Managing Urban Shallow Geothermal Energy (Preliminary Results of the MUSE Project)

Abstract

In 2018, the MUSE project (Managing Urban Shallow Geothermal Energy) was launched under the umbrella of the GeoERA initiative of the European Geological Surveys (http://geoera.eu/). Partners from 16 European Geological Survey Organizations investigate potential of shallow geothermal energy (SGE) and possible conflicts associated with its use in the European urban areas. The project runs until June 2021 and outputs represent key geoscientific subsurface data delivered to targeted stakeholders via a user-friendly web service hosted at the GeoERA information platform project (GIP-P). The assessment of geothermal resources and conflicts of use will lead to the development of management strategies considering both efficient planning and monitoring of environmental impacts to feed into the general framework strategies of cities like Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs). The developed methods and approaches will be tested and evaluated together with input from the local stakeholders in 14 urban pilot areas across Europe, which provide different boundary conditions for the use of SGE. The pilot areas are geologically and climatologically diverse and provide different legal and socio-economic settings making the project outcomes and obtained knowledge relevant to the whole of Europe and beyond. The project addresses all relevant aspects by capitalizing on existing knowledge inside the project consortium, identifying and closing specific knowledge gaps and providing joint proposals on methodologies, criteria and concepts on SGE management. We adapt workflows to focus on local scale investigations suitable for densely populated urban areas, where heating and cooling demand is generally the highest, and which will represent the most important SGE market in the future. The outcomes of the project represent a comprehensive collection of methods, approaches and tools, which can be transferred to other urban regions in Europe and adapted by other organizations.