started looking at this a few years ago. Really as a, I suppose like all of us, we were trying to think how can we contribute? And how can geoscientists in general help solve the problems that we're dealing with nationally and internationally globally? And one of the things that was becoming more and more obvious;  we work a lot with our European colleagues, and there was a lot more discussion about geothermal energy, in a lot more situations as well. And, in a lot more conferences and conversations and meetings and everything, and other colleagues of ours and other geological surveys, were starting to develop national programmes. And we were going, this is something that we could be doing. And as I mentioned earlier, this is something that the technology has moved on such that we can now do this efficiently and effectively. And it makes sense to start looking at this in Ireland. 

So we started then trying to figure out what what we need to put in place to really develop the sector, why don't we have a sector? So we have some shallow geothermal in the residential scale of things happening, a little bit of other kinds of investigations and work per se, commercial size buildings, but there really wasn't anything of scale, certainly not compared to Europe. And there was a project some years back, I think, is 2011. We're a company, we're looking at it in Newcastle County, Dublin, and they stopped the development and said, so they were looking at deep geothermal. And they said, well, if there's no policy and regulation in place, it's too risky for us, you know, and when we spoke to other companies and said, well, why would you not come and develop this scenario, and they said, but there's nothing in place. Like we were not going to come in and do something, if there's no regulation legislation, and then something is imposed on us when we're halfway through the job or later.

Denis  21:12

So the fear was that they would put a substantial investment in and then the rules would change from a situation where there's no rules to rules coming in, that could have an impact on their operation. 

Aoife  21:22

Yes, or even as they're going through the planning process that you know, they go to, to apply for something. And then because the person receiving the application doesn't know what to do with it, because it's a new thing, and it's on a desk, and then it gets passed to somebody else and it fall between stools and everything just takes too long. And companies just can't work in that environment. It's just too hard. 

Denis  21:38

And in Ireland, just for listeners, we have a lot of, particularly US, multinational companies that have come in. So what you're saying in terms of them coming in and investing and investing in a new type of heating system, that certainty is crucial for them? 

Aoife  21:51

Them, but also for the developers themselves. So for example, you might have a geothermal company who will come in and they'll say, Okay, well, we'll develop a heat network and a geothermal source here. And that may be the point that you then attract in a multinational company to use it. So you know, you build up your users at the same time, but throughout Europe, there are commercial companies who will go into an area and develop this as a resource, same as you what other resources but without that legislation, and who owns the heat, and you know, who how does the planning work? Are there going to be extra environmental things, if you're drilling to depth, most of our environmental legislation is quite shallow, and you know, didn't all apply. So at the time, the company and other companies kind of backed off and said, well, until this is in place, like we're really, you know, we have nothing to grab on to here. 

Denis  22:36

Just to cut across you for a second Aoife, just to explain to listeners that in Ireland anyway, the situation is that once you go onto the ground, it's not the person that owns the land, it's actually the state that owns what's actually under the ground. So I suppose there was a concern that they could buy a piece of land off a landowner, but they don't necessarily own the heat on the ground. 

Aoife  22:56

Exactly. Yeah. And different countries deal with it in different ways. And different countries follow, for example, might be similar to like mining legislation, or might be similar to groundwater extraction legislation. So it depends a little bit on where you are, and how developed the sector is in the country. So that was one thing for us, and then how we went and looked at our own data and what we make available. So Geological Survey, Ireland is an office of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communication, but we make all our data openly available. And so, we were looking at this as well, this is a dataset that we can add, we can add something here, make it available, support the sector support anybody who wants to develop this area, you know, try and figure out what resources we have. And as you say, I mean, it was largely about de-risking. So once you go underground, it and it's an unknown environment, it's something that's most expensive. And you may remember so we have programmes, for example, like Infomar, which is a marine mapping programme that we do with the Marine Institute, and that data was collected. So where we mapped offshore was collected originally, as part of the UN Law of the Sea to figure out, you know, where our continental shelf was, but because for example, the wind, offshore wind has developed in the meantime, that sector is now using that data. And we regularly get feedback from people to say this data to having this open and available is amazing, because we can now look at that in the first instance. And then target areas that we think are the most appropriate. And then if needs be do very fine scale studies, but just having this information available, and there are there's only one sector that's using that data.  

Denis  24:18

And just on that, because this is an issue that the Inter-Parliamentary Union Working Group on Science Technology is coming across on a regular basis, is making data open and freely available. So what you're saying is that having that data of which the state has paid for having that open and freely available, is, as a result, attracting investment into the country investment maybe that we would never have envisaged at the time that this data was collected. 

Aoife  24:47

Absolutely. And not just that it's used by multiple sectors. So everything from transport to, you know, fisheries, to recreation and tourism, all of it. And in that case, for example data from our project which was finishing in the next couple of years, is now being, that data is now informing, for example, the licensing rounds for the offshore wind, but it's also being used by private companies. So you're building the SME sector as well, for you know, they don't, they just don't have the funds to be able to go and do that kind of mapping. But I mean, we've done studies on that and shown that, you know, the return conservatively, the return on that is somewhere between four and five times the investment. So you know, although it sounds like an expensive programme to run, once you get into the Marine, everything is expensive, the return on it is multiple times what the investment is, and for multiple decades out into the future, because and this Geothermal energy is the same. I mean, you you can do these once off studies, but the good thing about geological timescales is that what you map doesn't largely change quickly.  

