Fantastic participation in the WGC2020+1 virtual events so far

The World Geothermal Congress 2020+1 has been in full swing and following some two intensive GeoSciences days, it is time to look at the reach of the event.

From an event planned for several years, then postponed and finally kicked off with a virtual event series in March 2021, things are in full swing. With vaccinations in full swing in many countries, we are optimistic to see many of the participants to join us here in Reykjavik, Iceland in October.

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Planning such a huge virtual event has been a large undertaking, and we can say for certain that none of us really understood the extent of work that had to go into it. For the Technical Committee of IGA that was in the lead of the abstracts, then papers, preparing and organising the collection of videos, publishing the papers etc was no easy feat. But under the leadership of Prof. Roland Horne and his team things worked out much better than we were able to hope for.

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The numbers of participants, visits to the conference site etc are quite impressive. Over 5,000 individuals in total have watched the kick off event in March and the three days of the virtual event series in April and May.

With 18-hours full of presentations, it was remarkable to see that we had around 500-600 people attending over the day. Clearly the geographic location and timezone played into the attendance of people from certain locations, but seeing the panelists partly participating in the middle of their night was really impressive.

There is – as you can likely imagine – also a lot of technical work going on in the background, here below a short video to show you a behind the scenes with Bjarni Pálsson, Chairman of the WGC2020+1. This was taken on May 12, 2021 around 3 hours before the end of Day 3 at ca. 11.00pm local time in Iceland.

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Here below an overview on where people participated from.

Given the virtual nature, the streams and live panel discussions provided a really good flow, as many people commented afterwards. Having the presentations and the panel discussions available now within the system and being frequented regularly also has added a tremendous value for participants. At the onsite events, due to the shear amount of presentations and many parallel streams, you are never able to watch a lot of the presentations you want to.

How much the event days, presentations and website have been frequented is shown by the page views … just in the week from May 11 to 18, the conference had in excess of 40,000 page views.

So WGC2020+1 has got off to a good start and with two days left for the Virtual Event Series with the Engineering Day on June 15, 2021 and the Cutting Edge Day on July 6. 2021.

Here the main program elements of both days:

June 15, 2021 – Engineering

• Drilling & Completion
• Reservoir Engineering
• Corrosion & Scaling
• Power Generation
• Production Engineering
• Injection Technology

July 6, 2021 – Cross Cutting

• Geothermal Heat Pumps
• Enhanced Geothermal Systems
• Direct Use
• Health, Tourism & Balneology
• Drilling & Completion
• Heat from Oil/ Gas/ Coal Fields
• Advanced Technology
• District Heating
• District Heating & Agriculture
• Minerals Extraction & Processing

For the full program ahead and what you can expect for the onsite event October 24-27, 2021, have a look on the conference website.