Your question was clear at the get-go. The place to start is determining how much heat your mom needs. I don't know much about oil furnaces, but you need to quantify her heat needs, in btus or a modern equivalent. Preferably, total for a normal winter.
Then you get to determining how many btus you can realistically retrieve from your cisterns. One way to bump that up would be to increase your storage temperature. Several methods that would work. Make it very high, and you really need to insulate your cisterns. Heat storage in dirt around 70º works well, a lot higher does not.
Don't worry about a thin plastic tank reducing your heat transfer from the earth. The formula for conduction is q = A (k/t) ∆T, where A is area, k is thermal conductivity, t is thickness, and ∆T is the temperature differential. A very thin t means a low thermal conductivity isn't very important. The major factors are A and ∆T. Get them both large enough and you've got something interesting.
I design earth heat storage for Passive Annual Heat Storage (PAHS) where we need to determine how much heat is put into the storage, and how fast it can be retrieved. And no, it is not a system that readily retrofits an old house.
Your primary problem will be finding a ground source heat pump company able and willing to do the calculations you need.
The short answer: yes it can work, but the devil's in the details.
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Today's Featured Article - Third Brush Generators - by Chris Pratt. While I love straightening sheet metal, cleaning, and painting old tractors, I use every excuse to avoid working on the on the electrics. I find the whole process sheer mystery. I have picked up and attempted to read every auto and farm electrics book with no improvement in the situation. They all seem to start with a chapter entitled "Theory of Electricity". After a few paragraphs I usually close the book and go back to banging out dents. A good friend and I were recently discussing our tractor electrical systems when he stated "I figure it all comes back to applying Ohms Law". At this point
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