About the Hystorm-project
Transitioning to a sustainable global energy system involves using variable renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and wave energy. Since these depend on shifting weather phenomena, they create a temporal mismatch between energy supply and demand. To be widely used, these rely on access to large facilities for storing and withdrawing energy. The energy can be stored in the form of hydrogen (H2) by using electrolyzers. Subsurface H2 storage has been tried in the field in caverns, but a larger-scale option that has not yet been attempted is storage in offshore depleted petroleum reservoirs.
For Norway, with its vast continental shelf and high offshore activity, this would open a clean energy platform and increase the use of renewables. Emissions from petroleum production stand for over 25% of Norway's total CO2 emissions, which must be significantly reduced for the country to reach its ambitions in the Paris Agreement. Powering offshore platforms with renewables is a goal but relies on large-scale energy storage options to balance the supply-demand mismatch. Through experiments and modeling, we will collect fundamental research results to indicate whether underground H2 storage in depleted reservoirs is feasible in Norway.
Objectives
The Hystorm project pursues the following goals:
- Perform initial fundamental studies to assess the feasibility of using depleted reservoirs on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) as storage sites for hydrogen
- Study NCS caprock and reservoir rock samples for potential fluid-rock interactions and advection-diffusion-reaction processes
- Include potential detrimental effects of geochemical reactions and cyclic site operations
- Upscale experimental results by modeling, and studying potential leakage through caprock defects, with input from experimentally deduced accurate thermophysical properties of H2-rich mixtures.