Shallow geothermal potential mapping of the northern community of Whapmagoostui-Kuujjuarapik, Nunavik, Canada

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All the northern off-grid communities of Québec currently rely on fossil fuels to produce both electricity and heat. Environmental, social and financial costs can be reduced by the deployment of clean and renewable solutions, such as geothermal technologies whose reliability has already been demonstrated down south. A profound change toward such a new source of energy in the North requires to better understand the thermal state and properties of the underground in remote communities, where data is difficultly available. CIMA+, which is a Canadian engineering firm with long lasting experience in different markets, proposes to tackle this problem looking at low enthalpy geothermal technologies for covering space heating and domestic hot water of buildings, such as ground source heat pumps (GSHP) and underground thermal energy storage (UTES). Given its strong presence in the North, with services provided to a number of autochthonous peoples in Ontario and Québec, such as Cree and Inuit, a partnership will be started with INRS. Prof. Raymond's team has been working to demonstrate the viability of GSHP and UTES in Nunavik for the last three years. Hence, the goal of the project is to map the amount of heat that can be sustainably extracted from the ground below the village of Whapmagoostui-Kuujjuarapik by means of GSHP and the volume of energy that can be stored with UTES systems for a later use. The recently developed G.POT method and a novel approach STOREmap will be applied to achieve these targets and ensure that cutting-edge geothermal energy tools will be provided to CIMA+ as a successful result of the partnership grant.****