Analysis of waste heat and geothermal heat potentials for district heating in Ukraine

There is still a developed District Heating (DH) supply in Ukraine, which exists in large, medium and sometimes small cities and covers about 35-40% (according to some estimates – up to 50%) of the total heat supply for the population. According to our estimation, DH’s heat production is about 6.2 Mtoe.

In recent years, there has been a constant decrease in heat production in DH. About two dozen cities have switched to autonomous and individual heating for consumers. The towns of the Zakarpattia region have entirely switched to autonomous and individual heating.

The most developed DH is in the industrial areas of the centre, east and south-east of Ukraine. Five regions provide about 60% of the DH services in Ukraine. These are Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. These regions also have the highest concentration of industrial enterprises, which can potentially be sources of waste heat resources for heat supply. In general, this contributes to the possibility of using the WE of industrial enterprises for DH.

The most promising potential geothermal energy sources are in the east of Ukraine (bordering the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipropetrovsk regions), as well as the Zakarpattia region, the north and east of the Crimean peninsula. Large parts of Poltava and Kharkiv regions, parts of Chernihiv, Sumy, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Luhansk, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, as well as parts of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil and Chernivtsi regions, central and southern parts of the Crimean Peninsula are also promising regions.

Geothermal heat energy resources of Ukraine, the readiest for development (with a water temperature of 60–80 °С), amount to more than 1 GW of thermal capacity. Zakarpattia, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kherson and Poltava regions are the most promising regions. The thermal potential of the existing 34 geothermal wells of Ukraine when used in geothermal heat supply and hot water systems (temperature of thermal water – 60-70 ˚С) is 240.7 thousand MW∙h/year, equivalent to 23 million m3 of natural gas per year.

The analysis concerns the situation before the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The territory of the Republic of Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions occupied by the Russian Federation in 2014 does not include in the report.

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Analysis of Waste Heat and Geothermal Heat Potentials for District Heating in Ukraine (in Ukrainian)