The UK's Energy Technologies Institute has embarked on a project examining the potential for storing hydrogen and hydrogen gas mixtures in salt caverns.
The UK’s Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has embarked on a project examining the potential for storing hydrogen and hydrogen gas mixtures in salt caverns.
ETI has issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking partners for the project, which builds on an earlier project that showed that storing hydrogen in salt caverns could play a key role in decarbonising the electricity sector.
In a report released in 2015, ETI said that using salt caverns to store hydrogen to be used for power generation reduces the level of investment required at a system level to build new clean power station capacity. The report showed how a single H2 cavern could cater for the peak energy demands and fluctuations of a whole city.
There are over 30 large salt caverns in use in the UK today storing natural gas for the power and heating market. This latest ETI project will identify and examine three existing salt caverns in Cheshire, Teesside and East Yorkshire that could be used to store hydrogen to be used in power generation.
ETI Project manager Paul Winstanley said: "The end goal of the project is to understand the challenges, opportunities and costs of creating and operating these stores.
"Large amounts of energy can be stored, with one cavern providing enough storage capacity to satisfy the peak demands of a single UK city.
"This project will provide more detail on the suitability of individual caverns and the costs associated with using them, increasing the evidence base needed if they are to be developed further."