Subsurface
Geothermal & Subsurface Energy
Critical Minerals & Resource Exploration
Decision assurance for geothermal exploration, characterization, drilling, resource dependency, and development commitments.
Typical decisions:
- Which prospect deserves further characterization?
- What evidence is needed before drilling?
- Can the current resource interpretation support the next commitment?
Critical Minerals & Resource Exploration
Critical Minerals & Resource Exploration
Decision assurance for exploration targets, information acquisition, drilling, resource assumptions, and the transition toward development.
Typical decisions:
- Which prospect deserves the next exploration commitment?
- Does the evidence support drilling?
- When are infrastructure or capital commitments beginning to outrun resource confidence?
Geological Storage, Disposal & Long-Duration Stewardship
Geological Storage, Disposal & Long-Duration Stewardship
Decision assurance for geological systems expected to contain materials safely and reliably over consequential time horizons.
Applications include carbon storage, geological hydrogen storage, nuclear disposal, and other long-duration stewardship decisions.
Typical decisions:
- Does the formation deserve further characterization?
- What evidence is needed before site commitment or injection?
- What new information would invalidate the current decision basis?
Marine
Marine Geophysics & Exploration
Offshore Infrastructure & Corridors
Offshore Infrastructure & Corridors
Decision assurance for survey, characterization, exploration, seabed conditions, access, and infrastructure decisions where observation and intervention are costly.
Typical decisions:
- Where should the next survey or characterization effort concentrate?
- Does the evidence support sampling, drilling, site selection, or corridor fixation?
- Which physical or operating uncertainty should be resolved before the next commitment?
Offshore Infrastructure & Corridors
Offshore Infrastructure & Corridors
Offshore Infrastructure & Corridors
Decision assurance for seabed characterization, route fixation, landfalls, installation dependencies, and irreversible corridor decisions.
Typical decisions:
- Does the available seabed evidence support route fixation?
- When does route investigation begin creating difficult-to-reverse dependency?
- What unresolved condition could still require re-siting or redesign?
Orbital and Cislunar
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Decision assurance for deployment, persistent operations, shared infrastructure, and the dependencies created by operating in increasingly congested orbital regimes.
Typical decisions:
- Does the available evidence support deployment, expansion, or continued operation?
- When do communications, servicing, or logistics dependencies begin reducing operational optionality?
- What new performance, conjunction, debris, or congestion evidence should trigger reconsideration?
Proximity & Servicing Operations
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Decision assurance for rendezvous, inspection, servicing, refueling, repositioning, and other physical interactions between spacecraft.
At close range, sensing, relative motion, maneuver authority, coordination, and recovery become tightly coupled.
Typical decisions:
- Does the evidence support entering or continuing the proposed proximity operation?
- What sensing, maneuver, coordination, and recovery conditions must be satisfied first?
- What new evidence should require separation, constraint, re-evaluation, or termination?
Orbital Autonomy & Coordination
Orbital Infrastructure & Logistics
Orbital Autonomy & Coordination
Decision assurance for autonomous maneuver, distributed spacecraft operations, machine-mediated coordination, and delegated physical authority.
Typical decisions:
- Which actions may be delegated without immediate human approval?
- What conditions should require escalation or revocation of autonomous authority?
- When do bounded spacecraft actions begin creating system-level dependency or correlated exposure?
Planetary Exploration, Resources & Infrastructure
Lunar & Planetary Exploration
Mobility, Access & Infrastructure
Planetary Resources & Subsurface
Decision assurance for exploration campaigns, precursor missions, site characterization, resource investigation, and the transition from scientific evidence to operational commitment.
Typical decisions
- Where should the next exploration effort concentrate?
- Which observation or investigation deserves scarce mission resources?
- When does the evidence support advancing into a more consequential mission commitment?
Planetary Resources & Subsurface
Mobility, Access & Infrastructure
Planetary Resources & Subsurface
Decision assurance for resource investigation, subsurface interpretation, excavation dependency, and the transition from scientific signal to development assumption.
Typical decisions
- Does the evidence support further investigation of the target?
- What information is needed before a resource assumption carries mission or infrastructure dependency?
- When does an inferred resource remain too uncertain to justify further commitment?
Mobility, Access & Infrastructure
Mobility, Access & Infrastructure
Mobility, Access & Infrastructure
Decision assurance for traverses, operating zones, access, power, communications, logistics, and infrastructure sequencing.
