Assessment of the onshore storage capacity of hydrogen in Argentina’s natural gas fields

Abstract

Increasing the proportion of electricity from renewable energy sources is critical for the reduction of CO 2 emissions required to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement. However, intermittency in energy generation due to the daily and seasonal variability of wind and solar radiation is a major challenge. Addressing this issue requires the development of large-scale energy storage systems. Low-carbon hydrogen production and storage in geological reservoirs offers a potential seasonal energy storage solution. Here, we provide the first assessment of the underground storage capacity for hydrogen in Argentina and identify sites where future clusters of low-carbon hydrogen production could be co-located with suitable geological storage sites. We outline a production-based methodology that couples historical hydrocarbon production with remaining reserves to provide a reliable estimation of the amount of hydrogen that can be stored in each reservoir. Assuming a cushion gas requirement of 50%, our results show that a combined storage capacity of 2860 TWh of hydrogen exists. This far exceeds the requirements to meet the seasonal electricity demand for residential consumption in the country. The results of our sensitivity analysis show that the two most sensitive variables are temperature and compressibility, suggesting that high-pressure shallow reservoirs are most suitable for underground hydrogen storage. We additionally propose locations for two H 2 production and storage hubs that would permit the integration of storage sites with renewable developments and natural gas reserves that could be combined with carbon capture and storage to produce low-carbon hydrogen. Thematic collection: This article is part of the Hydrogen as a future energy source collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/topic/collections/hydrogen