Of Alexandrou Zacharopoulos*

The need to reverse climate change that determines the high economic and energy reform, the strong political will and the decisions resulting from the Green Deal (green deal/net zero action), the commercial prices of exploitation products and services related to underground uses, and the long-term demographic criteria in a megacities world slowly surpassing 8+ billion, with enormous rates of growth in energy needs, now make the use of underground development and underground energy uses among the most efficient new development economic and environmental prospects.

Now the economic and technical conditions, the technological leaps, the economic opportunities and the environmental benefits, allow the exploitation of the underground fluids - two-phase most of the time -, Greek underground stratigraphic units, the ophiolitic geotectonic windows and their specific basalt formations, but also useful underground structures that exist below the geographical boundaries over which we exercise sovereignty and sovereign rights.

Around the world, a new economic activity is emerging with the use of mixed energy technologies where they are in a stage of maturity and highly remunerative benefits, primarily environmental.

These basically include the following: Underground CO2 sequestration, energy storage, storage of raw materials (oil, gas, e.g. warehouses of F.A. Kavala, etc.), waste storage (toxic, radioactive, industrial heavy waste, construction waste, etc.), underground production and storage facilities, and, the energy use of geothermal fields.

All of the above uses relate to well development technology. These key new uses of exploiting underground fluids/gases and the porosity of underground formations have gained a lot of momentum in the last two decades, while we have, once again in the field of exploiting our subsoil, lagged behind. All risks of natural and other technological disasters, including earthquakes, can be addressed by professional geologists and engineers in the field of deep drilling technology.

The time for Greek "underground development" is here to stay. The experience of executives in the relevant state bodies of EAGME, EADY and the Ministry of the Interior as well as other scattered executives in other state research institutes can launch the developments in "underground development" in order to create the final institutional framework that will release the relevant domestic investments and activities.

It is time to rekindle and activate the relationship of the solutions provided by our subsoil, with the emerging developments under the new economic, energy, climate and technological developments that make sustainable "underground" uses.

Globally, governments have already prepared the institutional framework so that the relevant investments can be implemented and have environmental conditions. Most of the modern technological applications of underground development are based on deep drilling technology. Beware, not of the wells associated with underground hydroleptic/hydraulic uses, but the deeper ones usually associated with technology for greater depths and safety conditions for two-phase fluids, wells that bring fluids to the surface at high pressures and perhaps temperatures.

The national and regional local and municipal economy will benefit if the exploitation of uses in our deep subsoil is developed. We must finally switch to exploiting our subsoil in these modern sustainable ways that create great Green and Zero carbon solutions. There is no country that has such a great distance between the status quo and the potential extractability of its underground resources, either at the level of structures or as underground resources.

I hope that the main emphasis will be given to the flexible all-in-one institutional integration and preparation of the legal framework for the use and exploitation of the underground masses with the use of deep drilling technology where we (the Hellenic Republic) exercise sovereign rights. It takes consolidation and eventual understanding of the technical and other options (politico-economic and otherwise) for the market to respond and activate our underground goodwill. The political institutional approach must leave room for innovation and technological developments that we don't even have in mind yet, be an institutional framework that sets the minimum capable and necessary but gives the market the degrees of freedom for the rest without strangling it with excessive obligations these exploits which essentially due to accuracy will idle them. To be based on sustainability and safe practices that follow the best international practices of science and art on the relevant subjects. The institutional framework must definitively and unequivocally resolve the use of the subsoil for all technologies related to and dependent on the two-phase circulation of fluids and gases within the subsoil between drilling technical projects/interventions, as well as the relationship of two-phase circulation drilling with the economic-technical-political-social effects, conditions and motivations for their use.

*Alexandros Zacharopoulos is a Dipl. Civil Engineer & Geologist MBA/MPA/MEng, Chief Engineer of Public Works and Research Fellow at the Administrative Science laboratory of the Athens University of Economics.