Typical decisions
- Does the evidence support entering, traversing, or operating within the proposed zone?
- What capability or infrastructure must exist before access becomes supportable?
- Which assumptions should remain provisional before route or infrastructure commitments harden?
Cross-Domain
Autonomous Physical Systems
Decision assurance for delegated physical action where autonomous systems may traverse, disturb, sample, adapt, or escalate under uncertainty. The governing issue is how much physical authority the available evidence can support while retaining escalation, revocation, and human control.
Typical decisions
- Which physical actions may be delegated under the available evidence?
- What conditions should require escalation or human review?
- Does the system retain a credible ability to stop, retreat, or recover?
Capital & Portfolio Decisions
Independent review of the physical decision basis beneath capital commitments involving frontier assets. The work examines whether the physical evidence can support the capital thesis and whether multiple commitments are creating dependencies that are difficult to see at the individual asset level.
Typical decisions
- Does the physical evidence support the contemplated capital commitment?
- Which physical assumptions are carrying the investment thesis?
- Are shared dependencies or correlated commitments creating portfolio-level exposure?
Illustrative Geothermal Example
What This Review Catches
Geothermal · Synthetic Reference Case · Non-Reliance
The project team has a developed view of the reservoir. A board, investment committee, or JV partner has to decide what capital and commitments can reasonably rely on that view today.
In this case, the proposed production well supports more than a drilling decision. The same reservoir interpretation is being used to shape the pad and access layout, wellfield and reinjection plan, procurement, offtake assumptions, capital sequencing, and a 25 MW development case. Later testing could show a smaller reservoir, weaker connectivity, or a different reinjection geometry. That could require additional drilling, site redesign, changes to infrastructure and procurement, or a smaller commercial case after capital has already been released.
The review examines which parts of the development case are supported by the current evidence, which remain provisional, and which commitments should remain reversible.
The financial exposure can be substantial. NREL estimates that full-size resource-confirmation and field-development drilling accounts for 30% to 57% of the overnight capital cost of installing a new geothermal plant, depending on the development approach and well design.
For the approving party, the question is therefore specific: does the evidence support funding the next well, relying on the 25 MW case, fixing the field layout, advancing procurement, or some combination of those commitments?
Additional testing may still be worth acquiring where it could materially change that decision. Where uncertainty remains, the review records the assumptions being relied upon, the exposure being accepted, and the evidence or conditions that would require reconsideration.
The key question is: What physical claims are we being asked to rely on, and what commitments do those claims support today?
The value is separating the authorization to drill from the authorization to rely on that drilling decision for field layout, plant sizing, procurement, offtake, and further capital commitment.
Source: Akindipe, D. & Witter, E. (2025), 2025 Geothermal Drilling Cost Curves Update, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL/CP-5700-92793.
The Prospect Is Strong. Is the Development Decision?
A geothermal prospect shows compelling structural, thermal, geochemical, and slim-hole evidence. The evidence supports another consequential exploration step, but the proposed production well is also being used to anchor permanent site works, procurement, offtake, capital sequencing, wellfield planning, and a 25 MW-class development concept.
That creates a different question: Has the evidence earned the well, the development package, or both?
The existing evidence remains compatible with materially different reservoir states, from a connected commercial reservoir to a genuine thermal system that may not support the contemplated development scale. Those alternatives change what should be drilled, what should be built, how much capital should be committed, and whether the current development architecture remains defensible.
The Commitment Boundary
A production well can generate information. It can also become the first commitment in a development architecture. The distinction depends on what is allowed to harden around it.
If decision-changing information can be obtained through a lower-commitment action, the larger development package has not yet earned its burden.
ILLUSTRATIVE FINDING
INADMISSIBLE
The present development commitment is not supported by the current evidence record.
The evidence supports continued exploration and consequential subsurface testing. It does not yet support coupling that exploration step to permanent site works, procurement, offtake, infrastructure planning, and a development architecture dependent on the preferred reservoir interpretation. Lower-commitment evidence can still discriminate among the physical states controlling the development decision.
The larger development package has therefore not yet earned its burden.
What Follows?
Reinterpret the existing evidence across competing reservoir models, acquire bounded hydraulic evidence, and test field-scale continuity where it remains decision-dominant. Then freeze the updated evidence record and reconsider the development gate.
Do Not Use the Development Commitment as the Experiment.
A promising geothermal signal can earn the right to be explored before it earns the right to organize a development.