Geothermal Energy

Debate between David Drew and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 19th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential for geothermal energy resources in the UK.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Evans. I am pleased to have the opportunity to open this debate on what is a huge carbon-free energy resource for this country. I hope we can use the debate to highlight the potential of the resource and to encourage the Minister to act, so that we fully realise the opportunities.

In Britain, geothermal energy comes in two forms: that which occurs naturally in the geological structure in some places, and that in old mine workings. I first became aware of that when I was a trustee of Auckland castle, which sits on the Butterknowle fault. At that time, the trustees looked—I understand they are still looking—at the possibility of using the geothermal energy there to heat the castle, and perhaps for a district heating scheme.

The Butterknowle fault runs across my constituency. It is a geological feature where coal was mined from the time of the Romans to the mid-20th century. Now the coal is exhausted but scope for geothermal has been discovered. At a depth of 500 metres, the heat is 30° C, and at 1.5 km there are rocks of about 73° C. It would be really good to exploit that, particularly because some of the villages on the fault—Evenwood and Cockfield—are off the gas grid, meaning that fuel bills and, in turn, fuel poverty are high. I met a woman whose winter oil bill one year was £3,000. I know that such a system exists in Southampton, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), who was the leader of the council there when the project began—indeed, I think he was instrumental in beginning it—will tell us more in his Front-Bench speech about how that works. Maps show that there are considerable areas of the country where it is a possible source of energy.

The second kind of geothermal energy we have is warm water in old mine workings. At about 30° C, the water is generally not so hot, but it is nearer the surface and therefore easier to extract. The Coal Authority has completed maps of 23,000 former collieries and has a very good understanding of the geology, the engineering and the feasibility of such schemes. The former mine workings are treated as a £3 billion liability for British taxpayers, because they must be kept safe, but they could be turned into a massive stream of income for them instead. Durham University’s Durham Energy Institute, in particular Dr Charlotte Adams and Professor Jon Gluyas, has done, and continues to do, a lot of work on this, and it has shown that the scale of the resource is phenomenal. Currently in this country, 80% of people heat their homes with gas. Durham University believes that the deep geothermal—the geological—could provide 100 GW of power, which is 16% of the electricity we consume.

Turning to the mine workings, a quarter of homes in this country sit on the old coalfields—7 million homes that could use mine-water heat instead of gas. In business terms, that represents a business or a sector with an annual turnover of about £2.5 billion and profits of £250 million. The net present value of the resource is £72 billion—I am using these numbers because I know that the Minister is financially literate and will understand their significance—and the net present value of the profits is £7.2 billion, so the Minister should look to turn the current £3 billion liability into a £72 billion asset.

Furthermore, the heat source is virtually carbon-free. It is estimated that enabling a quarter of the homes in this country to move over to it would save between 10 and 15 million tonnes of carbon a year. The current warm water would supply heat for 100 years, but if pumping technology were introduced to recycle the heat, that period could be extended almost indefinitely. I am told that by Durham University, which says that to meet our next carbon budget, it is essential to decarbonise heat. The Government’s current strategy is to do that by shifting people from gas to electricity heating, but electricity generation is only about 35% efficient, whereas I understand that for geothermal the figure is 75% or 80%, so the loss during production, transmission and distribution is much less. Geothermal would, therefore, be a much better route to pursue to hit our carbon targets. Some 40% of our carbon emissions are produced by fuel for heating, so if we decarbonised a quarter of the country there would be a reduction in our carbon emissions of 10%. That would be fantastic. It represents a really large reduction that is really worth having, and it would give us more flexibility in other areas of life.

There are considerable other policy advantages of using the mines in this way. First, this source of energy would improve energy security. Geothermal energy is not intermittent, unlike wind and solar, and it would reduce our dependency on unstable foreign regimes.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not know if my hon. Friend sees Iceland as an unstable foreign regime, but another idea is to have an interconnector through to that country, which gains enormous power from geothermal energy. Would my hon. Friend say that that fits into her debate in some way?

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend has just inserted it into the debate, so it obviously fits. Yes, that is a country that is already using the resource, as are others, and I will come on to that in a moment.

