The £88,000 grant is the first fruit of a new partnership between Cheshire East Council and Keele University, which recently signed a memorandum of understanding covering work on renewable energy.
PhD students at Keele will carry out extensive research into the technical and economic aspects of the project, which would entail drilling down up to 5km and extracting water heated by the earth’s core at temperatures around 100 degrees Celsius.
The British Geological Survey has identified the Cheshire Basin, near Crewe, as only one of six deep geothermal resources in the UK. There is potential to generate about 100 gigawatt hours a year within a 2.5km radius of the proposed site in Leighton West.
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