Hydrogen: The Key to Clean Energy? Let’s Scale Up Storage First
As the world races toward decarbonization, low-carbon hydrogen continues to emerge as a fuel brimming with potential. Beyond its use as a clean fuel, hydrogen’s unique value lies in its ability to store energy from renewable sources, which is critical for ensuring uninterrupted, affordable, and secure energy.
Achieving a reality where hydrogen can be used viably, successfully, and extensively will require a major change in how we store it. To unlock hydrogen’s full potential, we’ll need small — and large-scale, long-term storage solutions that can hold vast amounts of hydrogen underground. This infrastructure would provide greater day-to-day resilience and reliability to energy suppliers, distributors, and consumers in a rapidly changing world.
The energy industry has a breadth of experience in storing natural gas underground. This established foundation paves the way for a crucial transition to hydrogen storage, but technological advancements and infrastructure adaptations will be necessary to embrace this solution fully. Considering hydrogen’s different behaviors and characteristics, it is not just important but essential to modify site selection and storage operation procedures. This calls for increased collaboration between researchers, communities, policymakers, and industry leaders, highlighting the crucial role each entity plays in this process.
Designing a Global Roadmap for Underground Hydrogen Storage
Collaboration is key to quickly scaling any technology solution, and it is certainly pivotal to taking hydrogen to the next level. That’s why GTI Energy has been part of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Underground Hydrogen Storage (UHS) task force since its inception in January 2022. GTI Energy is actively shaping the landscape of large-scale, long-duration hydrogen storage along with a global community of 25 countries, 54 organizations, and more than 250 UHS experts from diverse fields like industry, research, science, and policy.
Last year, the UHS task force developed a Technology Monitoring Report, a comprehensive roadmap for the future of UHS. The task force convenes global scientists, engineers, and policymakers who are actively dissecting the technical hurdles and deploying solutions for UHS development today. For example, RAG Austria is injecting pure hydrogen into a depleted gas field for the first time in a unique demonstration facility in Gampern, Austria. They are converting solar energy to hydrogen using electrolysis and storing it in an underground reservoir previously used for natural gas storage.
In 2024, the UHS task force is accelerating collaboration, data sharing, and knowledge exchange with a laser focus: Translating research into actionable recommendations for widespread UHS deployment.
Collaborating with Industry to Accelerate Deployment of Underground Hydrogen Storage
The surge in demand for large-scale storage solutions is undeniable. UHS offers a secure and scalable answer, but challenges to minimize uncertainties remain. Fragmentation in research and development, as well as knowledge sharing, threatens to slow progress.
In response to this challenge, GTI Energy is proud to introduce a new industry collaborative, SUSTAIN H2: Subsurface Storage Technological Advancements & Innovation for Hydrogen, aimed at engaging industry stakeholders to accelerate and achieve deployment-ready plans for UHS. SUSTAIN H2 unites researchers, communities, policymakers, and industry leaders to bridge the gap between UHS research and deployment. The growing collaboration will provide well-tested, safe technologies that align developments with market demands and expedite UHS infrastructure deployment.
It is inspiring to see the unifying efforts driving the bright future of hydrogen. GTI Energy and its partners, through SUSTAIN H2, are dedicated to enabling the demonstration and implementation of UHS. This collaboration promises to swiftly lead us to well-tested, safe, and low-carbon technologies that will help decarbonize global economies.
Join GTI Energy’s Future Focused webinar, Global Collaboration for Enabling Large-Scale Underground Hydrogen Storage, on April 15 to learn more. If you have knowledge and expertise to share or would like to get involved in SUSTAIN H2, please contact sustain-h2@gti.energy.
