Economic and environmental benefits of geothermal energy in industrial processes

Abstract

As the industrial sector is one of the world's largest greenhouse gas dispatcher, a solution must be found, and geothermal energy can make a significant contribution to this challenge. This study shows that almost 85% of the industrial processes can be carried out with very low, low and medium geothermal temperature resources in Spain. In this context, the CO2 emissions avoidance to the atmosphere would mean more than 80 million tons per year and 15 years would be the amortization period for this investment for industrial processes of up to 45 °C in Spain. As a practical vision, a technical-economic study is performed by means of the reconversion of the already existing solar energy into geothermal energy of the plants belonging to the Spanish Solar heat for industrial processes obtaining savings of 18% of the investment with respect to the solar energy.