Abstract
Large transboundary Upper Miocene geothermal sandy aquifers which are widely utilized by both countries for balneological and direct heat purposes exist in the Slovenian-Hungarian border region. In NE Slovenia the total direct heat use was 382 TJ in 2010, while in SW Hungary it was 648 TJ, including utilization from basement reservoirs. The total installed capacity of the 13 Slovenian users was 38.8 MWt, while that of the 29 Hungarian users was 70.6 MWt. Utilisation takes place without harmonized management strategies which might endanger the longterm sustainability of these systems. We aimed to overcome this by delineating a transboundary thermal groundwater body (TTGWB) Mura-Zala with an aerial extent of 4,974 km2 and with vertical extent between depths 500- 2,200 m, which was done based on detailed geological, hydrological, geochemical and geothermal models as well as numerical modelling. The regional groundwater flow in the Mura-Zala TTGWB is from west to east in general, the modeled cross-border flow is approximately 50 1/s. At present, thermal water abstraction rates from the Mura/Újfalu Fm. (61.8 1/s in the Slovenian and 67.3 1/s in the Hungarian part of the TTGWB) does not endanger the good regional quantity status of the water body, and this should be maintained by allowing a maximum increase of thermal water abstraction 3.5 times higher than today. However, to achieve target numbers for an increased proportion of geothermal energy in the total energy mix in both countries, we suggest that increase of thermal efficiency and re-injection should be prioritized apart from the higher thermal water abstraction with setting up limit of the maximum allowable drawdown.
Highlights
Growing energy demand, restricted reserves of fossil fuels and efforts to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, contributing to the mitigation of climate change effects made clear that within 20-30 years a significantly growing proportion of energy has to come from renewables
The integrated climate and energy policy of the EU COM (2006)848 aims to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions by 20 % and increase the proportion of renewables by 20 % by 2020. This ambitious goal is manifested in the 2009/28/EC Directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources, on the basis of which each country prepared its national renewable energy action plan where they defined the target numbers. In these strategies both Slovenia (Urban~i~ et al, 2011) and Hungary (Nemzeti Fejlesztési Minisztérium, 2010) aim at 3-3.5 times increase of geothermal heat production from 2010 to 2020, which is mostly based on the promising geothermal potential of the Pannonian basin
As a result harmonized datasets from 792 Hungari an and 404 Slovenian boreholes were integrated into a joint database (MS Office Access) containing more than 42,000 inputs of which 12,904 are available to public through interactive ArcGIS web-map at http://akvamarin.geo-zs.si/t-jam_bo reholes (Rman et al, 2011a)
Summary
Growing energy demand, restricted reserves of fossil fuels and efforts to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, contributing to the mitigation of climate change effects made clear that within 20-30 years a significantly growing proportion of energy has to come from renewables. The integrated climate and energy policy of the EU COM (2006)848 aims to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions by 20 % and increase the proportion of renewables by 20 % by 2020 This ambitious goal is manifested in the 2009/28/EC Directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources, on the basis of which each country prepared its national renewable energy action plan where they defined the target numbers. Geothermal energy has been widely utilized for more than hundred years in the Pannonian basin by the abstraction of deep circulating thermal groundwater that extracts and transports heat from hot permeable rock volumes in the depth This classical hydrogeothermal system is gover ned by convection in zones with higher permeability or faults, and by conduction in less permeable deposits (Tóth & Almási, 2001; Tóth, 2009). The ICPDR (www.icpdr.org) manages mostly transbounda ry surface water resources in the Danube River Basin, a successful management example of thermal karst between Lower Bavaria and Upper Austria (Vollhofer & Samek, 2010) is among their assignments
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