ALBERT

Description: Planned decommissioning of coal-fired plants in Europe requires innovative technical and economic strategies to support coal regions on their path towards a climate-resilient future. The repurposing of open pit mines into hybrid pumped hydro power storage (HPHS) of excess energy from the electric grid, and renewable sources will contribute to the EU Green Deal, increase the economic value, stabilize the regional job market and contribute to the EU energy supply security. This study aims to present a preliminary phase of a geospatial workflow used to evaluate land suitability by implementing a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique with an advanced geographic information system (GIS) in the context of an interdisciplinary feasibility study on HPHS in the Kardia lignite open pit mine (Western Macedonia, Greece). The introduced geospatial analysis is based on the utilization of the constraints and ranking criteria within the boundaries of the abandoned mine regarding specific topographic and proximity criteria. The applied criteria were selected from the literature, while for their weights, the experts’ judgement was introduced by implementing the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), in the framework of the ATLANTIS research program. According to the results, seven regions were recognized as suitable, with a potential energy storage capacity from 1.09 to 5.16 GWh. Particularly, the present study’s results reveal that 9.27% (212,884 m2) of the area had a very low suitability, 15.83% (363,599 m2) had a low suitability, 23.99% (550,998 m2) had a moderate suitability, 24.99% (573,813 m2) had a high suitability, and 25.92% (595,125 m2) had a very high suitability for the construction of the upper reservoir. The proposed semi-automatic geospatial workflow introduces an innovative tool that can be applied to open pit mines globally to identify the optimum design for an HPHS system depending on the existing lower reservoir.

Description: ODYSSEUS is an R&D project initiated in 2019 and funded by the European Research Fund for Coal and Steel. The project partners from the European coal industry, research organisations and universities focus on the Coal-to-Liquids Supply Chain (CLSC) integration and enhanced assessment of operational, economic and environmental risks during or after mine operation in unfavourable geological settings for potential high coal production areas in European medium- to low-grade coal deposits. For that purpose, technological CLSC integration and optimisation are the main objectives, supported by laboratory- to demonstration-scale experimental activities on upgrading coal-derived liquids and by-product beneficiation, integration of conventional and innovative mine development as well as enhanced techno-economic and environmental risk management. The present contribution provides insights into the CLSC integration strategy developed for a European hard coal deposit and an operating lignite mine based on the combination of in-situ coal conversion with conventional extraction, findings from laboratory- and demonstration-scale coal- liquefaction experiments at surface and in-situ conditions, techno-economic assessments and numerical modelling of coupled processes for the elaboration of a robust environmental risk assessment framework. © 2021 38th Annual International Pittsburgh Coal Conference 2021: Clean Coal-based Energy/Fuels and the Environment, PCC 2021. All rights reserved.