Use rights markets for shallow geothermal energy management

Due to the growth in demand for shallow geothermal energy, the development of an integrated management system to organize the exploitation of this resource is mandatory to protect both groundwater and the users' rights. This paper proposes a methodology to establish a market of shallow geothermal energy use rights which will represent an advance in the management of this resource. The new concept developed to define the basic unit of management is the thermal plot. It is related to the shallow geothermal potential of a registered plot of land. This methodology is based on a GIS framework (ArcGIS, ESRI) and is composed of a geospatial database (Personal Geodatabase, ESRI) to store the main information required to manage the SGE systems, such as groundwater velocity, thermal conductivity or thermal heat capacity, and a set of GIS tools used to define, implement and control this use rights market. The exchanged heat rate and thermal disturbance are calculated on the basis of analytical solutions of heat transport equation in porous media. Thermal impacts derived from the exploitation of this resource can also be registered geographically, by taking into account the groundwater flow direction and adjusting the thermal impact to the available plot. A synthetic application of this methodology is presented for the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, Spain.