Community leaders and local officials broke ground yesterday in the Hill District to install a big heat pump that will use water runoff from an abandoned mine to heat and cool John Wesley AME Zion Church on Herron Avenue.

The $80,000 project is expected to cut heating costs by 80 percent and cooling costs by 50 percent.

The system also will be able to provide discounted energy for buildings on 40,000 square feet of vacant land next to the church, which the Herron Avenue Corridor Coalition hopes will provide an incentive for some development there.

The project, funded by a state grant and installed by Western Pennsylvania Geothermal Heating and Cooling, is unique in that it makes use of the very mine water that bedeviled the church when drainage seeped into the basement.

The state Department of Environmental Protection spent $106,000 fixing that problem in 2004 by installing a pipe on the mine floor that drains into the storm and sewage system under the street.

Now the church will turn that water, which flows at a constant rate of 100 gallons a minute at 55 degrees, into an elegant solution to its energy needs.

Wesley AME spends about $100 on baseboard electric heat each Sunday, the only day the church is open. The building doesn't have air conditioning.

"This geothermal program will use mine water, send it through a heat exchanger and a heat pump, and use that water to eventually heat and cool the church," said Pastor Calvin Cash.

Darwin Burtner, owner of the company doing the work, said it will take a few weeks to install the system, which will be housed in a massive 16-foot vault buried next to the church. Heat pump technology isn't new, of course, but he said using mine drainage as an energy source is.

"We take heat from it and heat the church, and take heat away from it and cool the church," said Mr. Burtner. "It becomes the most energy-efficient system that's out there today."

The project could spur similar ones near other abandoned mines.

The state, and particularly Western Pennsylvania, is dotted with old coal mines; the one next to the church is left over from the 1800s.

But in the Hill, the Rev. Cash, state Sen. Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, and others at the groundbreaking ceremony said their more immediate goal is to rejuvenate once-bustling Herron Avenue as a "green corridor."

A traffic study in 2007 showed that 9,200 vehicles travel Herron every day, a sufficient volume to make land along the corridor attractive, the Rev. Cash said.

A developer willing to build on the land adjacent to the church would be able tie into the geothermal vault and reap the energy savings, he said.

The land is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which in 2006 asked students at Carnegie Mellon University's Urban Lab to come up with a "dream" design for Herron.

Geothermal energy was part of their plan.

The Rev. Cash said the overall design calls for a mix of homes and stores.