News

Strategic roadmap released for deep geothermal energy in Germany

Strategic roadmap released for deep geothermal energy in Germany Roadmap Deep Geothermal Energy in Germany, screenshot
Alexander Richter 2 Feb 2022

An exciting roadmap document has been released in Germany to provide concrete guidance to politicians, businesses and the science community on utilising geothermal energy for a successful heat transition.

Oil and gas still play a major role in heating homes, offices and businesses and lead to high CO2 emissions in Germany and beyond. The current governing coalition of Germany wants to change this and is aiming for half of municipal heat to come from climate-neutral sources by 2030s, so a press release shared today by Fraunhofer IEG. Deep geothermal energy can make a major contribution here because it supplies local energy regardless of the weather and takes up little space in settlements.

The joint roadmap by researchers from the Fraunhofer Society and the Helmholtz Association shows that deep geothermal energy could cover more than a quarter of Germany’s annual heat requirements (over 300 TWh) and provides recommendations for actions necessary to achieve this goal. Among other things, clear expansion goals, large-scale geological exploration and the development of skilled workers are required.

The joint strategy paper “ROADMAP DEEP GEOTHERMAL ENERGY FOR GERMANY – Recommendations for action for politics, business and science for a successful heat transition” by researchers from the Fraunhofer Society and the Helmholtz Association is available for download.

“Achieving the climate neutrality of the heating market is a huge challenge and requires a whole bundle of measures,” explains Prof. Rolf Bracke, head of Fraunhofer IEG and co-publisher of the current geothermal roadmap for Germany. “Market players such as energy suppliers, industrial companies, the housing industry, the financial sector, politics, administration, trainers and municipalities need new instruments for this complex implementation task.” The strategy paper is intended to provide all stakeholders with the necessary information on the geothermal heat supply, the versatility of the heat market, and the technological realization of the heat transition. The aim is to provide recommendations for action in order to implement the potential of geothermal energy in terms of climate-neutral heat supply.

The roadmap identifies five recommendations for action to promptly expand geothermal energy for the heating market in Germany:

  1. Parliament and local councils should formulate clear expansion goals and flank them with appropriate legislation and statutes, from the Federal Mining Act to municipal spatial planning. The CO2 avoidance costs of the various technologies can serve as a guiding value in order to create comparability and competition.
  2. Small and medium-sized companies such as municipal utilities are active in the heating market and can only bear limited economic risks such as exploring deep geothermal energy. Therefore, financial instruments are needed for intermunicipal risk equalization such as state insurance or revolving funds that participate financially in projects. In addition, the federal government should increase federal funding for efficient heating networks to over 1 billion euros and the federal states should set up a comprehensive geophysical exploration program in order to reduce the discovery risk for the municipalities.
  3. The few dozen deep geothermal systems in Germany must now become thousands. This requires business investments in key technologies in order to achieve large-scale industrial standards. The key technologies are drilling methods, reservoir management, borehole water pumps, high-temperature heat pumps, large-scale heat storage, trans-municipal combined heat networks and cross-sector system integration.
  4. The growing geothermal industry does not require energy imports, but leads to domestic value creation and creates regional jobs in technology development and production as well as in the construction and operation of the plants. One can assume approx. 5-10 full-time equivalent jobs per MW of installed capacity. In order to train thousands of skilled workers, supplementary curricula are needed to the existing offers of the chambers of crafts, industry and commerce.
  5. Solving social challenges requires social acceptance. The municipal actors therefore not only need business management and plant engineering strategies. It is therefore necessary to involve all local interest groups on the way to the regional heat transition with citizen energy models, municipal communication strategies and transparent projects.

The roadmap now presented discusses the contribution of geothermal energy to the heat transition. The focus is on the hydrothermal reservoirs, i.e. thermal water-bearing rocks at depths between 400 meters and 5,000 meters. Geothermal water can be pumped from deep wells at temperatures between 15 and 180 degrees Celsius. They are available independent of the season and time of day and can be used in particular for municipal heat supply, district heating, housing and the provision of industrial process temperatures. The technology is mature and has been used in many European cities, such as Paris and Munich, for decades.

The heating sector accounts for 56 percent of the national energy demand. Only 15 percent of the heat is regenerative. While hydrogen and biomass will primarily have to cover the high-temperature requirements of the energy-intensive basic industry in the future, solar thermal and geothermal options in particular are available for low-temperature uses below 200 degrees Celsius. The advantages of geothermal energy lie in the base load capacity and the small space requirement, even in cramped inner-city conditions.

Geothermal Systems (source: Fraunhofer IEG, Roadmap Deep Geothermal Germany)

According to estimates in the roadmap, hydrothermal geothermal energy (possibly combined with large heat pumps) as a heat source for district heating networks could cover around a quarter of Germany’s total heat requirements, i.e. around 300 terawatt hours of annual work with 70 gigawatts of installed capacity. In 2020, 42 plants nationwide delivered 359 megawatts of installed heat output and 45 megawatts of electrical output (2020). Public households and private companies will have to invest 2.0 to 2.5 billion euros per gigawatt of installed capacity over the next 10 years to build up this geothermal generation infrastructure and to connect it to municipal distribution infrastructure for heat. This enables competitive heat production costs of less than 30 euros per megawatt hour to be achieved.

The joint strategy paper by researchers from the Fraunhofer Society and the Helmholtz Association “ROADMAP DEEP GEOTHERMAL ENERGY FOR GERMANY Recommendations for action for politics, business and science for a successful heat transition” can be found here .

The editorial team of the  roadmap includes:

Editor:

  • Rolf Bracke, Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Infrastructures and Geothermal Energy (IEG),
  • Ernst Huenges, Helmholtz Center Potsdam German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ)

Co-authors:

  • Simona Regenspurg, Ingo Sass, Daniel Acksel, Helmholtz Center Potsdam German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ)
  • Haibing Shao, Karsten Rink, Uwe-Jens Görke, Olaf Kolditz, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ)
  • Judith Bremer, Eva Schill, Thomas Kohl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
  • Marcus Budt, Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology (UMSICHT)
  • Harald Will, Gunnar Grün, Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP)
  • Gregor Bussmann, Thomas Reinsch, Anja Hanßke, Florian Hahn, Matthias Utri, Dimitra Teza, Florian Amann, David Bruhn, Leo Thien, Clemens Schneider, Fraunhofer (IEG)

Source: Fraunhofer IEG