Won't happen, but here's all the stuff about which people prattle in one picture.

[NNadir]

Here you go, from Toward a Fundamental Understanding of Geological Hydrogen Storage Adnan Aftab, Aliakbar Hassanpouryouzband, Quan Xie, Laura L. Machuca, and Mohammad Sarmadivaleh Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (9), 3233-3253



The caption, for what it's worth:

Figure 1. Graphical representation of entire carbon-free and sustainable hydrogen energy production and supply chain mainly comprising H2 geostorage in depleted gas reservoirs and salt caverns

I'm running out of lifetime, I think, and here's all the energy dreams of my time in one fantastic schematic.

Didn't happen, isn't happening, won't happen but in these times, if no other, theory (or perhaps wishing) trumps reality.

(Trump and reality side by side. It's 2022. Anything is possible. Right? "By 'such and such' a year, nirvana.)

Nearly three quarters of a century of talk and it's not like we've stopped talking, nor will we, until the last molecule of CO2 is in the air.

We're pushing 419 ppm of CO2 in the planetary atmosphere this week, but don't worry, be happy; it's such a cute picture, isn't it?

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Um, wait -- storing H2 *UNDERGROUND* ?? The leakingest, fastest diffusing gas in the Universe ???

Seriously, has anyone crunched the numbers on that ?

[Caribbeans]

2. Yes

PV Magazine: The burgeoning underground scene of hydrogen storage

Underground hydrogen storage seems to be coming up a lot lately, and with the burgeoning hydrogen industry needing somewhere to store itself, it’s not hard to understand why. One of the countries with the best credentials for the future hydrogen economy is Australia. A newly published report has quantified the country’s “massive opportunity” for underground hydrogen storage.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/10/22/the-burgeoning-underground-scene-of-hydrogen-storage/

PV Magazine: Storing excess energy in underground salt caverns in Kansas

The Kansas Geological Survey may help address the challenge of intermittent production from solar and other renewable sources. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/27/storing-excess-energy-in-underground-salt-caverns-in-kansas/

Older

Sandia National Laboratories released in 2011 a life-cycle cost analysis framework for geologic storage of hydrogen.[12]

The European project Hyunder[13] indicated in 2013 that for the storage of wind and solar energy an additional 85 caverns are required as it cannot be covered by pumped-storage hydroelectricity and compressed air energy storage systems.[14]

ETI released in 2015 a report The role of hydrogen storage in a clean responsive power system noting that the UK has sufficient salt bed resources to provide tens of GWe.[15]

RAG Austria AG finished a hydrogen storage project in a depleted oil and gas field in Austria in 2017, and is conducting its second project "Underground Sun Conversion".[16]

A cavern sized 800 m tall and 50 m diameter can hold hydrogen equivalent to 150 GWh.[17][18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage

Hydrogen = energy independence on local, state and national levels. Bottled and transportable sunshine.

[NNadir]

3. Rather than read PV magazine, I recommend learning the laws of thermodynamics.

Of course, this recommendation will go nowhere, rather like the idea that solar hydrogen would save the world.

It never stops, does it?

[NNadir]

4. This paper may have been an effort to crunch the numbers. I just looked at the picture and...

...laughed bitterly.

[NNadir]

5. Well, I reopened the paper and scanned the text and looked at a few more pictures, and found...

Last edited Thu Mar 17, 2022, 09:15 PM - Edit history (1)

...the authors' backgrounds and institutions.

Petroleum engineers dominate. The text of the paper, from what I can gather in a very superficial scan is how wonderful it would be to store hydrogen is...wait for it...depleted oil and gas fields.

Much, much, much, much better than salt domes.

Anything that depends on oil and gas can almost instantly declared "green." The petroleum/gas industry always wants to tell anyone who'll listen how wonderful it would be to store gases in the rocks they've fracked.

They're happy to report that a single offshore gas/oil field off the coast of Australia, the Marlin field, "could" store 100 TWh of hydrogen (0.36 EJ). Last year the data for the year World Energy Consumption for 2000 was released, 584 EJ. Thus in "percent talk" the Marlin field "could," if it actually worked which it never will, store 0.062% of the world energy supply. Note that 584 EJ was the first year in all of the published WEO reports where energy consumption fell with respect to the previous year, this because of Covid lockdowns. This year is expected to be well over 613 EJ.

According to the CAISO website, yesterday, 3/16/22, all of the wind turbines in California, spread over more than a 1500 square miles of trashed wilderness - and this was a good day for wind in California with the peak out put was briefly over 5 GW in the State of California and averaging just over 4 GW, very much unlike early February, when the same turbines went weeks without producing much over 2 GW with daily averages of less than 1 GW - produced 0.000351 EJ of electricity, (97,720 MWh).

Given the thermodynamic losses for producing hydrogen by electrolysis, one is inspired to wonder how many Californias worth of wind turbines it would take to fill the Marlin field with hydrogen while still supplying electricity to the grid.

I am so damned tired of hearing about how "green" hydrogen is. It's awful that this kind of stuff gets published in my view.

The authors:

Author Information

Corresponding Authors

Adnan Aftab - Curtin University, Discipline of Petroleum Engineering, 26 Dick Perry Avenue, 6151 Kensington, Australia; Petroleum Engineering Department, Mehran UET, SZAB, Khairpur Mir’s Campus, 66020 Pakistan; Energy Resources and Petroleum Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology KAUST, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia; Orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5287-2060; Email: [e-mail]

Mohammad Sarmadivaleh - Curtin University, Discipline of Petroleum Engineering, 26 Dick Perry Avenue, 6151 Kensington, Australia; Email: [e-mail]

Authors

Aliakbar Hassanpouryouzband - School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Grant Institute, West Main Road, Edinburgh EH9 3FE, U.K.; Orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4183-336X

Quan Xie - Curtin University, Discipline of Petroleum Engineering, 26 Dick Perry Avenue, 6151 Kensington, Australia; Orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0951-1133

Laura L. Machuca - Curtin Corrosion Centre, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia 6102, Australia

Sigh...