A combined pumping test and heat extraction/recirculation trial in an abandoned haematite ore mine shaft, Egremont, Cumbria, UK

Banks, David, Steven, Jonathan K., Berry, John, Burnside, Neil and Boyce, Adrian J. (2019) A combined pumping test and heat extraction/recirculation trial in an abandoned haematite ore mine shaft, Egremont, Cumbria, UK. Sustainable Water Resources Management, 5 (1). pp. 51-69.

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Abstract

A pumping test at rates of up to 50 L s-1 was carried out in the 256 m-deep Florence Shaft of the Beckermet–Winscales–Florence haematite ore mine in Cumbria, UK, between 8th January and 25th March 2015. Drawdowns in mine water level did not exceed 4 m and the entire interconnected mine complex behaved as a single reservoir. Pumping did, however, induce drawdowns of around 1 m in the St. Bees Sandstone aquifer overlying the Carboniferous Limestone host rock. During a second phase of the pumping test, a proportion of the 11.3–12 C mine water was directed through a heat pump, which extracted up to 103 kW heat from the water and recirculated it back to the top of the shaft. Provided that an issue with elevated arsenic concentrations (20–30 lg L-1) can be resolved, the Florence mine could provide not only a valuable resource of high-quality water for industrial or even potable uses, it could also provide several hundred to several thousand kW of ground sourced heating and/or cooling, if a suitable demand can be identified. The ultimate constraint would be potential hydraulic impacts on the overlying St Bees Sandstone aquifer. The practice of recirculating thermally spent water in the Florence Shaft produced only a rather modest additional thermal benefit.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	Sustainable Water Resources Management
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	2363-5045
Departments:	Professional Services > Enterprise & Business Development (EBD)
Additional Information:	This article is an open access publication, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Acknowledgements The minewater heat energy research project RETEC-RD-02 was delivered by Groundwater and Geothermal Services Ltd in collaboration with the University of Cumbria and funded by Britain’s Energy Coast in partnership with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The stable isotope work reported in this paper was funded as part of the Low-Carbon After-Life (LoCAL) project under the European Commission Research Fund for Coal and Steel Grant RFCR-CT-2014-00001. AJB is funded by NERC support of the Isotope Community Support Facility at SUERC (F14/G6/11/01).
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	18 Jul 2019 15:15
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2024 08:31
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5016

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