Cornwall-based geothermal company GeoScience has won a bid to complete a study into the viability of a mine water heat network from abandoned mines in the west of the county.
Cornwall Council, the National Trust, LiveWest and Pendeen Community Heritage recently partnered to commission the study with funding from the Department of Energy Security & Net Zero.
The Falmouth company, alongside its consortium partners TownRock Energy, Tomson Consulting, Carrak Consulting, Tony Bennett and the University of Exeter, will collect data from three mine sites located within the Penwith Peninsula; Geevor, Levant and Botallack.
It will assess the viability of the potential resource in terms of production rate, temperature and geochemistry, and look at the surface infrastructure and engineering options required to connect the resource to the end user.
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GeoScience said that work has already started, with consortium partners collecting data and characterising the accessibility and structural integrity of mineshafts, including running temperature and CCTV surveys. This work has been carried out in partnership with Deep Digital Cornwall, an EU funded project led by the University of Exeter through site visits and research into historical data and published literature.
The full potential of using the heat stored underground both in mines and from the surrounding rocks in Cornwall is yet to be determined but is "potentially very significant". By carrying out site-specific studies GeoScience hopes to build up "a picture of how and where to implement these systems" to benefit heat users on the surface and identify where the challenges might lie.
According to the company there is a growing interest in extracting geothermal heat from mines, both in the UK and internationally. Organisations in the North East of England and Scotland have been exploring the potential of geothermal mine water in abandoned coal mines. Several universities (namely Durham, Glasgow, and Strathclyde) have carried out research. The Coal Authority is exploring the utilisation of this resource across the UK.
In Cornwall there are hundreds of abandoned metal mines that could potentially be utilised in the same way. It is Cornwall Council's "goal to assess the feasibility of implementing heat networks around these mine water geothermal resources".
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