Underground Hydrogen Storage in Salt Caverns: Current Status, Technical Challenges, and Future Outlook

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🔬研究者:Provides consolidated operational data and modeling constraints for hydrogen storage research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers design parameters and risk management insights for salt cavern hydrogen storage projects.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights infrastructure and regulatory needs for large-scale hydrogen storage deployment.

Underground hydrogen storage in salt caverns offers a technically mature and cost-effective solution for long-duration energy storage, essential for integrating variable renewable energy and supporting large-scale hydrogen deployment. This review critically assesses the current status, technical challenges, and future prospects of salt cavern hydrogen storage, with emphasis on operational evidence and engineering deployment constraints. A focused technical synthesis was conducted by analyzing peer-reviewed studies (2019–2025), documented industrial case reports, and numerical investigations. Literature was screened for relevance to operational data, geomechanical performance, hydrogen-specific risks, and techno-economic implications. Rather than performing a meta-analysis, the study integrates field experience with modeling-based projections to define realistic performance envelopes. Results show that salt caverns provide high containment integrity and flexible injection–withdrawal capability when operated within depth- and pressure-dependent geomechanical limits. Reported leakage rates are typically below 0.05% under well-managed Gulf Coast conditions, while modeled long-term convergence may reduce working capacity by 20–40% over 30 years depending on cavern depth and geometry. Hydrogen-specific risks, including material embrittlement and site-dependent microbial activity, are manageable through geological screening, conservative pressure design, and monitoring technologies. Although regional technical storage potential is substantial, economically realizable capacity depends on infrastructure availability and regulatory alignment. This review contributes an engineering-focused integration of operational data, geological constraints, and system-level considerations, clarifying where salt cavern hydrogen storage is technically proven and where uncertainties remain for large-scale deployment.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.2118/232672-msfirst seen 2026-05-23 05:52:59 · last seen 2026-05-27 05:03:45