SUMMARY

The project will test hydrogen test on an industrial scale for the first time, according to Uniper.

By Joseph Murphy

Germany's Uniper has secured €2.375mn ($2.4mn) in state funding for a pilot project that will test hydrogen storage on an industrial scale for the first time, the company announced on July 25.

Situated at the existing Krummhoern natural gas storage facility in north Germany's Lower Saxony region, which has been out of use since 2017, the KRUH2 project aims to demonstrate the storage of up to 250,000 m3 of hydrogen by 2024. It will test how equipment and materials react to hydrogen in a new salt cavern.

Uniper plans to invest €10mn in total in the project. While it will store only green hydrogen, according to Uniper, results from the project will have important implications for hydrogen storage at large. As Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) noted in research last year, only salt caverns have so far been proven as suitable for hydrogen storage, and a key challenge is hydrogen's far lower density than natural gas, meaning four times as much space is needed to store the equivalent amount of energy.

The funding was provided by Lower Saxony's local government.

"It has long been clear that the energy transition cannot be achieved with electrons alone. Hydrogen will be a central element for the success of the energy transition," Lower Saxony's environment minister Olaf Lies said in a statement.