Plants painted with birds and hedgehogs direct hot water from below to generate energy and heat for thousands of homes in Hungary’s third largest city, Szeged.
Experts say the project – dubbed Europe’s biggest overhaul of urban heating systems – can serve as a model for other cities across the continent as EU nations scramble to wean themselves off of Russian gas in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Geothermal energy is local, accessible and renewable, so why not use it,” geologist Tamas Medgyes told AFP next to a recently completed well in the middle of a residential area.
The city of 160,000, located about 170 kilometers south of Budapest, is one of 12 in the central European landlocked country with geothermal district heating.
When the system is fully rolled out next year, 27 wells and 16 heating plants will push geothermally heated water through 250 kilometers of pipes to heat 27,000 homes and 400 commercial consumers.
– “Blueprint” –
This will make it Europe’s largest geothermal urban heating system outside of Iceland.
But unlike in the Icelandic capital, the heating systems in Szeged were built to run on gas.
EU member Hungary covers 65 percent of its oil needs and 80 percent of its gas needs with imports from Russia.
“This housing project was built in the 1980s. Since then, we’ve burned millions of cubic meters of imported Russian gas to heat cold water in these apartments,” Medgyes said.
But now “we’ve drilled and we’ve got hot water under our feet,” he said of the project, whose cost of more than 50 million euros ($51 million) will be partially covered by EU funds.
He added the project could be a “blueprint” for cities in parts of France, Germany, Italy or Slovakia rich in geothermal deposits.
Experts say geothermal energy is an underutilized source of renewable heat in Europe.
“The development of geothermal urban heating in Szeged is an easily replicable example in many regions of Europe,” said Ladislaus Rybach, an expert at the Institute of Geophysics in Zurich, Switzerland.
Lajos Kerekes of the Regional Center for Energy Policy Research told AFP that more than 25 percent of the EU population lives in areas suitable for geothermal district heating.
Long before the Ukraine war, Balazs Kobor, director of the Szeged-based heating company Szetav, began investigating how cities could use geothermal energy and “knocking on the doors of decision-makers.”
In 2015, the city administration commissioned him and Medgyes to initiate the integration of renewable energies into district heating.
“To heat the city annually, the company burned 30 million cubic meters of gas and produced around 55,000 tons of CO2 emissions every year,” Kobor said.
“The city itself was its biggest CO2 emitter,” he added.
Replacing gas with geothermal energy will cut the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent — around 35,000 tons — annually, Kobor said.
If similar small to medium-sized cities switched to geothermal for their district heating, it would be “a big step towards a carbon-neutral, sustainable Europe,” he said.
– 2,000 meters underground –
Surrounded by the mountain ranges of the Carpathians and Alps, Hungary and in particular the area around Szeged forms a basin in which 92 to 93 degrees hot water collects up to 2,000 meters below ground.
In facilities next to the wells, “heat exchangers” made of hundreds of metal plates transfer heat to water in piping circuits that serve various neighborhoods.
The geothermal water itself doesn’t reenter the circuits, but instead re-enters the earth through a nearby “reinjection” well, Medgyes explained.
In another neighborhood, a loud borer is working its way deeper and deeper into the ground, adding lengths of pipe as it goes.
The drilling period will last about three months, Medgyes said.
And while residents can see and hear the drills while they work, they don’t notice the change in the heat source in their homes after the job is done.
“The radiators and the tap water are as warm as before. I don’t feel any difference,” Gabriella Maar Pallo, a 50-year-old employee, told AFP at her nearby home.
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