Airports aren’t generally the most eco-friendly environments, what with all the gas-guzzling planes around – but Paris’ Orly Airport is about to gain some brownie points for going green in a most unique way.
Airports aren’t generally the most eco-friendly environments, what with all the gas-guzzling planes around –but Paris’ Orly Airport is about to gain some brownie points for going green in a most unique way.
In 2011, the airport’s operator, Aeoroports de Paris (ADP), plans to launch an innovative geothermal energy project to heat Orly Airport, an adjacent hotel, and two nearby business districts using hot water buried beneath the earth. “We have the unprecedented luck of having hot water below our feet that can heat a large part of Orly without CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions,” ADP chairman Pierre Graff told AFP. “We are the first airport in Europe to do this.”
The 17.27 million dollar project involves the drilling of two parallel shafts on the airport’s perimeter. In order to reach a reservoir of superheated water, each shaft will have to be 1,700 metres (one mile) deep. At that level, heat emanating from the Earth’s molten mantle warms the water up to a scalding 74 degrees Celsius (165 degrees Fahrenheit). Natural pressure will force the hot water to the surface, where it circulates through the network of radiator tubes that make up the airport’s heating infrastructure. The system is closed and produces no waste - once the water imparts its heat energy to the airport and has cooled to approximately 45 C (113 F), it’s pumped back underground to replace what has been taken out.
It may sound a bit surreal, but Orly Airport’s geothermal heating initiative is no pie-in-the-sky scheme: The nearby towns of Orly and l’Hay-les-Roses already use geothermal energy to supplement their heating requirements.
ADP’s plan should cut more than 7,000 tons from the airport’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Now, if only they could get all the planes to run on french fry oil instead of jet fuel, they’d be set.