Techno-economic analysis of developing an underground hydrogen storage facility in depleted gas field: A Dutch case study

Underground hydrogen storage will be an essential part of the future hydrogen infrastructure to provide flexibility and security of supply. Storage in porous reservoirs should complement storage in salt caverns to be able to meet the projected high levels of required storage capacities. To assess its techno-economic feasibility, a case study of hydrogen storage in a depleted gas field in the Netherlands is developed. Subsurface modelling is performed and various surface facility design concepts are investigated to calculate the levelized cost of hydrogen storage (LCOHS). Our base case with hydrogen as cushion gas results in an LCOHS of 0.79 EUR/kg (range of 0.58-1.04 EUR/kg). Increasing the number of full-cycle equivalents from 1 to 6 lowers the storage cost to 0.25 EUR/kg. The investment cost of the cushion gas represents 76% of the total cost. With nitrogen as cushion gas, LCOHS is reduced to 0.49 EUR/kg (range of 0.42-0.56 EUR/kg).& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Underground hydrogen storage is critical for future hydrogen infrastructure to ensure supply flexibility and security. Storage in porous reservoirs should be used in combination with salt caverns to meet high storage capacity requirements. A case study of hydrogen storage in a depleted gas field in the Netherlands evaluated its techno-economic feasibility. The study assessed different surface facility designs and calculated the levelized cost of hydrogen storage. The study found that using nitrogen as cushion gas resulted in a lower cost of storage.