Urban Ecoist

The Dutch have happened upon a neat discovery in abandoned coal mines in the Southern province of Limburg.  Water has flowed into these vacuums, and when the water is that deep underground, abutting warm rocks that are conducting the heat of the Earth’s mantle, it can become quite warm.  Warm enough to heat homes in the newly built neighborhood in Heerlen.

The map of the Netherlands colored yellow is the province of Limburg.

Limburg was once home to a thriving coal mining industry, but the mines fell out of use during the latter part of the 1960’s.  It seems the coal in the area didn’t make economic sense to mine, when natural gas was so much cheaper.  Guess the government didn’t hand out subsidies to the coal industry to make it cheaper and thus competitive against other forms of energy, as in the United States.

Wait…a coal mine?  Don’t I always write about how dirty coal is?  Why would anyone want water from a former coal mine?

The power plant does not actually use the water, per se, only the heat held by the water. The heat, i.e. energy from the heat (because heat is a form of energy — think potential rather than kinetic) is then converted to energy through turbines moved by the heated water or steam more precisely.

To put it simply, the power plant pumps water up from a certain distance underground where it is hot. The hot water coming up from the mine turns turbines, and that is how electricity is generated. In fossil fuel-based energy production, the same principle is at work, except that the heat must be generated by the combustion of oil or coal instead of it coming from deep down in the Earth.

It is called geothermal energy, and if you have been reading this author regularly, you will know how much I like geothermal.

The Heerlen Minewater Power Plant employs five wells going down as far as 700 meters or 2300 feet for the American readers. That is approximately half of a mile down, and the water in the mine (that seeped there naturally over the last thirty or so years) is a warm 89 degrees F at the bottom of the mine.

Now, of course, this type of geothermal energy source is only available to those areas that were once home to major and deep mining industries. When I compare the following two maps…

Coal Producing Regions of the United States

Potential Areas of Geothermal Energy Production

…there is a some overlap as to the regions that have geothermal potential and those coal-producing regions, but there are some areas of the United States that have coal mines but not a natural potential for the usual geothermal. So perhaps, with these coal mines, we can create our own geothermal energy. It may not work everywhere, but it could make mountaintop removal-style mining obsolete, as it could not be converted to a geothermal basin in the future after the coal runs out (or is made to reflect the true cost of the coal and its environmental impacts).

Dutch, Heerlen, Minewater Power Plant, coal mines, mining, Netherlands, geothermal, energy, electricity, United States, potential energy, turbines, generation, power, heat, subsidies, government