Professor Ladislaus Rybach, a partner of GEIOS Technologies, delivered the Session 2.1 Distinguished Lecture at the IAH 2026 congress in Budapest. The topic: how to produce electricity from deep geothermal resources to meet future demand, starting from the heat generated by natural radioactive decay in rock.
The talk took place on 15 September, as part of the 53rd World Congress on Groundwater of the International Association of Hydrogeologists. Its title was a question: how can energy be generated from deep geothermal resources to meet growing electricity demand? There are three authors. Alongside Rybach, the paper is signed by János Szanyi, a hydrogeologist at the University of Szeged, and Abdelmoumen Shad Serroune, founder and CEO of GEIOS Technologies and head of the Nanogeios Laboratory.
The starting point is physics. Crystalline rock at depth continuously produces heat through the decay of uranium, thorium and potassium. Rybach quantified this phenomenon, known as radiogenic heat, in a widely cited 1976 study. His empirical formula is still used to estimate heat production from gamma-ray well logs.
The problem is extraction. That rock has little or no porosity, so conventional geothermal methods struggle to recover the heat it contains. The heat is there, abundant and constant, but it remains trapped. According to the speakers, nanotechnology is beginning to change this picture, and the lecture outlined the radiogenic approach of GEIOS Technologies, which has already been the subject of peer-reviewed laboratory research.
GEIOS describes its technology as a method for extracting radiogenic heat from ultramafic crystalline formations, using nanofoams and autonomous management via artificial intelligence. It claims a power density two to three times higher than conventional geothermal per well and continuous electricity production, day and night. These are company figures, not verified by independent sources, and the work presented in Budapest remains at the level of laboratory research.
For Italian readers the subject has a direct connection. Italy has a long geothermal tradition, from Larderello onwards, and Rybach taught for years at the international geothermal school in Pisa. The link with the nuclear sector is the source of the heat itself: the same physics of radioactive decay that powers reactors, here in its natural form, spread throughout the Earth’s crust.
The next step is field testing. If the laboratory results hold up in real wells, geothermal energy from crystalline rock could stand alongside nuclear and renewables in producing baseload electricity, in areas without hot aquifers.
