The Eden Project and EGS Energy Limited have announced plans for the UK's first geothermal power plant, producing carbon neutral electricity and heat from Cornish granite.

The Eden Project, a visitor attraction and environmental education centre, announced it has entered into a partnership arrangement with EGS Energy Limited, a leading UK engineered geothermal system energy developer.

The partnership is for EGS Energy and Eden to establish an engineered geothermal system power plant from which Eden can take the electricity and heat to power the Eden site in an old clay quarry at Bodelva, near St Austell, Cornwall.

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The partners believe that with the vast quantity of geothermal energy stored in the rocks below Cornwall, the county could eventually provide up to 10 per cent of the UK's entire electricity requirements.

EGS Energy, a company based in Penzance, Cornwall, and Eden will now work together to obtain consent for a site and to establish the power plant, in what would be the first installation of its type in the UK.

The power plant at Eden would consist of a two borehole system - one injection well and one production well, both around 3-4km deep. Water would be circulated between the bottoms of the two wells, with it being heated by the hot rocks in the process and returning to the surface at approximately 150ºC. There it would drive a binary turbine to create electricity, at a planned capacity of 3MWe. It is intended that further development of the power plant would see the hot water being used for other purposes such as community heating, before it is returned into the reservoir.

The partnership process began this month and is expected that it would be completed, the boreholes drilled and the power plant producing power, by 2012.

(CD/JM)