IMPACT: Investigating Mine Potential for Cooling and Thermal storage

We will explore the technical possibilities and challenges of cooling and thermal energy storage in mine workings by discharging warm water into mine workings at the BGS UKGOES site in Glasgow. Thermal storage in mine workings is part of our Business Plan 2032 vision and Mine Water Heat Framework and is vital to understand if we want to unlock mine water heat advisory services and deliver value to coalfield communities.

Thermal energy storage will be a vital technology in decarbonising heat and making net zero a reality. Underground coal mine workings could be an important thermal store for a number of sources including excess heat from data centres and for balancing heating networks.

To overcome these challenges, we want to undertake the mine heat storage experiment at the British Geological Survey (BGS) owned mine workings 'observatory' in Glasgow. This is a unique research facility designed for investigating this shallow, low-temperature, mine-water heat energy and potential heat storage resources. It is fully constructed and ready to use and it has all the permits, licences and equipment in place to test heat storage. It is the only place in the UK that has suitable infrastructure to enable us to undertake this research.

Scope of work

This project requires BGS to manage, co-design, undertake and report on a mine heat thermal storage experiment at their Geoenergy Observatory in Glasgow. The exact parameters of the experiment will be defined in collaboration with the MRA. BGS will collect, process and analyse samples, details of which will be confirmed prior to start date.

The outputs will include summary reports, produced by BGS with MRA contribution on the works undertaken and data packages including all the data collected at the Observatory during the experiment, which the Mining Remediation Authority will publish as an open access dataset. The IPR of new data will remain the property of the MRA.