About Hydrogen Storage in Caverns 2024 (HSiC 2024)
Storing hydrogen underground will be a vital component in the UK achieving Net Zero. Transformation from primary energy to hydrogen and back again to usable energy is not technically complex – and huge amounts of energy can be stored in this medium.
Last year the Royal Society published a report entitled “Large Scale Electricity Storage” where they emphasize that the UK will need about 100 TWh of storage capacity provided by underground hydrogen caverns and depleted fields to decarbonise the electricity system. Rounding to the nearest integer, the country currently has a total 0 TWh of storage capacity. There is a real need to get on with it!
In an effort to kickstart strategic developments in the country, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has published a document outlining the government’s plans to support hydrogen storage, including a strategy to minimize the risk of low revenue for potential cavern operators.
This year the Hydrogen Storage in Caverns 2024 (HSIC 2024) event took place at the University of Nottingham on the 12th of April. It was held as part of the wider UK Energy Storage Conference (UKES 2024). It builds on successful previous events held in London in [2020, 2022, and 2023].
The event explored some of the key challenges involved in deploying the necessary amounts of hydrogen caverns as well as some of the high profile projects currently being carried out in the country .
Download the event report
The full report from this event which includes a summary of every presentation and discussion session, can be downloaded here.
Programme videos & presentations
Geological storage of Hydrogen for Net Zero
Dr. Katriona Edlmann, University of Edinburgh
Assessing the Regional Demand for Geological Hydrogen Storage: Building a Strategic Case for Investment in the East Coast Region
Mr. Adam Kemshell, Arup
An overview of gas cavern construction and its energy requirements
Ms. Aura Alvarado de la Barrera, DEEP.KBB
Transforming Rough for large-scale hydrogen storage
Mr. Chris McClane, Centrica
Pathfinder project: Engineering electricity storage using hydrogen
Mr. Klim MacKenzie, SSE
H2 long-duration energy storage: How much capacity will there be across Europe by 2030, and will this be enough?
Mr Brendan Murphy, LCP Delta
Projects EMStor: Exploring potential for geological hydrogen storage in the East Midlands
Dr. Faye McAnulla, Net Zero Strategy
Event review
A strong section of UKES2024 was dedicated to hydrogen and its role in storing and carrying energy. Many other discussions address hydrogen separately from energy storage and yet its only other roles are small by comparison.
On Friday 12th, one of the three parallel streams of UKES2024 was dedicated to the underground storage of hydrogen and this session was also co-badged as Hydrogen Storage in Caverns 2024 (HSiC2024). HSiC2024 was characterised by a real sense of willingness and excitement to get on with it. The presentations included an impressive assessment of the real potential of the Rough depleted gas reservoir (owned by Centrica) to act as a massive hydrogen store for the UK – hosting around 10TWh(LHV) of the gas. This represents something like 10% of all of the hydrogen storage that will be needed in a cost-optimised Net Zero UK.
A separate presentation from DEEP.KBB was very revealing about the amounts of energy required to realise caverns in bedded salt. Evidently the energy required to realise a large salt cavern is less than the energy that would be lost in a single cycle of the resulting energy store – and even then, the action of making the cavern has a significant compensation in that it releases many hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mineral salt that has potential value for its elemental sodium and chlorine.
A keynote talk from British Geological Survey confirmed that the UK theoretical potential for developing storage in salt caverns runs to multiple tens of thousands of TWh(LHV) – far more than we will ever need. The UK is very well endowed with bedded salt resource.
Seamus Garvey
Professor of Dynamics & Director of the Rolls-Royce UTC in Gas Turbine Transmission Systems, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham