Thermal Testing and Pumping System for Geothermal Energy Recovery

The Project

The project covers the design, manufacture and testing of a thermal testing, pumping and control system. This pump forms part of a closed loop, downhole heat exchanger system for a geothermal heating unit. Water will travel through pipework into the well where the sub-surface, geothermal heat will heat the water. Then the water will continue its journey back to the surface where a heat recovery system will extract the heat from the water. Lastly, the water passes through the pump and heads, once again, underground.

Calder’s 40 years of experience in the design of bespoke pump packages makes us the ideal partner for this project. We will carry out all design, assembly and testing at our factory in Worcester. Calder Managing Director, Lee Watkins said, “Calder has a long history of delivering quality bespoke pumping packages for a variety of applications, and our experience lends itself well to Geothermal Energy solutions. It is great to be working with the CeraPhi team on this innovative solution, within the growing renewable energy market. We look forward to continuing to support them in their journey towards net zero.”

The Pump Package

The package will have a vertically mounted pump which minimizes the footprint. The pump is particularly reliable and benefits from long service intervals. As such, the unit’s lifetime operating costs are kept to a minimum. An electric motor will power the pump.

A 20ft container will house both the pump unit and the control room. This will protect the equipment from the elements, and offer significant package noise reduction. Additionally, we shall ensure low noise levels around the unit by lining the inner container walls with acoustic panels.

An integral control room within the container will accommodate the VSD and a HMI control screen. The control system is user-friendly and includes a fault shutdown facility and data logging. As is usual with our pump units, a suite of pressure and temperature transmitters feeds information back to the control system, giving maximum data acquisition potential.

Geothermal Energy

The use of geothermal energy is almost as old as the hills and is still used to this day. Think of the hot springs of Japan and Iceland. How about the ground source heat pumps being installed in gardens in ever-greater numbers today?

Ongoing radioactive activity due to the decay of materials in the earth’s core generates heat and, because of this, geothermal energy is renewable. It is certainly long lasting. In fact, some estimates suggest the sun will fail before geothermal energy. Other sources predict that geothermal energy will last as long as the earth itself.

Another huge advantage of geothermal energy is that it is not dependant on the weather. As such, it is a constant source of energy, known as a baseload energy. In other words, it’s always ‘on’!

The CeraphiTru Solution

The Ceraphi geothermal solution is industrial-scale harvesting of the heat below our feet to provide heating to homes and industry. The drilling of wells to extract the heat is a venture where success is not always guaranteed. However, the design of Ceraphi’s heat exchanger system makes it ideal for use with redundant oil wells. Significantly, this removes the risk and utilises existing, re-purposed wells.