Denis  25:46

You would hope not anyway unless there is an earthquake, or something very serious like that. And just coming back to the policy development aspect of your work. So the investors, whether they be companies that are investing in geothermal technology, or investors coming into the country, they all want certainty. They want clarity over who owns that heat. So how do we progress that from a policy perspective? 

Aoife  26:11

So in our case, and although we have helped to say inform policy for several things, the geothermal one is one of probably been most involved in in the last few years. And in terms of the timing, as it happened with had been some reorganisation internally in our department. And they set up a new geoscience policy division. So there was a reorganisation of some of the teams that were dealing with licencing, for example, for the minerals and oil and gas sector. So some new staff who came in there, they were eager to, you know, look at what's next. They were looking to 

Denis  26:44

Pivot away from fossil fuels,  

Aoife  26:46

Yeah, well, in the meantime, there had been a decision, nationally, that we were not going to issue new licences for oil and gas anyway. And so there was a, you know, they were looking forward to seeing, well, what's next. And we got talking to them and said, look, we're seeing lots of this stuff in Europe, we can help you with the geological piece, we can help you with the resource mapping, we can figure out what heat is there, where it is, what kind of geology then, and therefore inform the economics and the models and everything else. But there's a lot of other work that's going to be done with it. So they said, Okay, well, that sounds interesting. And we published a paper in 2020, in parallel with our colleagues who published a framework of how to go forward with the next steps of the policy and regulation and legislation. So we were looking at the scientific part, and they were looking at the framework of what needs to happen next in that base, because we're geologists, so although we want to do this, that's not our space. So we needed to work with them. And we said, here's the things that we can inform you about, we can put you in touch with lots of people, internationally, lots of our colleagues, we were involved in lots of European projects. 

And that's been a huge help for us, actually, because we've really tapped into their knowledge and experience and expertise, both technologically geologically in terms of the policy and regulation, you know, so everybody who's ahead of us, and some, in some cases, we're ahead of them. So yeah, we I say we exploit some of our contacts and got lots of information from them. And then we've been working with the geoscience policy division. And, you know, we've built up quite a good relationship that they will contact us and say, you know, we've come across this, maybe you can help translate some of this, or is this important? Or is this apply in an Irish context? Because some of the things they're reading internationally, for example, maybe more suitable for, you know, very deep geothermal systems where they're trying to generate electricity. And we're saying, no, we don't have that kind of geology, or this is, you know, this is a better option or that’s more complex than we need to get at the start. So, there was a lot of those conversations and fortunately, the team that we're working with, and Ian and Máiread and the guys have been amazing with this and just had a great curiosity about how it works. And luckily for us, they're also not slow to say, no, no, no, that's, that might be interesting to you. That's not interesting from a policy perspective. Sometimes we get carried away with the science. 

So that's been really helpful and really good. And as I say, we've we've used our international contacts a lot for that, and, and vice versa. I mean, we then help people and fed back into their programmes. So we started it in kind of 2020. And then last July, we've published a national policy. So it's a geothermal energy for circular economy policy statement from the government. And in that the document that we had been drafting in 2020, we had been talking to people who were telling us what they thought the barriers were, what are the barriers to setting up, you know, geothermal sector in Ireland? Why have we not developed one yet? And what that policy statement did was to identify what those barriers are, and set out a strategy of how do we deal with them. So the first large piece of that will be developing the legislation and regulation, which is what they're doing now. And that will hopefully be out next year. And then the other element of that is looking at the scope of what should be in a strategy to really get this moving as a sector. So it's not enough to just put out legislation and say, right, that's our job done. It's about how do you really help promote and develop that sector. And that will be things like incentives and grants. And you mentioned earlier about the wind farms, you know, that you that's gotten cheaper, and solar has gotten cheaper, and all of those things, but all of those had helped to get moving in the beginning, whether it's grants or incentive schemes or insurance schemes. Lots of European countries, for example, would have had insurance scheme that developers can buy into. And it's often state sponsored or supported. And it's trying to encourage the whole sector until it gets to a point that it's self standing. And that's ideally what you're aiming is..... 

Denis  30:10

....a critical threshold, Aoife.... the time has just literally run away, here, but all of those links that you've referenced, we post at the end of the podcast so people can link in with it. And I think we would like to bring you back to talk about the other element of your work in relation to minerals because this is a really important area, the whole area of critical raw materials because it is very much instrumental and key in terms of developing the data economy, which is where the economy is going. But really, thanks for being with us today, Aoife,, and for your time in contributing to the Science4 Parliament podcast, and giving your perspective on the area of geoscience. And as always, if listeners have any queries or questions then they can email me as denis.naughten@oireachtas.ie and you can listen to all the episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So until the next time, thanks for listening