As a kind of building heating and cooling technology, surface water source heat pump (commonly known as "water-cooled air-conditioning") technology has been applied gradually. It provides a new way to solve the problem of refrigeration (heat) in the hot summer and cold winter areas south of the policy heating line in China. The heat energy project using the Yangtze River water is developing in scale. But theoretical research on resource potential, utilization conditions and environmental effects has not kept up. In order to study the geothermal resources contained in the Yangtze River water source, the Datong Station of Yangtze river was selected as the representative section. The means of non-uniformity coefficient of runoff, Mann-Kendall method and the moving T-test method were used to analyze the hydrological regime of the Datong Station. The average annual runoff of Datong station was calculated as 905.36 billion cubic meters, and the concentration of water flow occurs in early July. According to the data of air temperature and water temperature from 2004 to 2021, it is concluded that the monthly average temperature is the highest in July and the lowest in January. The annual average water temperature is 18.9℃, and the annual average of the days when the water temperature is lower than 5℃ is 1.5 days. Therefore, it is suitable to use volumetric surface water units for heating/cooling. The water quality of Datong section is above Class II, so it meets the standard. To sum up, the water quantity, temperature and quality are suitable for the development and utilization of geothermal energy from river sources. On this basis, according to the temperature difference between air temperature and water temperature, the total geothermal resources of Datong Station are calculated as 3.08×10¹⁸ J from November to February and 1.67×10¹⁸ J from June to September. According to the control threshold of water temperature variation in the next section, the recoverable resources were calculated as 1.28×10¹⁸ J from November to February and 6.71×10¹⁷ J from June to September. The total amount of recoverable geothermal resources is equivalent to the emission reduction of about 166.04 million tons of CO₂.

river water source geothermal energy  /  Datong Hydrological Station of Yangtze River  /  amount of recoverable resources  /  carbon emission reduction