RFI:Technology Advancements for Subsurface Exploration for Renewable Energy Resources or Carbon Storage | DE FOA 0002599

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The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) issued this notice as a Request for Information (RFI) titled "Technology Advancements for Subsurface Exploration for Renewable Energy Resources or Carbon Storage" (DE-FOA-0002599). It is not a grant competition and it is not seeking applications for funding. Instead, ARPA-E is gathering technical and market input to help shape a possible future research program. Because it is strictly an information-gathering exercise, the listed award amount and expected number of awards are effectively none, and the notice repeatedly emphasizes that no Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) exists at this time.

At a high level, ARPA-E is interested in technologies that can deliver high-resolution, wide-area subsurface mapping to accelerate the low-carbon economy. The motivation is that many emerging energy and decarbonization activities depend on knowing what is underground, but the tools, workflows, and datasets that exist today have largely been developed and optimized for oil and gas exploration. ARPA-E wants to understand what needs to change so that subsurface exploration and monitoring becomes faster, cheaper, more scalable, and more informative for applications like carbon capture and storage (CCS) reservoir identification, discovery of new geothermal resources, mapping natural accumulations of energy-relevant minerals, and assessing potential geologic hydrogen resources.

The RFI lays out several specific capability gaps and performance outcomes ARPA-E is probing. One major theme is cutting "frontier exploration" costs by an order of magnitude or more for renewable energy and carbon storage projects. In practice, early-stage site screening often starts with very large regions, especially in areas with limited historical oil and gas activity and therefore limited high-quality imaging data. ARPA-E is looking for ideas that make wide-area exploration more cost-effective, such as new survey methods, combining multiple imaging modalities with multi-physics models, improving or "upgrading" legacy datasets using advanced processing or geostatistics, and machine learning approaches that can intelligently fill in data gaps or integrate disparate data sources.

A second theme is data processing at scale. Wide-area and potentially nationwide subsurface surveys can produce extremely large datasets, and ARPA-E is explicitly asking about approaches that can handle much larger volumes of data while reducing processing time by orders of magnitude. This points to interest not only in better algorithms, but also in practical, implementable workflows that can move from data collection to actionable maps and decisions quickly enough to matter for commercial development timelines.

A third theme is improving project success rates through better subsurface understanding. ARPA-E highlights outcomes like fewer dry wells in geothermal development and improved identification of mineral deposits, which implies a focus on increasing confidence in site selection and reducing expensive failures. The RFI suggests that success may come from higher-quality data, more comprehensive data coverage, and improved interpretation methods that can discriminate between promising and non-promising sites using measurable probability factors rather than intuition or sparse indicators.

The RFI also emphasizes the need for monitoring changes underground over time, often referred to as 4D subsurface mapping. For CCS, geothermal operations, and other subsurface-based low-carbon technologies, the ability to track dynamic processes is critical for performance and safety. ARPA-E notes that the relevant subsurface changes may differ from those traditionally modeled in oil and gas, calling out examples such as rock morphology changes, active water-rock chemical reactions, fluid migration, fracture network evolution, and biological processes. The agency is therefore seeking input on more sensitive survey techniques, more comprehensive physical and chemical models, and algorithms capable of interpreting time-lapse data to detect and explain these evolving processes.

Finally, ARPA-E is using the RFI to surface opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. A recurring barrier in subsurface work is that expertise is often siloed across geophysics, geology, hydrology, geochemistry, computational science, statistics, and machine learning. ARPA-E is explicitly asking where new partnerships across groups that do not typically interact could unlock better understanding of complex geologic systems and lead to more robust exploration and monitoring approaches for renewable energy and carbon storage.

Administratively, the RFI was issued by ARPA-E within DOE, with an unrestricted eligibility posture in the sense that any type of entity could provide input. Responses were to be submitted as a PDF by email to ARPA-E-RFI@hq.doe.gov by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on December 1, 2021. The full RFI and detailed instructions were posted on the ARPA-E funding site (arpa-e-foa.energy.gov). The main takeaway is that ARPA-E was testing the landscape for transformative, practical subsurface imaging and data technologies that could dramatically reduce cost and risk for geothermal, CCS, minerals, and geologic hydrogen, and use the feedback to decide whether and how to design a future funded program.

• The Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy in the opportunity zone benefits, science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "RFI:Technology Advancements for Subsurface Exploration for Renewable Energy Resources or Carbon Storage" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.135.
• This funding opportunity was created on Oct 21, 2021.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Dec 01, 2021 Reponses to this RFI should be submitted in PDF format to the email address ARPA-E-RFI@hq.doe.gov by 500 p.m. Eastern Time on 12/01/2021. For further instruction, please review the RFI in its entirety at https://apra-e-foa.energy.gov.. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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