We stopped extracting the ore. What if we got heat from abandoned mines in Quebec?
I have copied / pasted the text below
My thinking is as follows:
Is it profitable to couple geothermal energy with vortex towers?
Energy is recovered to produce heat drawn into the towers.
Is the depth of the mine shaft (several hundred meters) a factor in increasing the height traveled by the hot air. Depth of the mine shaft + height of the tower.
Regards
ptrem
by Joël Leblanc
February 26, 2007 - Since the XNUMXth century, geologists have known that the interior of our planet is hot. In the thickness of the mantle, sustained nuclear activity generates heat and keeps the rock at temperatures of several thousand degrees Celsius. This is a huge source of energy that humans would be well advised to exploit, according to Jasmin Raymond, a doctoral student in geology at Laval University in Quebec. "Geothermal energy is continuous, reliable and renewable," he says. Above all, it is clean because it emits no greenhouse gases. ”
In theory, it is quite simple to draw this energy from the bowels of the globe. First you need wells several hundred meters deep, because the more you sink into the earth's crust, the hotter the rocks. When water is sent to the bottom of these wells, it acquires part of this energy and heats up. It then suffices to pump this water to the surface to draw at the same time the thermal energy which it contains.
Lots of wells already exist in Quebec. "There are more than 160 mines here that are no longer in operation and that could serve as heat sources," says Jasmin Raymond. Even the smallest have their geothermal potential. ” And as a bonus, they are already full of water!
The student researcher conducted tests at the old copper mine in Murdochville, in the Gaspé Peninsula, closed since 1999. Its network of underground galleries, now flooded, sinks 600 meters deep. “In this sector of the Gaspé Peninsula, we gain 1,1 ° C for every 100 meters towards the center of the Earth. In the deepest part, the water temperature is 9 ° C, while it is 4 to 5 degrees at the surface. "
By pumping this deep water, we can extract the heat from it using heat pumps. Once its temperature has dropped to 4 degrees, we reject this water so that it seeps into the ground where it will be warmed again in depth. The heat obtained can then be used to heat homes.
Jasmin Raymond calculated what it would cost to heat all the buildings in the industrial park of the city of Murdochville, that is 14 m000 of floor space. “The energy required to pump water and extract heat from it would reach about 2 million kilowatt hours on an annual basis, or one third of the 1,1 million kWh currently required. Heating would therefore be three times cheaper, which would represent savings of $ 3 per year. ”
The researcher suspects that the abandoned mines that are sleeping in the province, and elsewhere on the planet, all offer interesting geothermal potential. Wind energy has the wind in its sails. What if we dug the geothermal sector?
Yes, in my childhood, I visited CHAUDESAIGUES (this name means warm waters).
