The city of Newcastle has embarked on a £900,000 project that aims to tap into renewable energy trapped underground.
Scientists and engineers at
Newcastle University began work today on the
geothermal project, which will drill 2,000 metres down, the deepest ever drilled under a city. The aim of the scheme is to provide five megawatts of thermal energy, hot enough to heat any domestic or commercial central heating system.
The project, which is being part funded by the Newcastle Science City Partnership and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, is being carried out in the heart of the city under the site of the former Scottish and Newcastle Breweries. As well as heating the planned 24-acre Science Central, which will be home of Newcastle University’s sustainable sciences, the boreholes will draw water up at temperatures of around 80 degrees centigrade to heat other parts of the city including, Eldon Square, the city’s main shopping mall.
How it worksGeothermal technology works by capturing energy from hot water and hot rock found beneath the Earth's surface. It is an attractive source of heat and power because it is carbon neutral and can be produced on an industrial scale. It also has a small footprint above ground with a negative environmental impact because it consists of a closed loop system.
In this case, boreholes will drill into sandstone under Newcastle that is connected through an inactive geological fault to granite that is found beneath the landscape surrounding the city. This granite is heated by naturally occurring low-level background radiation. The geological fault allows heated, mineral-rich water to circulate through the rock strata.
"Our aim is to rise to the challenge of putting a novel form of deep geothermal energy at the very heart of city centre regeneration," said Professor Paul Younger, director of the University’s Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability, who is leading on the project. "It’s an incredibly exciting project. If we’re right and we pump up water at such elevated temperatures, it would mean a fully
renewable energy supply for a large part of the city centre, massively reducing our reliance on fossil fuels."
Green cityThe geothermal project is part of a programme that has earned Newcastle the title of leading sustainability city two years running by Forum For the Future. It follows a similar trial by the same team 12 months ago at Eastgate, in Weardale, County Durham, where water was pumped up at a temperature of 40 degrees centigrade from a 1,000 metre twin-borehole.
Newcastle University said today that if successful, this scheme will pave the way for other projects across the country where it is known similar deep fault lines exist, such as Carlisle and the Craven Faults in West Yorkshire and Lancashire.
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