Our Story

For many years, Oldham’s councillors have had an interest in the town’s industrial heritage and whether it could be used to provide clean energy for the town into the future. Councillors had heard about minewater heating schemes elsewhere in Europe, and asked us (Oldham Council) to look into whether such a scheme could be developed in Oldham.

Minewater district heating works by extracting energy from the floodwater in disused coal mines, which is heated by geothermal processes, and upgrading it using heat pumps to supply a district heat network using insulated pipes conveying hot water around a town centre. Public, commercial and residential buildings can all be supplied with heat from such a system.

The Challenge 

Like many towns in Northern England, Oldham has an extensive network of disused coal mines underneath the town centre, dating back to the Industrial Revolution. If the principle of minewater heat can be shown to work in Oldham, it could open up the potential for this clean energy technology to supply town centres anywhere where this industrial heritage exists.

Our Solution

Working together with the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, we commissioned specialist consultants and the UK Coal Authority to carry out feasibility work looking at the potential for a minewater heat network. The feasibility study showed that a 4MW minewater heat network could be feasible, supplying large town centre buildings such as Spindles Shopping Centre, Oldham Leisure Centre, and a wide range of other commercial and residential buildings including homes on the nearby St Mary’s social housing estate, owned by First Choice Homes Oldham.

FCHO already own a district heat network at St Mary’s, and the feasibility work showed that this could be linked up with a new minewater heat network to serve the whole of Oldham town centre plus the St Mary’s social homes. This potential wide-scale heat network could be expanded even further in the future. The existing First Choice Homes energy centre at St Mary’s houses 3.5MW of biomass boilers which could also be used to provide additional heat for the low carbon heat network.

In partnership with First Choice Homes we are now looking to work together on the next stage of technical and economic feasibility to see if they can make the new low carbon heat network a reality. Key to this will be the drilling of test minewater boreholes, which will be the next big step towards the realisation of a low carbon Oldham Town Centre.

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