In Salo, Lounovaima’s waste incineration plant has completed the world’s first 2,000 meter deep geothermal well drilled for the use of a waste incineration plant. The operation of the well is based on Quantitative Heatin to the thermal well solution developed and it has been drilled Geomachinewith the GM2000 drill trailer developed by
“Since there won’t be any more land for geothermal wells in the future, the wells must be able to be drilled deeper than at present. One geothermal well drilled to 2,000 meters produces the same amount of energy as more than a dozen traditional shallower wells, and it is also suitable for heat storage and cooling”, CEO of Geomachine Samuli Salmela says in the announcement.
According to him, the now developed solution is excellently suited for use in, for example, larger construction sites and district heating networks.
The world’s first GM2000 well drilling trailer was commissioned in Salo by order of the waste incineration plant Lounavoima.
“The operation of the plant generates energy steadily for the district heating network. In the network, however, the heat consumption load changes all the time, so when the consumption is at a low level, the plant has produced wasted energy. This energy can now be stored in deep geothermal wells and released from there later when consumption increases”, CEO of QHeat Erika Salmenvaara says in the announcement.
According to Salmenvaara, a similar solution has never been used anywhere in the world at a waste incineration plant. Over the next few years, a thermal storage consisting of a total of six wells will be drilled for Lounavoima’s waste incineration plant.
In the past, the record depth for drilling geothermal wells has been 1,600 meters at QHeat. The fact that drilling can now be carried out with Geomachine’s GM2000 drilling rig to 2,000 meters and even deeper takes the utilization of geothermal energy to a whole new level.
“The drilling depth has been increased by a third, which means that up to 60 percent more energy can now be recovered from one well than before. Annually, 950 megawatt hours were obtained from a 1,500 meter deep well, and 1,530 megawatt hours from a 2,000 meter deep well,” says Erika Salmenvaara.
The numbers are even higher if the energy output of a 2,000-meter-deep well is compared to a traditional 300-meter-deep geothermal well.
“Compared to a traditional well, we can now recover up to 60 times more energy from one well than before.”
Geomachine’s geothermal well drilling solution is optimized for hammer drilling in hard Scandinavian soil. The relative share of geothermal heat as the main heat source for buildings has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the 21st century. In the future, the GM2000 solution will especially benefit large real estate sites where the concept can be used as a regional energy source. From one well, there is enough energy to heat even more than three hundred A-class 70-square-meter apartments.