Last week a thesis was discussed by Muhammad Nabeel Shahid concerning the feasibility of the heat supply to the municipality of Grottaminarda by a geothermal energy resource.
Starting from a well-characterized geothermal reservoir, the evaluation of energy requirements for the buildings in Grottaminarda has been conducted considering their characteristics in terms of age and type. Following the established methodology in the previous thesis, based on the RSE work on energy analysis of Italian buildings, the energy required in heating has been quantified at 10.4 MW. The idea is to evaluate the potentiality of the Guardia dei Lombardi reservoir and precisely the location of well Bonito 1 dir to satisfy the heat demand of the town with this single well or if there is a need to drill more wells.
The results of the analysis highlight the importance of the renovation of the buildings, upgrading to energy class C, and reducing the energy required to 5 MW. This reduction allows to requires only two production wells. Proper standard piping procedures were considered, including calculation of heat loss and leakage test as ignoring these things can decrease the investment cost of the project; however, maintenance cost goes higher, and the life of the system decreases.
The distribution network is not studied thoroughly as designing this network will become very complex. Economic analysis is carried out with the help of financial indicators to see how it can be a viable option. Later, the carbon footprints of the existing heating system and the proposed system is compared and analyzed to which of the two systems is emitting fewer carbon emissions. For the geothermal option, the avoided emissions are around 44,500 t CO2/year.
It is interesting to highlight that financial resources will undoubtedly play a crucial part in implementing this technology soon. The primary hurdle to the widespread use of Geothermal district heating networks is always assumed to be the initial investment, as drilling deep wells requires huge capital.
The skyrocketing natural gas prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine are hurting Italy hard because of the significant reliance on Russian natural gas. Another concern is that Russian could create a scarcity of supply to drive up the gas prices, and the consequences would be that the government might have to pay 2000 euros for just 1000 cubic meters of natural gas shortly. The Italian government has underestimated the problem of increasing its gas consumption and its dependence on Russian gas in the last few years. Now is the time government should start to work on short and long-term plans to slash the amount of natural gas imported from Russia. They should allocate some funds for the geothermal energy sector to install more geothermal systems to make the environment pollution-free and to terminate the usage of conventional fuels and sources.
Hydrocarbons & Geotermics Workgroup 