Well Drainage Management in Abandoned Mines: Optimizing Energy Costs and Heat Use Under Uncertainty

Reinhard Madlener and Mathias Lohaus (rmadlener@eonerc.rwth-aachen.de)
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Mathias Lohaus: RWTH Aachen University, Postal: RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany, https://www.rwth-aachen.de

No 12/2015, FCN Working Papers from E.ON Energy Research Center, Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior (FCN)

Abstract: In this study, we investigate how pump control optimized with respect to the prevailing electricity prices (temporal arbitrage conditions) impacts the “eternal” operating costs of well drainage in an abandoned mine. Such a drainage system can be seen as a small-scale underground pumped storage hydro plant. The mathematical optimization of the well takes the dependency of electrical power with the water volume lifted and the changing water level into account. The non-linear dependency is transformed into a linear optimization problem in multiple stages. First, a superstructure optimization is used. Second, the characteristic pump profiles are linearized piecewise, resulting in a simplified problem where only the multiplication of a binary and a positive real variable remain. The multiplication of the two variables is replaced by a new variable, transforming the optimization problem into a mixed integer linear optimization problem. The results of the superstructure optimization yield the optimal pump size and the minimal costs incurred, which are then used to optimize the maintenance strategy. We find that well drainage costs can be reduced markedly by the optimization proposed, and that the economic potential for using mine water as a heat source for a local district heating network is rather limited.

Keywords: Underground pumped hydro storage; Mixed integer programming; District heating; Mining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D25 O25 P48 Q25 Q42 Q57 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2015-09, Revised 2020-07
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:fcnwpa:2015_012

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