PROVIDENCE – Brown University is exploring its campus to see if the answer to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 may already lie underneath.
Researchers at the Ivy League institution have drilled three wells on its campus to explore using geothermal energy as the primary source of heat for its buildings in its Hill and Jewelry District neighborhoods.
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Construction crews working with Brown’s Office of Sustainability and Resiliency and Division of Facilities Management drilled about 1,000 feet into the ground at the three different sites to install test wells that will help determine the viability of using geothermal heating and cooling across campus.
Researchers are hoping the wells will show how many more and what depth would be needed to allow Brown to move away from fossil fuel combustion to a highly efficient geothermal system, which would work by extracting heat from the Earth in the winter and pumping waste heat from air conditioning back into it during the summer.
“We need to find a way to heat our campus that doesn’t rely on the combustion of fossil gas,” said Stephen Porder, associate provost for sustainability. “The big picture idea here is that rather than creating heat by burning something, we want to move it from one place to another and have an ability to concentrate it where we want it. Geothermal provides great potential to both get heat and store heat, so we started drilling to find out how well this would work, how many wells it would take and how much it will cost.”
The test wells are located in a Lloyd Avenue parking lot near Brown’s athletics complex, a Prince Laboratory parking lot near Brook Street, and on the site of Brown’s future integrated life sciences building in the Jewelry District. The boreholes are about 6.5 inches in diameter with the deepest reaching about 1,000 feet and the shallowest going down about 860 feet.
The drill sites were selected because of where they sit on the campus’s heating loop, how close they are to additional equipment that may be needed and the amount of space they have nearby for more wells. By drilling in three locations, Brown’s sustainability leaders hope to gain a better understanding of the different geothermal properties that range across campus, including how much heat the rocks can absorb.
“The rock substrate can vary from location to location, and that can impact how effectively the wells in that area can perform,” said David Larson, senior energy engineer for the Office of Sustainability and Resiliency. “High rates of heat transfer would essentially mean we would need fewer geothermal wells to meet our heating needs, while a lower rate of heat transfer would require more wells.”
If viable, the precise nature of constructing geothermal wells on campus would depend on indicators such as the rate that heat can be injected or extracted at the sites. This will help determine the number of wells needed, which would likely number into the hundreds. Construction would be a multiyear effort, with wells installed in at least three locations either at or near the current test sites.
