This Premium Content article on our website is the presentation made by Simon Todd at the Energy Geoscience Conference in May 2023. Some of the key points conveyed:
Northern Ireland is relatively well endowed with geothermal resources, both deep and particularly shallow.
An integrated approach to understanding the heat flow budget in the earth’s crust leads to a revised view of geothermal gradients, compared to previously published temperature versus depth maps.
The Sherwood Sandstone is a prospective hydrothermal resource in much of Northern Ireland, but its potential for higher temperatures (> 120 ºC) for material power generation is negligible.
Instead, the Sherwood is a very useful, but hugely under-used, resource for heating and cooling, enhanced by heat pumps. Novel approaches using open loop doublets at depths of around 1 km combined with heat pumps appear to very economically attractive for large scale heating.
Closed loop deep (>1 km) borehole heat exchangers are unlikely to be anywhere economic, anytime soon.
As well as a source of thermal energy, geothermal can play a role as a store of thermal energy. This attribute, together with higher more stable source temperatures, mean that geothermal heat pumps are needed to limit the increasing gross and peak demand for electricity.
Geothermal can make a very substantial contribution to the making Northern Ireland’s heating self-sufficient and low/zero carbon.
