Republic of Ireland:

Drilling Down into Geothermal on the Emerald Isle (The Irish Times)

Ireland’s geothermal potential is good but the pace of progress has been slow

We may not be Iceland or Sicily. We have no active volcanoes or regular seismic activity. But that does not mean we cannot exploit the geothermal possibilities that lie beneath us to generate power and heat.

Geothermal relates to taking heat naturally in the ground and using it either for direct thermal heating locally or going through a heat exchange to generate electricity.

“When people think of geothermal they tend to think of high-enthalpy [high thermodynamic potential] sources,” explains Prof Alan Jones from the School of Cosmic Physics Geophysics section at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. “You think of places like Italy, Iceland and Indonesia, where there are a lot of volcanoes.

“But in fact only 5 per cent of the world’s population live anywhere near high-enthalpy sources. So a lot of the thrust of current geothermal energy exploration has been in low- enthalpy sources.”

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