Craigie Leisure Centre Geothermal Heating Enhancement

“Oceanis’ exceptional engineering for remediating the under-performing geothermal system has resulted in Craigie Leisure Centre now heating its pools over the cold winter months with close to zero use of the backup electric heating.”

Geothermal heating systems provide excellent environmentally sustainable solutions ideal for heating large aquatic centres.  However, as they age or stop performing at their intended design capability, they become inefficient and expensive to maintain.

For Craigie Leisure Centre (CLC) this had become the case, with CLC increasingly reliant on electric backup heating, and experiencing significantly increased operations costs.

An investigation conducted by Oceanis in 2021 identified that the geothermal bore suffered from low temperature geothermal water and frequent clogging. Refurbishing a low temperature geothermal bore presents significant challenges and would require a new technically challenging energy efficient design to allow CLC to generate more heat and maximise the thermal energy extracted from the existing system.

Oceanis has greatly improved the efficiency of the Centre’s previously underperforming geothermal system. Oceanis designed new heat exchange systems to maximise heat extraction and re-designed all hydraulics to maximise extraction rates of the existing well and minimise system pressure drop.

Oceanis also introduced optimised thermal storage/surcharge control system strategies. Most importantly Oceanis developed cascading geothermal water use which extracted the maximum available thermal energy out of the pumped water.

A new optimally sized geothermal pump has also been selected, and new geothermal fluid filters have been installed to minimise clogging of the injection bore.

The result is that Craigie Leisure Centre has been able to turn off its supplementary heat pumps which had been required to operate for the last 18 years saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the local council.