Utilising publicly available datasets for identifying offshore salt strata and developing salt caverns for hydrogen storage

Hydrogen is expected to play a key role in a future climate-neutral economy by decarbonising ‘hard to abate’ sectors, and importantly act as an energy carrier to balance intermittent renewable energy production which if stored, could be used to address grid-scale energy demands. It is evident that for unlocking the vast potential of hydrogen technologies, large-scale hydrogen storage with the capability of fast cyclic operations needs to be secured. Underground salt caverns, where decades of operational experience exist, offer an attractive option for hydrogen storage due to the; high hydrogen sealing potential of salt, capability for large injection/withdrawal flow rates and capacity for large volume storage. This study presents a novel methodology for selecting offshore salt cavern sites based on publicly available datasets, which leads to eventually estimating regional hydrogen storage capacities. The Southern North Sea was investigated and a case study detailing a single diapiric salt structure is presented, demonstrating the strength and practicality of the framework as well as highlighting the potential of offshore salt cavern storage of hydrogen in the decarbonisation energy journey of the UK. Supplementary material at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6315742

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Geological Society Special Publication

• Publication date

  2022-12-05

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1144/sp528-2022-82
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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