Sunderland aims to use city’s coal legacy to cut 4,000 tonnes of carbon emissions
SUNDERLAND Council is looking to create a carbon-saving geothermal scheme which will turn abandoned mine workings into a giant radiator to heat city homes and businesses.
The council believes the project could become the UK’s largest community heating scheme to use underground mine water – turning the legacy of one of the world’s most CO2-polluting industries into a planet-protecting pioneer.
But councillors being asked to approve test-drilling will be acutely aware that only three months ago an almost carbon-copy project just over the border in South Tyneside failed, frustratingly, at the final hurdle.
Sunderland’s plan is to use water trapped in the sealed-off underground workings of the former Wearmouth Colliery as a heat source to warm homes and buildings nearby.
The water will be pumped to the surface, where its heat will warm water circulating through a network of pipes running through homes and businesses nearby, before it is pumped back underground to collect more of the earth’s underground heat.
The pumping and heat transfer will be constant, creating effectively a giant radiator powered by the earth’s natural underground warmth. The result would be low-carbon, low-cost heating.
It’s estimated the scheme would prevent the equivalent of 4,100 tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, by removing the need to burn gas in conventional heating, like combi-boilers.
That’s the same as taking almost 900 average family-sized cars off the road for a year.
Problem water now an asset in the historic pit that set records and claimed hundreds of lives
Photo: Wikipedia/Tyne & Wear Museums.
Wearmouth Colliery was first sunk in 1826 and finally closed in 1993, the largest pit in Sunderland, signalling the end of mining in the former Durham coalfield. Ironically, the amount of underground water caused problems in its original sinking. The colliery set new records for the depth of its seams - 1,700 feet - and the distance its tunnels went out under the North Sea - two miles. Throughout its near-170-year life, it employed thousands of men - around 2,000 shortly before it closed - and claimed the lives of hundreds in accidents below ground. As its coal seams were flat, roadways could be built and interconnected easily, forming huge underground warrens with long straight roadways constantly moving miners and coal between shafts and faces. It was so big that it was said more than 20 miles of steel-wire rope were in daily use to keep men and coal on the move. It is into this huge warren of tunnels that the new geothermal heating scheme aims to tap.
Consultants WSP have now put in a formal planning application, asking councillors to approve test boreholes, to see if they can reach the mine water. Permission will be decided by the council’s planning committee in April.
The location of the boreholes has been guided by the Coal Authority, which has provided guidance and if approved, drilling will take place at the now-disused Fan Zone next to the Stadium of Light, which was built on the site of the former pit.
If the project gets the green light, WSP will have a window of July 2023 to April 2024 to get the drilling done.
The scheme would be a major milestone in achieving Sunderland Council’s corporate ambition to be carbon-neutral by 2030, and the city’s aim to be carbon-neutral by 2040.
Council leader Coun Graeme Miller said: “This could be a transformational project for the city. We have made a clear commitment to becoming carbon-neutral by 2040 and projects such as this will be key to helping us achieve our goals.”
