Winner: Environment - Energy sector
Project: Enhancing underground hydrogen storage assessment
The resources sector is fundamentally important for society, with global leaders acknowledging the need for industry to address climate change and for society to have diminishing reliance on fossil fuels.
The University of Adelaide's discipline of Petroleum Engineering is ranked 10th in the 2022 QS World University Rankings, assisting the global impact of their staff assisting the resource sector to become more sustainable. Their research and teaching focuses on the management and recovery of subsurface resources that are vital to sustaining a fair and prosperous society.
This project uses forward geo-mechanical modelling during cyclic injection and production, leveraging surface data from tiltmeters to assess deformation source intensity to enhance underground hydrogen storage assessment.
The critical aspect of underground hydrogen storage relies on understanding, controlling, and optimising the geo-mechanical integrity of storage sites during numerous cyclic injections and production.
While some scholars have studied the geological storage deformation during natural gas and carbon dioxide storage, few studies have investigated the unique loading conditions for underground hydrogen storage sites sourced from intermittent renewable resources.
We develop a novel technique to model the geo-mechanical response of underground hydrogen and natural gas storage in depleted gas reservoirs that undergo numerous cyclical injection and production to study their performance and technical viability. An analytical solution is developed using the principle of superposition to consider the impact of numerous cycles of injection and production on changes in pore pressure and in situ stresses. The developed model was validated against a numerical model constructed in Abaqus and results indicate an error value lower than 3% in the worst-case scenario.
The project received a funding grant from the South Australian Government, with substantial support from CSIRO, including resources for experimentation, access to essential data, and financial support through a top-up-scholarship.
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