Repurposing former underground coal mines by deploying emerging renewable energy and circular economy technologies

• DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-egu24-2202
• Publication Date: 2024-03-08T10:59:06Z
• Authors: Pedro Riesgo Fern...; Alicja Krzemień; Gregorio Fidalgo ...; Antonio Luis Marq...; Francisco Javier ...
• Keywords: Repurposing; Circular Economy; Emerging Technologies

This presentation introduces the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS) GreenJOBS project, which approach is premised on leveraging five competitive advantages of underground coal mines to deploy emerging renewable energy circular economy technologies: (1) mine water geothermal green hydrogen. Geothermal a source that harnesses heat from inside earth, in our case, through floods mines. From certain depth, temperature subsoil constant regardless season. Thus, continuous accessible available all year round. On other hand, represents an essential raw material producing hydrogen by electrolysis; (2) connections grid can be adapted inject electricity produced; (3) large waste heap areas installing photovoltaic/wind; (4) deep shafts suitable unconventional pumped hydro storage using dense fluids has smaller footprint higher density than conventional systems; (5) fine recycling into employed storage; artificial substitutes soils wastes closely located agricultural industries, coal-fired power plants, plants; rare earths wastes. The objective provide mining companies with two innovative business plans: Virtual Power Plant where produced will sold or used electro-intensive industries consumption close mines, such as aluminium factories data centres; a Green Hydrogen electrolysis sources.