Breathing Cities

How to create a breathing city

One building, one street, one town, one city at a time is how we use geothermal to transform cities. We replace the heat source that comes from burning fossil fuels (oil, coal) of one neighborhood to the next with geothermal heat.

The world has been developing fast with billions of people been lifted out of poverty and the rapid development has come at a price as a result we have what we call suffering cities. Cities that are covered with the smog that mostly comes from burning fossil fuels and people trying to stay warm.

The best answer to the problem of heating cities is the direct use of geothermal energy, and it has been proven in Iceland for decades where almost all space heating is done with geothermal and in China where we are working in over 60 cities/counties in China.

Geothermal District Heating (GeoDH) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating of buildings. The systems can vary in size or from below 0.5 MWth to 2 MWth and larger with a capacity of 50 MWth. Areas with shallow geothermal resources are assisted by large heat pumps.

ls in deviation from a drilling pad. One well is a production well used to extract the heat up to the surface and the other well is an injection well to pump the same water that has cooled down in the system back into the source to maintain the sustainability of the reservoir.

Well depths of 2 to 3 km are not uncommon and they are often located in sensitive, populated urban environments without interfering with the daily life of the neighborhood and the wells and or heat centrals need very little footprint.

With geothermal basically the only baseload green energy, it´s on 24/7 does not need any batteries and can form the backbone of any district heating system used as a single source or in a combination with other sources of heat.

What is interesting with replacing fossil fuels with geothermal, that it is not just cheaper it comes with benefits such as improved health and restoring of the environment – free of charge.

Bringing Back Breathing Cities

William McDonough gave a speech at Arctic Circle 2019 – China and the Arctic Forum where he talks about the world getting better because we are here.

Mr. McDonough is an architect, designer, author, leader, adviser, and a globally recognized leader in sustainable development. He is the co-author of the influential book Cradle to Cradle: Remarking the Way We Make Things.

McDonough has received many recognitions and awards over his lifetime and in 2019 the Fortune Magazine named him on the top of 50 world´s leader’s list as an influential person that is transforming the world and inspiring other to do the same