An approach to describe heat transfer in porous media is presented on the basis of the continuous time random walk (CTRW) framework. CTRW is capable of quantifying both local equilibrium and non-equilibrium heat transfer in heterogeneous domains, and is shown here to match published experimental data of non-equilibrium thermal breakthrough. It is argued that CTRW will be particularly applicable to the quantification of heat transfer in naturally heterogeneous geological systems, such as soils and geothermal reservoirs.