With the phasing out of the nuclear and the coal energy, Germany is undertaking its energy transition towards renewable energies and energy sectors with less impacts on the environment and with positive effects for the climate protection. This situation initiates a challenging transformation process predominantly in mining regions of former hard coal and lignite extraction.
On one hand the aftermath of former coal mining with its everlasting influences on the ground 
water level, on structures and buildings due to subsidences and uplifts or the coal firing related 
emissions is a burden, on the other hand transformation processes create new chances in former mining regions with their generally well-developed infrastructure network.
Historical mining sites of metal and coal mining are located in the vicinity of the city of Aachen. Until today vast opencast mining activities are taking place in the Rhenish region close to Aachen. As mining played a dominant role in this region, RWTH Aachen University still has a strong Faculty for Georesources and Materials Engineering, and due to the variety of disciplines in their nine faculties RWTH Aachen can play a major role in this transformation process on an interdisciplinary level.
In Germany hard coal mining has already phased out and lignite mining will be terminated by 
2038 and with the relevant know how gained the underground space can be utilized in different ways, such as utilization of geothermal energy, as storage of gas, hydrogen and materials or as Underground Pump Storage Power Plants (UPSP), respectively.
RWTH Aachen University with its relevant disciplines and with high level expertise among 
others in geomonitoring, geohazards, geomodeling, geodata management can contribute to 
elaborate solutions in transformation processes and in the utilization of the underground space.

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