Project InSpEE - Rock Mechanical Design for CAES and H2 Storage Caverns & Evaluation of Storage Capacity in NW-Germany

Underground storage in salt structures for compressed air or hydrogen are one of the few options for storing renewable energy in grid scale. However, there are only insufficiently substantiated estimates of the total potential.

Therefore the objectives of the InSpEE project are the development and deployment of design principles and basic geological/geotechnical data and of site selection criteria for the establishment of salt caverns as well as the estimation of the renewable energy storage potentials of the salt structures in the North German Basin. Cooperating project partners bringing in their expertise in the areas of salt geology, rock mechanics and planning and construction of salt caverns. Thermo-mechanically based assessment criteria will be applied for the site characterization and an algorithm of the estimation of the possible storage potential will be developed.

Finally, a publicly accessible “Salt information system” will be provided and the estimation storage potential for caverns in NW-Germany shall be addressed. Within this paper the rock mechanical design for CAES and H2 storage in salt caverns under consideration of thermo-mechanical coupled calculations will be presented as well as the methodology and the evaluation of the storage capacity for renewable energies.