{"id":120050,"date":"2017-09-28T04:18:12","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T08:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=120050"},"modified":"2017-09-28T04:18:12","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T08:18:12","slug":"a-huge-boon-alberta-town-hopes-to-pull-new-kind-of-energy-from-old-gas-well-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2017\/09\/28\/a-huge-boon-alberta-town-hopes-to-pull-new-kind-of-energy-from-old-gas-well-2\/","title":{"rendered":"‘A huge boon:’ Alberta town hopes to pull new kind of energy from old gas well"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An<\/a>
An Alberta town is planning to pull a different kind of energy from the abandoned oil and gas wells that ring its outskirts. (Photo<\/a> by Bureau of Land Management\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

EDMONTON \u2014 An Alberta town is planning to pull a different kind of energy from the abandoned oil and gas wells that ring its outskirts.<\/p>\n

Hinton, west of Edmonton on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, is teaming up with academic researchers and the private sector to install what may be Canada’s first geothermal heating system in its downtown core.<\/p>\n

And some say it could change the ground rules for industry all over Alberta.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be a huge boon for the economy of this province,\u201d said Jonathan Banks, a University of Alberta geologist who’s working on the project.<\/p>\n

The town and Calgary-based Epoch Energy propose to re-open an abandoned gas well near the community and use heat from the bottom of the hole to warm municipal buildings.<\/p>\n

Water five kilometres down simmers at 120 C. It would be pumped topside and used to warm another fluid, which would be piped downtown to the networked buildings. The water would then be re-injected.<\/p>\n

One study has run the numbers for 12 public buildings, including schools, government offices, the hospital and the RCMP detachment. The $10.2 million cost would be paid back in 16 years at current natural gas prices. The town would cut its CO2 emissions \u2014 and associated carbon tax costs \u2014 by 3,795 tonnes a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes sense,\u201d said Hinton Mayor Rob Mackin. \u201cWe were built on resources and this is just an extension of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Banks draws a distinction between ground source heat pumps in common use and true geothermal energy. The first, he says, draws on solar energy stored in the top layers of the Earth while the second uses heat actually generated in the depths.<\/p>\n

The geothermal concept is widely used around the world, but Hinton’s version has a few wrinkles.<\/p>\n

Rocks beneath the town contain tiny pores which hold oil, gas and water. Pump those pores dry and rocks behave differently. Those differences are well-understood for hydrocarbons, but not water.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it’s related to oil and gas, we know everything,\u201d said Banks. \u201cWhen it’s related to geothermal, we actually don’t know any of this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Water from that far down is full of salts and other materials such as heavy metals. Will those materials crystallize out at the surface? It’s not known.<\/p>\n

Questions on pump rates, pipe sizes, flow rates and well spacing all need to be answered.<\/p>\n

The town has asked the provincial government for $1.2 million. Hinton and the university have borne the cost so far.<\/p>\n

There are also legal and regulatory issues.<\/p>\n

Alberta has no legal structures for owning heat. A system to encourage oil and gas producers to transfer end-of-life wells to geothermal producers needs to be developed. Transferring environmental liability from oil and gas producers to geothermal producers must be figured out.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has to be a really fulsome conversation between oil and gas, green energy producers and the regulator to say there’s a good outcome here if we can figure out how to do this together,\u201d said Lisa Mueller of Epoch Energy.<\/p>\n

The Alberta Energy Regulator says it is already discussing how to adapt to geothermal, as is the province.<\/p>\n

If the questions are answered, the possibilities are large. Alberta has thousands of oil and gas wells that offer possibilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would typically look for water above 60 degrees,\u201d said Banks. \u201cThere’s a practically unlimited supply of that in Alberta. There’s an ocean of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geothermal heat could sponsor a whole new industry \u2014 greenhouse agriculture.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you could go to a greenhouse developer and offer a 20-year fixed-price heat contract, there’s a lot of upside there,\u201d said Mackin.<\/p>\n

Communities such as Boise, Idaho, use geothermal to melt snow off streets. Any industry that needs to heat water \u2014 such as the oilsands \u2014 could let heat from the Earth do the heavy lifting, carbon-free.<\/p>\n

If everything goes well, Mackin said his town hopes to have the pilot project up and running as early as 2019. If it is, Canada will join the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis isn’t new elsewhere in the world,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is new for Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDMONTON \u2014 An Alberta town is planning to pull a different kind of energy from the abandoned oil and gas …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":120053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[25184,1771],"class_list":["post-120050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","tag-abandoned-oil-and-gas-wells","tag-alberta","mauthors-bob-weber","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}