As I said at the outset, there is significant fuel poverty in some parts of the country and using geothermal energy is a way of tackling that. The sector could also be a source of jobs, especially in the former coalfield communities, which still suffer economic decline and need regeneration—in 2004, the Department of Trade and Industry estimated that it could create a million jobs. That is a very big number, and it might not be as many as that. If we compare it, however, with the 300,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector, we can see that it is obviously a significant number of jobs. Moreover, the skills and supply chains used in the oil and gas sector would be similar to what is required for geothermal. It would provide a useful transition for those businesses as the North sea declines.

Fourthly, geothermal could help to improve food security. That warm water would facilitate horticulture in parts of the country where it does not currently exist. Fifthly, mines can be used to store heat and therefore to balance power across the grid. We would be developing an industry that could be a source of exports. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) suggests importing heat from Iceland. I do not know whether an interconnector across the very deep waters of the north Atlantic is feasible, but I know that in many areas of renewables, this country has done a lot of innovation and research and then not seen through the development. In the case of wind, we did a lot of the basic science and initial work, but the industry has flourished more in Denmark, Norway and Germany than it has here. We must stop making that mistake. We need a different approach for geothermal, because we could be exporting engineering services for geothermal.

Another advantage is that there is no nuclear waste with geothermal, which compares well with some of the other power projects being promoted. It also does not produce the environmental damage that fracking produces, yet in the Government’s 160-page clean growth strategy, there is not a mention of geothermal. I want to understand why that is. The strategy says that the Government wish to ensure that they can

“deliver affordable energy for households…decarbonising ‘harder to reach’ parts of the UK economy”,

particularly heating. The strategy says that it is important to have “concerted joined up working” across Departments. It wants to see innovation to minimise costs. I agree with all those things, and geothermal is a policy area where they could be put into practice.

I know the Minister well. When she puts her mind to something, she is a very effective operator. She is a formidable figure. Officials in her Department have told me that they have found her leadership on renewables inspirational. I know she is not a paper shuffler. I want her to pick up the baton and run with it, because I have confidence that if she wanted to, she could make a difference here. The time to do that is now, using the skills and know-how of the petroleum industry. I am going to give her a few practical suggestions as to what I would expect to see in a policy for geothermal.

First, the basic science is strong, but we need more demonstration projects. The Coal Authority needs more resources to do those, as well as to provide advice for commercial actors.

Secondly, in the medium term we should probably have regulation and a licensing system that would bring in money for the taxpayer. For now, it would be sensible to extend the contract for difference to heat. At the moment, it operates just for electricity. In the Netherlands, the Government introduced a form of risk insurance. In five years, the scale of their geothermal sector has doubled.

Thirdly and finally, my concern is that we should see reform to planning and building regulations. The resource is being lost and opportunities are being wasted. One of the studies that Durham University did was into some old mine workings in Spennymoor in my constituency. It found that it would be feasible to have a district heating system for a new development of 300 houses. The local authority had no powers to require the house builder to consider, let alone implement, sustainability factors or renewable energy sources.

We all know that the large national house builders want to minimise risk and maximise profits, which, on being interpreted, means that they are lazy and greedy. They are not going to innovate unless they are required to do so. It has been suggested to me that we need a return to code 6 for sustainable homes. That gave us targets for achieving carbon neutrality in house building. Just as with the transition from oil and gas, the time to reform the building regulations is now. We are trying to build a lot of houses, so now is the time to raise the standards.

Everybody knows that retrofitting is more costly, so this is the moment to raise the quality of the housing stock for the next 100 years. We are in danger of making exactly the same mistake that was made after world war two, when a lot of prefabricated buildings were built. If we are going to build a lot, we need to build high-quality buildings for the long term, not the slums of the future. I suggest to the Minister that she organises a seminar for the national house builders and experts in the field to educate them. Will she write to or meet her colleague, the Minister for Housing, the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), to persuade him that he needs to incorporate the changes into the building regulations? He is going to make big changes to the building regulations, so he may as well do a proper, comprehensive job.