Laura Pannekoek

Research

Like many places in the UK, the city of Glasgow sits on top of flooded coal mines from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The British Geological Survey is currently investigating whether the water in these mines could be used to heat homes in the city through geothermal heating. This is not the only project of its type – minewater geothermal is on the rise with mine remediation projects popping up all over Europe. In 2023 the International Energy Agency held a two-day symposium on mine water geothermal and a handful relatively successful projects are currently operational in The Netherlands and the UK. Minewater geothermal research not only uses subsurface data from the oil and gas sector, but there is a broader overlap in expertise, methods, institutions, and corporations between geoenergy projects like these and the fossil fuel industry.

During the SGSAH EARTH Scholarship, I visited the British Geological Survey’s Goeenergy Observatory and spent some time thinking more broadly about institutional geology’s recent interest in geoenergy.  Geoenergy is a broad category of energy technologies and sources that interact with the geological subsurface. It encompasses geothermal energy, but also energy storage, subsurface carbon capture, radioactive waste storage, and critical mineral exploration. During my research at the University of Glasgow I’ve been interested in what this category of geological research promises, but also what it perpetuates, what its infrastructural and epistemic lineages are and how it sits within the legacies of inhuman territorializations enacted by institutional geology. 

The science of geology, that developed in Scotland and England in the late 18th and early 19th century, has been (and remains) a major epistemological force that helped map subsurface resources, obviously not only in the UK but across the British Empire, and many other places in the world. Scholars like Suzanne Zeller, Kathryn Yusoff, Pratik Chakrabarti, and others, have argued how geological research aided in colonial violence, Indigenous erasure and dispossession, and the creation of global mining industries in the colonial periphery. (Chakrabarti 2022; Zeller 1987; Zaslow 1970; Yusoff 2018).

Yet, the British Geological Survey now argues that their work on Geoenergy signals a quote “step change in our understanding of geology and our relationship with the underground environment” (www.bgs.ac.uk, “UK Geoenergy Observatories”). Generally this ‘relationship with the underground environment’ is understood as purely technical and not social economic or political relationship. But the very fact that they name a ‘relationship with the underground environment’ at all is interesting in its own right. The gesture of naming that relationship is a gesture of reading what happens on the surface against what is contained in the subsurface and flows through it. It perhaps signals an awareness of a geological dependency or geological becoming, that in the past was considered natural, or perhaps not addressed at all. 

This interest in geoenergy is in part what brought me to the British Geological Survey’s Geoenergy Observatory in Glasgow. The mine workings where the research station is located is now filled with water that is around 12 degrees Celsius year-round. This water gets pumped up and transferred in a heat converter, which helps heat up a different fluid which then gets pumped to homes and businesses.  The water returns in a closed loop, when it’s cooled off, to the mine to get warmed up again. The heat comes from solar radiation that is absorbed by the ground and distributed through mine water. and works as a sort of heat sink, insulated by the subsurface architecture that was hewed out a hundred years before. This type of geothermal energy is described as ‘ground source heat’, to distinguish it from the form of geothermal where energy is derived from the heat of the earth itself.

Rejecting heat to the subsurface also causes potential problems related to the architectural legacy of 19th-century coal mines. As the water underground warms up, wooden studs used to prevent mine collapse may rot, and minerals exposed by mining may dissolve and sabotage pipes by clogging them with ochre.  It seems that the historical material is keen to let its legacy saturate the present. 

There is a specific geography to mine water geothermal as a heat source. It’s very local, the further the hot water has to travel, the more heat it loses. Unlike oil, gas, and coal which in Andreas Malm’s theory of energy are named as ‘stock’, or sources of energy that exists outside of the landscape, mine water geothermal can be considered a kind of ‘flow’ or a form of energy that is conditioned in space. It exists and circulates through a landscape. This means that there is little mobility, but also little possibility for the integration of this heat source in a global circulation of energy commodities. If the energy stock, for Malm, appears to be standing outside of time, mine water geothermal, as flow, is conditioned both by seasonal temperature changes, as well as surface activity. This potentially provides an opportunity for decentralizing energy.  Localizing sources of energy and heat, and offering opportunities for community ownership and maintenance. Recently a few researchers in the social sciences, Rozanne Spijkerboer and others have taken up issues of community access and ownership in geothermal and are starting to think more critically about what the production of geothermal spaces looks like.

But currently, it seems that there is little work being done in the way of social restructuring. The BGS does their research for the corporate sector, and its research objectives are often geared toward the  qualms or worries that the corporate sector may have in relation to the viability of building mine water geothermal infrastructure. Also, there is a major overlap in expertise between the geothermal and fossil fuel industries. Geothermal routinely uses datasets created by or for the oil and gas sector. One can ask what that does to the epistemologies and imaginations of geothermal spaces. Because of this mine water geothermal enters into view as an energy commodity anyways. I wonder if the type of geological research the BGS is conducting epistemologically forecloses different and more radical forms of energy governance that would be tied to more local and flowing understandings of energy.

Minewater geothermal, in the way that it is described by the BGS, fits into a narrative of energy transition that was recently critiqued by Mark Simpson and Imre Szeman. They argue that the phrase energy transition signals a type of transitional change that is orderly, measured, serene, step-by-step. That is especially jarring when many of us already live with the consequences of fossil capital and require an immediate ceasing of emissions. Energy transition narratives focus the idea of transitional change on energy only so that “absolutely everything else can remain the same – and especially neoliberal capitalism and the inequalities it generates”. 

In minewater geothermal, the material that is extracted changes from coal to water. but in some ways the land relations, and forms of power it enacts remains the same. Another way of saying this is: energy transition and sustainability narratives are modes of governing land relations that puts limits on what that transition can actually mean and how far it can go.  

Can geothermal help us thrive or flourish in the ruins of the fossil fuel industry? Perhaps we don’t have the luxury anymore to think of some future radically outside of the overlapping crises of climate and capital. There is no ‘free from’ fossil capital and the epistemological institutions that contour them. But there is an after. A mode of living in the wake of fossil fuels that we can decide on.