Sicily continues to emerge as a strategic hub for geothermal energy, with a growing body of research highlighting the island’s vast untapped potential.
A recent scientific breakthrough has placed the island of Pantelleria—located in the Strait of Sicily—at the forefront of Italy’s geothermal energy conversation.
A new study, "Thermal model of the Pantelleria Island (Sicily Channel, Southern Italy): new insights for promoting the sustainable exploitation of geothermal resources on the island," was published in the journal Geothermal Energy (Springer Nature). The research was developed through a collaboration between the Volcanology and Geothermal team at the University of Catania’s Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.
The team constructed a detailed three-dimensional thermal model of Pantelleria’s subsurface, analyzing how heat moves through the island’s rock layers and hydrothermal systems. Their simulations revealed a significant thermal anomaly at the island’s centre, with subsurface temperatures reaching up to 490°C at just 2 km depth. The study also showed how tectonic features strongly influence heat distribution across the island.
This work is part of a broader research initiative funded through the PON 2014–20 and PRIN 2022 PNRR programmes. The ongoing project, Thermal model of Aeolian Islands for new perspectives of sustainable exploitation of geothermal resources, is set to conclude in 2025 and aims to deepen understanding of geothermal systems across Sicily and its surrounding islands.
“The thermal reconstructions carried out by the team through numerical simulations validated also on the basis of available well data... constitute tangible proof of how geothermal modeling is today a precious tool in the hands of geologists and geophysicists engaged in subsoil exploration, and how it is able to return detailed and relevant information for the precise characterization of resources, optimizing exploration times and costs,” said Professor Marco Viccaro, the study’s coordinator.
“Sicily offers a wide spectrum of heat resources, both low and high temperatures, and we have defined this in another recent work that takes stock of the distribution of resources on a regional scale,” he added.