Reducing the risk associated with shallow geothermal exploration and deployment in the UK

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Heating and cooling buildings remains around one quarter of UK carbon emissions. Electrification of heat is required to decarbonise the sector and sustainable ground source systems of high efficiency are an essential part of that energy transition, minimising the need for additional green electricity. However, there remains uncertainty around investigation and deployment of ground source scheme such as open loop systems due to insufficient understand of the balance between porous media and fracture flow in UK aquifers. Relatively few open loop systems are operational and anecdotally some are not achieving performance due to thermal breakthrough that has occurred through insufficient understanding of the groundwater regime. This PhD project will work along side the NERC funded SMARTRes project to gather data from thermal testing in the Chalk and Sherwood Sandstone aquifers and use the results to both better understand thermal transport in those aquifers and upscale the results to develop sustainable plans for wider deployment.