(Wikipedia)

Cumberland’s coal mines once anchored Vancouver Island’s economy, fuelling ships, heating homes, and supplying smelters as far away as Japan for more than eight decades. Now the small community is looking to a future built on clean energy drawn from the abandoned mine shafts and tunnels beneath its streets.

“This is a way to highlight the history of Cumberland and bring it into a sustainable-future, clean-energy ethos,” says Mayor Vickey Brown. “It’s something that old Cumberland can be proud of, because we’re using the waste of that old resource to transition to cleaner energy.”

Through the Cumberland District Energy project, the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) initiative led by the University of Victoria is determining how water trapped in mine tunnels could produce geothermal energy to heat and cool buildings.

It’s basically a “giant ground-source heat exchanger”, says Emily Smejkal, a geothermal systems fellow at the Cascade Institute. Water trapped underground is cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the temperature above ground, says ACET community energy planner and project lead Zachary Gould. Using that temperature difference, heat pumps could use the water to provide heating and cooling to buildings at a relatively low cost and with near-zero carbon output.

“But it’s not just an energy system,” Gould notes. “It’s an opportunity to look at resource extraction in a new way in a village that was built on extractive principles. This project could turn those ruins of extraction, so to speak, into an opportunity and a shared community asset.”

Mayor Brown sees it as a step toward reimagining Cumberland—which already attracts nature lovers and mountain bikers—as a clean, green, outdoor adventure destination. Bounded by the Beaufort Range, forests, rivers, creeks, wetlands and lakes, the Cumberland area of the Comox Valley is rich in natural resources. It was called “K’ómoks” in Salish, which translates to “abundance” or “land of plenty”.

Cumberland’s natural environment was first a source of sustenance for First Nations, then a coal and forest-rich resource to support development of a British colony and the wider province, its website notes. Now more than 200 km (120 mi) of Vancouver Island’s most legendary singletrack attract mountain bikers. In 2015, Cumberland became Canada’s first “buy-social” community, adopting a social procurement policy.

Cumberland’s community story has achieved almost mythic status, says Douglas Magazine. After rich coal deposits were found near Comox Lake in 1852 and the provincial government offered 100 acres of coal land for every $1,000 invested in coal development, a group of prospectors organized the Union Company. But they sold their rights to the Dunsmuir family after their funds ran low.

By 1900, the Dunsmuirs had built a rail line from Union to the east coast of Vancouver Island (Union Bay) where coal could be shipped around the world. Workers were brought from Britain, Scotland, Italy, Eastern Europe, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Norway, Australia, Chile, and the US. Eight different mines were created in the Cumberland area, and some 16 million tonnes of bituminous coal were excavated and shipped before the mines closed in 1966.

Cumberland’s Chinatown was the largest in Canada towards the end of World War I, and its Japanese community was the largest on Vancouver Island until Internment in 1942. In 2009, 31 flowering cherry trees were planted to symbolize the families who were forcibly removed. When the local mines closed, most homes in Chinatown and the No. 1 Japanese town site were demolished, dismantled, or relocated.

If the pilot project proves successful and sustainable, that “vast labyrinth” of tunnels beneath the village could support broader deployment, making industrial land more attractive, potentially adding jobs and contributing to the tax base, the mayor says. “This is a way to highlight the history of Cumberland and bring it into a sustainable-future, clean-energy ethos. We’re using the waste of that old resource to transition to cleaner energy.”

While having a network of mine shafts means the entire town could access this clean energy resource, the pilot is focused on a more limited area – a proposed civic precinct that includes a community centre, municipal offices and potential affordable housing, along with a large industrial area near Comox Lake. Municipal buildings could cut their heating emissions by 90% — equivalent to keeping 30,000 pounds of coal from being burned each year.

Geologist Cory MacNeill says the idea began in conversations about methane produced by the former mines, then evolved into chats about other geothermal applications for abandoned coal shafts. “It’s about reimagining these old resources and relics of industry,” he says. “It’s really powerful to look at all of this mining and look at ways that we can benefit from it from a more environmental standpoint.”

And they had examples to follow. Similar projects exist in Nanaimo, and in Springhill, Nova Scotia, the original world leader in using abandoned-mine geothermal for heating and cooling, with research and pilot projects dating back to the mid-1980s.

“We haven’t always worked very well with natural systems,” says Mayor Brown. “But I think this is a model of using the tools and resources you have in place to look after the needs of your community. And I think that’s far more resilient than the way we’ve done it in the past.”

“By transforming its legacy of ‘black gold’ into ‘green heat,’ Cumberland is demonstrating a compelling model for communities worldwide to embrace a sustainable future, proving that even the deepest scars of industry can be repurposed for the benefit of generations to come,” says CTO Robotics.