Fri, 04 June, 2021
Saturday 5 June is World Environment Day, where the focus is on how we can ‘make peace with nature’ and to reduce our impact on the world around us. Part of this involves cleaning up our rivers and coastlines, growing trees and rewilding our gardens, but there is also an industrial angle to looking after the environment while also meeting our energy needs for the future.
Creating green energy solutions has become increasingly important as governments pledge to reduce carbon emissions, and geothermal energy has an important part to play as part of the green energy mix of the future.
The environmental impact of geothermal energy is much lower than those associated with using fossil fuels as, even though geothermal wells release greenhouse gases from within the Earth, these emissions are far lower per energy unit than those from fossil fuels.
Geothermal energy has other advantages too, as it is a reliable and sustainable resource with huge potential for growth in the future. Geothermal has the potential to easily meet the worldwide energy consumption of around 15 terawatts as more resources become exploitable with advances in the industry.
Of course, this does not mean that geothermal energy is without its challenges, including those related to cost and accessibility. However, many of the challenges are related to the aggressive environments associated with the extraction of geothermal energy, including the corrosion of metallic materials, wear, scaling and fouling, drilling, heat exchange, sludge treatment, waste and mineral extraction and efficiency. You can find out more about the advantages and disadvantages of geothermal energy here.
TWI has been working with a number of partners on a series of European Commission Horizon 2020-funded projects to meet the challenges and help advance the use of geothermal resources around the globe, investigating issues related to safety, corrosion resistance, energy storage, drilling technologies, resource management and heat exchangers.
These projects include:
- S4CE (Science for Clean Energy)- implementing innovative technologies to monitor, manage and mitigate environmental risks
- Geo-Coat- high performance erosion and corrosion resistant coatings
- GeoSmart– storing heat energy to cost-effectively respond to network demands
- GeoDrill- developing holistic drilling technologies that have the potential to reduce the cost of drilling to large depths and at high temperatures
- GEOPRO - developing a verified set of robust, user friendly, flexible and accessible tools to optimize sustainable geothermal reservoir management, power and heat production and reinjection strategies.
- GeoHex - developing heat exchanger (HX) materials, addressing both the improvements in the anti-scaling and anti-corrosion properties as well as the heat transfer performance of the HX material
The S4CE project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 764810
The Geo-Coat project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 764086
The GeoSmart project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 818576
The Geo-Drill project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 815319
The GeoPro project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 851816
The GeoHex project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 851917