Storm

When I was told I had to write the storm blog for this week I sat down and tried to get inspiration for an interesting and new piece to write. So instead of going out to ice skate on natural ice like everybody else I sat inside and did some research. A few weeks ago I blessed our wonderful readers with a piece about an incredibly large project that the Coca Cola company was initiating, this time I’m going to write about a small project and how important they are to sustainable development.

After looking for a couple hours I found an interesting project, okay, truth is I didn’t research, I just asked my mum, she knows a lot about this sort of stuff. She gave me a link to a small initiative, that you have probably not heard of before, but that could maybe one day change the world, and I’m going to give my short summary of what it is, and how it works.

Geo-Well is Dutch ingenuity at its best, it’s a sustainable project that makes use of the limited space we have here in the Netherlands. Geo-Well created and owned by “Ammerlaan, The Green Innovator”, is a project that uses Geothermal energy wells to heat up greenhouses for our horticultural products. You probably didn’t know, but warming up the green houses we have in the Netherlands takes A LOT of heat and energy (I mean look at our weather..). Thus finding away to decrease the energy we use on green houses will have a large positive impact towards our sustainable development goals. The geothermal wells are still small at the moment, however have a large impact, one geothermal well can heat up greenhouses of an area of 160 football fields, doing this they save 56,000 tons of CO2, this is roughly the same as the CO2 emission of 4000 households for a whole year. Imagine that? If every green house in the world was heated up by a geothermal well, we could cut out a massive amount of CO2 emission from our carbon cycle. Now, I’m going to do some math (I know, the things I do for our readers… math in the weekend):

**After some research, I found there is roughly 473,000 hectares of greenhouses in the world as of 2016. An area of 160 football fields is roughly 80 hectares. If one geothermal well save 56,000 tons of CO2, then we can say:

473,000/80 = 5912.5 geothermal wells need for all the greenhouses in the world.

5912.5 x 56000 = 331,100,000 tons of CO2 could be saved

This means that the CO2 emissions 23,650,000 households for a whole year could be saved. This is obviously not correct, as not all of the greenhouses in the world are in the same place, or are the same in general, but it does prove my point, this could be world changing.

              After having spent the morning researching and writing I have realized the importance of a blog like this. I’m not just spreading the word about Geo-well and how it works, I’m showing the importance every single sustainable initiative in the world, and the effect they could have if we all worked together. Our changing world can not merely be solved on one front; it must be solved on every possible front.

**This math is not accurate, it’s merely an example of what these wells could do*

Cheers,

Tom van Petersen