Speaker
Description
Long-duration energy storage is increasingly considered in the United Kingdom to address renewable intermittency, extended low-generation periods, and curtailment. Depleted natural gas reservoirs represent a potential option for underground hydrogen storage, but their performance depends on geological variability, operational choices, and economic uncertainty. To explore these dependencies, reservoir-scale simulations were carried out for representative UK fields across a broad range of reservoir properties, operational conditions, and cushion-gas strategies, enabling analysis of hydrogen recovery behaviour over multiple storage cycles.
Rather than treating individual parameters in isolation, the study adopts an uncertainty-aware perspective in which recovery outcomes emerge from interacting geological and operational controls. Global sensitivity analysis was used to identify the dominant contributors to recovery variability, highlighting the relative importance of reservoir properties and fluid-density contrasts compared to controllable operating parameters. These insights motivated the development of a surrogate model to represent reservoir behaviour efficiently, allowing large-scale exploration of feasible storage scenarios that would be computationally impractical with full-physics simulations alone.
The surrogate model was embedded within a techno-economic optimisation framework designed as a decision-support tool for screening UK reservoirs under uncertain demand levels, project horizons, and cost assumptions. Optimisation was performed for delivery targets spanning short-term to seasonal scales, while uncertainty in hydrogen production and purification costs was explicitly explored to assess competing purity-management strategies. The resulting analysis illustrates how uncertainty in subsurface behaviour and surface costs jointly influences preferred operating regimes and reservoir selection, and how multiple viable storage options may exist within the national portfolio
| Country | UK |
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