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Article

How Can We Make Pump and Treat Systems More Energetically Sustainable?

Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca Degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
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Water 2020, 12(1), 67; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12010067
Received: 4 November 2019 / Revised: 18 December 2019 / Accepted: 19 December 2019 / Published: 23 December 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Groundwater and Soil Remediation)
Pump and treat (P&T) systems are still widely employed for the hydraulic containment of contaminated groundwater despite the fact that their usage is decreasing due to their high operational costs. A way to partially mitigate such costs, both in monetary and environmental terms, is to perform heat exchange (directly or with a heat pump) on the groundwater extracted by these systems, thus providing low-carbon and low-cost heating and/or cooling to buildings or industrial processes. This opportunity should be carefully evaluated in view of preserving (or even improving) the removal efficiency of the remediation process. Therefore, the heat exchange should be placed upstream or downstream of all treatments, or in an intermediate position, depending on the effect of water temperature change on the removal efficiency of each treatment step. This article provides an overview of such effects and is meant to serve as a starting reference for a case-by-case evaluation. Finally, the potentiality of geothermal use of P&T systems is assessed in the Italian contaminated Sites of National Interest (SIN), i.e., the 41 priority contaminated sites in Italy. At least 29 of these sites use pumping wells as hydraulic barriers or P&T systems. The total discharge rate treated by these plants exceeds 7000 m3/h and can potentially provide about 33 MW of heating and/or cooling power. View Full-Text
Keywords: pump and treat; groundwater heat pumps; contaminated sites; groundwater remediation; sustainable remediation pump and treat; groundwater heat pumps; contaminated sites; groundwater remediation; sustainable remediation
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MDPI and ACS Style

Casasso, A.; Tosco, T.; Bianco, C.; Bucci, A.; Sethi, R. How Can We Make Pump and Treat Systems More Energetically Sustainable? Water 2020, 12, 67. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12010067

AMA Style

Casasso A, Tosco T, Bianco C, Bucci A, Sethi R. How Can We Make Pump and Treat Systems More Energetically Sustainable? Water. 2020; 12(1):67. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12010067

Chicago/Turabian Style

Casasso, Alessandro, Tiziana Tosco, Carlo Bianco, Arianna Bucci, and Rajandrea Sethi. 2020. "How Can We Make Pump and Treat Systems More Energetically Sustainable?" Water 12, no. 1: 67. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12010067

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