China’s First Million-Cubic-Meter Salt Cavern Hydrogen Storage Project Put into Operation

On April 25, China’s first million-cubic-meter level salt cavern hydrogen storage demonstration project was officially put into operation in Pingdingshan City, Henan Province. The launch of this major project fills the key gap in large-scale and low-cost energy storage for hydrogen energy, marking that China’s hydrogen energy industry has officially entered a new stage of industrialization in the whole chain of production – storage – transportation – utilization.

Co-implemented by a domestic academy of geological and rock mechanics research and a large comprehensive energy enterprise in central China, the project was constructed by a professional local gas storage and salt chemical enterprise. The research institute led the whole process of key technological breakthroughs, cooperating with national petroleum and petrochemical industry giants to complete full-cycle work including project site selection demonstration, engineering design, technical scheme optimization and safety monitoring system construction.

The academic expert team of the institute adopted refined site and layer selection methods, precisely setting the drilling depth at 1418 meters. It led the construction of a salt cavern with a water-soluble volume of over 30,000 cubic meters and realized the storage of 1.5 million standard cubic meters of hydrogen. The project has achieved the engineering practice of large-scale hydrogen storage in salt caverns in China and overcome a series of world-class technical challenges.

The project has made multiple major technological breakthroughs:First, it is China’s first hydrogen storage warehouse constructed with layered rock salt. It clarified the multi-scale migration law of hydrogen in ultra-low permeability rock salt, formed core technologies for precise site and layer selection of salt cavern hydrogen storage warehouses, and verified the long-term airtightness and engineering feasibility of hydrogen storage in layered rock salt.

Second, it overcame bottlenecks such as hydrogen-related material corrosion and equipment sealing. Independent developed hydrogen embrittlement resistant casings and high-tightness wellhead devices were applied, with all core key equipment domestically produced, establishing a self-controllable underground hydrogen energy reserve technical system.

Third, it pioneered an integrated ground-wellbore-cavity all-space safety monitoring technology. It realizes all-round real-time early warning of ground hydrogen concentration, wellbore vibration signals, gas-water interface depth, cavity seismic signals and other indicators, ensuring the safe and stable operation of the project.

As Asia’s first salt cavern hydrogen storage warehouse, the project has verified the technical feasibility of geological hydrogen storage in China for the first time, providing a mature technical route to break the bottleneck of large-scale hydrogen energy reserve during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.

With the advantages of large scale, low cost and high safety, it solves the key difficulties in the whole hydrogen energy industrial chain and provides core support for the trillion-yuan hydrogen energy industry. It can efficiently consume renewable energy such as wind and solar power, stabilize fluctuations of new energy, accelerate the clean and low-carbon transformation of energy structure, and support deep carbon reduction in industry, transportation, power and other fields.

In addition, it has built a self-controllable underground hydrogen energy reserve system, reduced reliance on imported fossil energy, and consolidated the bottom line of national energy security.