Reasons to Be Cheerful
Summary
Although Gateshead’s coal industry no longer exists, its heritage lives on. Indeed, at a Lanchester Wines warehouse in east Gateshead, Chris Smith likes to think of himself as following his grandfather underground. His granddad was a miner, but Smith, Lanchester’s energy and renewables manager, now helps pull a different kind of energy from the same earth: heat from warm water flooding the town’s old coal workings. “I’m here almost doing the same, just in a different way,” he says. “Still kinda going back down the mines … and extracting heat and energy.” He pauses, then smiles at the symmetry of it. “I do find it quite poetic.”
Dan Mallin Martin, a hydrogeologist at the Mining Remediation Authority (MRA), a non-departmental public body responsible for managing the environmental legacy of historical coal and metal mining across the U.K., says the old workings in Gateshead are naturally filled with water, geothermally warmed at about 15 degrees Celsius. That water is pumped up from around 150 meters down, passed through a heat exchanger and then into a large industrial heat pump, which boosts the temperature to roughly 80 degrees Celsius for the district network. The mine water returns underground around five degrees cooler, where it gradually absorbs heat from the surrounding rock before being pumped up again. “You can take something mildly warm and turn it into something very usable for heating,” explains Mallin Martin.
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