We are grateful that this research can be conducted with the financial support of the EU Commission Recovery and Resilience Facility under the Science Foundation Ireland Energy Innovation Challenge Grant Number 22/NCF/EI/11270.
GEOTHERMAL
Team Lead Dr Matthias Vandichel, University of Limerick
Team Co-Lead Prof Vivek Ranade, University of Limerick
Team Co-Lead Dr Kara English, University College Dublin
Societal Impact Champion Bill Kelly, The Urban COOP
Title GEOTHERMAL : Sustainable Geothermal Energy as zero-fuel alternative for heat pumping, storage and power generation
Subtitle Demonstrating that geothermal energy in Ireland can be a technologically, economically and socially sustainable
Challenge Description The selected challenges are related to exploiting the abundantly available geothermal energy resources. According to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) energy statistics report, geothermal accounts for less than 1% of Ireland's primary energy production. Our project objective is to mainstream geothermal energy in Ireland and to enable the community sector to take the lead in its adoption and deployment. We aim to achieve three main challenges
1. District-heating, and heating of buildings utilizing geothermal energy,
2. Production of storage chemicals from geothermal energy,
3. Production of electrical power from geothermal energy.
First challenge We aim to develop closed loop geothermal energy solutions to improve the overall heat exchange efficiency between working fluid streams and the geothermal reservoir, which can thus reduce the upfront costs. Our project builds on solid expertise in chemical engineering, thermodynamics and computational fluid dynamics to design and develop next generation technologies