GEMS: Can coal mines warm our homes (once again)?

GEMS: Can coal mines warm our homes (once again)?

10 March 2022, 1-2pm

Prof Jeroen van Hunen, DEI Fellow & Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences

Warm water in the ~23,000 disused, flooded mines in the UK offer a huge, low-carbon geothermal energy resource that could heat, cool, and provide heat storage for a quarter of UK homes and businesses, notably economically disadvantaged regions, such as former mining and many urban communities. To utilise and optimise this enormous energy supply and storage opportunity, research is required on a number of aspects, including optimised abstraction strategies of those heat resources, introduction of innovative heat storage solutions to level out diurnal and seasonal energy demand fluctuations, mapping the financial landscape for mine geothermal energy, and integration of the technical aspects with governance frameworks, social acceptance and economic viability.

By integrating novel simulation tools, innovative heat storage solutions, thorough evaluation of the governance and economic landscape, and community participation, The recently started project ‘Geothermal Energy from Mines and Solar-Geothermal heat’ (GEMS) aims to provide integrated solutions, from initial heat extraction to the end user, for employing mine water geothermal heat energy as sustainable, low-carbon heat source.

Jeroen van Hunen is a professor in Computational Geoscience in the department of Earth Sciences. He works on numerical modelling of a range of topics, including large-scale dynamics, climate, and energy-related models on carbon-capture and storage and mine geothermal energy.

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