How abandoned coal mines could heat our homes - BBC News

we need to be getting on with this really and companies like ours have a have a big role to play creating clean energy from the coal mines is something quite significant there's an awful lot of the industrial space in the northeast of England particularly it's over a flooded mind I think people are really excited at the prospect of something coming from the history that they helped create [Music] coal is the largest single source of CO2 emissions in the world and wealth internationally coal is still King here in the UK that picture is changing here coal production has fallen by 94 in the last 10 years so what happens when the coal mines that used to power our cities are no longer used [Music] we are in the industrial North we are about as far sort of Northeast as you can go and coal mining was absolutely essential it was a major part of Industry here this is around the site of the dawden colliery which closed in 1991. it provided in its time in one of the main employment sources for the area the mines which pumps to be dry while they were actually used as the mines were closed those pumps have been switched off and then water has resurfaced and gone through the infrastructure of the mines so one of the things about the water that is sitting in that coal mining infrastructure is it has been geothermally heated by the Rocks around it but what we've done here is the water that comes up the surface here is about 20 degrees and what we've been doing for over a decade is using that as a main source of heating for the offices and the working areas within the rhyme water treatment scheme there are some slight variations but this is broadly how it works the disuse mine floods with groundwater and the natural heat of the Rocks warms this water to around 20 degrees C the water is then pumped to the surface and passes through a heat exchanger where the heat is extracted and transferred to a separate Circuit of water that can warm homes and buildings one company that's put this into practice is Lanchester wines Adam nice to meet you this Warehouse is actually heated using the flooded mine water underneath it using a heat pump system this is Supermarket wine a lot of it so it needs to be kept as sort of an ambient temperature it's going to be drunk in the next few months and so that's one of the biggest expenses for our business is we've got about a million square foot of warehouse and you have to keep that at an ambient temperature and here that's where it all happens there is a wondrous heat pump we started our journey to carbon neutral in 2012. we started with wind turbines um very quickly we had to move on to Heating and so really it was a case of looking at what our options were and we were quite fortunate with this warehouse but then many of the warehouses in the northeast of England are overflooded mine workings but the flooded mine workings are only about 80 meters down here and I wanted to ask but what's the sort of driver for doing this because obviously you know it takes a lot of a lot of effort a lot of research a bit of investment as well to get going why why did you decide to pursue this heating route uh well we've made it part of the company's strategy part of their competitive strategy really that we want to attract our customers because we're a carbon neutral step it's really become part of what the companies uh is all about when you're pioneering a new technology there is problems it sounds relatively simple to pump the water out of the mines take the heat out of it and put it back our biggest problem probably is Oco which is a contaminant in the mine water just clogs things up all the time and finding Technologies to deal with that we're still on with that really the nice thing about um about a heat pump is that all the technology already exists you can buy most of the components off the shelf and this is just putting it together in a different way the UK is not the only place pushing forward with this technology the Netherlands is using its old mine water to heat and cool homes offices shops and more and this could be just the beginning how does it feel to take a historic technology that has in some ways played a part in the climate crisis and turn that around and find a new use for it so I think it's quite amazing for everybody that's involved in this because I think not only are you repurposing something and potentially providing economic regeneration and green jobs back into those areas that were associated with coal mining but actually creating clean energy from the coal mines in the UK we have got over 30 000 Old Mines now not all of them can be used because there's different forms of mining there's different geology around them but the potential for the UK is incredible it's an enormous heat resource down under the ground and these flooded mines in most places are a problem you know they need dealing with anyway I have high hopes for this technology over the next few years as the companies develop that can service these things and make it a little bit less of a of a sort of pioneering project and more like a normal heating system but I think that will come because the resource is there a quarter of homes in the UK sit above old coal fields and nine out of 10 of the UK's major and centers are in former mining areas and while many of these mines won't be producing coal anymore it seems we may not be quite done with them just yet [Music]

Channel: BBC News

Views: 176,480

Keywords: bbc, bbc news, news

Id: cRkp1g0smQc

Length: 6min 7sec (367 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023