55 DECEMBER 2021 WorldWide Drilling Resource® RENEW - SUBSCRIBE NOW! Join us for th and Casino at the in Mark January e 2022 LGWA An Hotel Resort Paragon sville, LA 12, 2022 nual Convention & Trade Show F For more in vailable onli orms jwalto or e-mail formation, contac A A.o www ne at: n022@aol.com (22 alton at W t Joel .LGW rg 5) 744-4554 Power to People - Hydrogen Storage in Salt Caverns Compiled the Editorial Staff of WorldWide Drilling Resource® Storage plans for hydrogen, the lightest element on the periodic table, received a boost from the Advanced Clean Energy Storage project. This effort, owned by Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS) and Magnum Development, calls for renewable energy to produce hydrogen, which then gets stored in an underground salt dome on-site. The hydrogen can later provide power during dips in wind and solar availability. Some 130 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah, engineers are working on a giant cylindrical hole in the ground, a cavern of salt wider than half a mile and a mile deep, serving as a place to store hydrogen. Salt caverns seem to be a feasible, flexible, and efficient solution for hydrogen storage, similar to the storage of natural gas, because they have similar needs for cavity design, construction, and operation. Underground salt caverns cost 10 times less than above ground tanks and 20 times less than hard rock mines. Scientists set parameters to ensure safe storage operations: a minimum salt thickness of 328 feet and a range of minimum to maximum depth of 1640 to 6561 feet for salt cavern construction. Salt caverns are carved out of underground salt domes by a process called “solution mining”. Drilling into the salt dome and injecting the rock with massive amounts of fresh water dissolves the salt. The resulting brine is extracted, leaving a large cavity. By carefully controlling the freshwater injection process, salt caverns of very precise dimensions can be created. The next step is storing the hydrogen in the created cavern. Hydrogen is extracted by taking water and running it through an electrolyzer system, in which an electric current splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and reconverted to electricity when needed. MHPS has developed technology which creates electricity from hydrogen and natural gases. The new system is intended to use compressed hydrogen to deliver 150,000 Megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable power to people for one year. At Intermountain Power Plant, the current power units will be replaced with Mitsubishi Power’s highly efficient gas turbine combined cycle technology. They plan to reach 100% renewable hydrogen capability no later than 2045. Micheal Ducker, vice president of renewable fuels in the western region for MHPS said, “To decarbonize, it’s going to take a confluence of technologies - hydrogen, lithium-ion batteries, solar, wind, biomass - but hydrogen plays a very important part in that toolkit.” MIN
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