Eden meets the underworld

摘要

Drilling a 4.5km-long hole through the Earth's crust could provide the Eden Project with enough geothermal energy to heat and power its entire site and potentially thousands of nearby homes, but will the £17 million experiment pay off - and what is its significance for wider sustainable development? When lockdown kicked in and people steered clear from tourist destinations, the Eden Project, in Cornwall, understandably suffered, but the concomitant collapse in oil prices provided it with an unexpected boost. Faltering demand for the black stuff should make it cheaper for the visitor attraction to hire heavy drilling machinery and services needed to bore down into the local bedrock to extract geothermal energy.