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Just a few minutes’ walk from a metro station in the northeast corner of Vienna, you might think that you were in Texas: A drilling rig more than 130 feet high looms over open land.
Instead of oil, though, the wells will pump close to 1.7 million gallons a day of hot water from deep underground. The water’s heat will be used initially to warm 20,000 households in the Austrian capital. It will then be pumped back below the surface.
This geothermal energy will reduce the city’s consumption of natural gas — an important consideration in Europe, and not just because it will cut carbon dioxide emissions. OMV, the Vienna-based company supervising the project, is trying to break a longstanding dependency on Russia for gas by pushing to secure new energy sources.
“For us it’s a new chapter,” said OMV’s chief executive, Alfred Stern. For the first time in six decades, “we no longer have Russian gas in our portfolio.”
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine put intense pressure on Central European countries to rethink their approach to energy. But breaking with Russian gas has been difficult for Austria, which until recently was one of a handful of European countries to keep importing the fuel by pipeline.
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