Local authority announces plans to turn Somerset's mines into heat generators
The West of England Combined Authority has announced £1.6 million in funding
Last updated 24th Jan 2024
£1.6 million has been promised to turn North Somerset's closed mines into sustainable energy generators.
The warm water inside the mines can be used to heat homes, hospitals and libraries of the future.
The West of England Combined Authority Mayor Dan Norris has described it as a fantasy of his:
"I'd love it if Poulton Memorial Hospital, for example, was fuelled from the old pit which closed in 1966.
"There's all these possibilities - right across our region."
Dan Mallin-Morris is a hydro-geologist from the Coal Authority, who own the underground mines.
"Now the mines are abandoned they have filled with water and we may be able to extract this water, take it to the surface and extract some of its heat," Dan said.
"We can take a few degrees of out it, and then pass it to a heat pump and get it to people's homes, businesses and offices and we can return the mine water back into the ground and re-use it again."
A similar model has been used successfully in Gateshead.
"They take around 6 megawatts of heat out of the ground to provide their district heat network and they save around 1800 tonnes of CO2 a year.
"So a fantastic way to try and decarbonise our heat network and heat supply."
There are still some questions as to how much this will cost and how easy it will be to get hold of the mines - the council will need permission from those who own the land on top first.
But Dan Norris thinks it's a necessary jump into the future of sustainable energy and a good way to pay tribute to the men who worked the mines.
"It was a tough existence and I don't romanticise that - I'm glad it stopped but it would be lovely, given all that work that they did to drop those shafts thousands of feet, if we could benefit from their hard work yet again," Dan Norris said.
Bryn Hawkins was an engineer who worked in Somerset's mines during the cold war.
"It's a wonderful project," Bryn said, "for us that have been underground and our parents, our men, our fathers who dug the tunnels - all that toil was probably not in vain.
"It's wonderful to think what they did and now something is going to happen with the mine workings.
"It's a wonderful thing and I'm intrigued to see how far this goes."
Politicians, scientists and locals hope this is a chance to turn Somerset's history into its future.
The investment will be spent this summer, though it is unclear as to when the first watt of energy will be generated.