Decrease Saxony’s Surroundings Minister Olaf Lies introduced the funding notification of €2.375 million for Uniper’s deliberate hydrogen pilot mission on the Krummhoern pure fuel storage website.
The local weather disaster and the warfare in opposition to Ukraine are forcing us to push forward with the vitality transition at high velocity. It has lengthy been clear that the vitality transition can’t be achieved with electrons alone. Hydrogen will likely be a central ingredient for the success of the vitality transition. We want it to turn into unbiased of fossil fuels and to decarbonize our vitality sector and business. The benefit of hydrogen is that it may be saved. To ensure that it to develop this benefit, we’d like storage amenities, together with caverns. I’m happy that Uniper desires to make use of cavern storage for hydrogen right here in Decrease Saxony. We’re comfortable to assist this path. It’s in all our pursuits that we go ahead rapidly.
—Olaf Lies
Storing electrical energy transformed to hydrogen is necessary for balancing provide and demand fluctuations sooner or later. However present storage amenities are designed for pure fuel and would have to be transformed to make use of hydrogen.
Uniper Power Storage will check the development and operation of a brand new salt cavern particularly constructed for hydrogen storage on a big scale and in a real-world surroundings on the pure fuel storage facility in Krummhoern, Northern Germany, which has not been used commercially since 2017.
For this objective, a brand new pilot cavern will likely be sol-technically constructed utilizing an present properly. Throughout the trial operation, gear and supplies will likely be examined for hydrogen compatibility, and expertise will likely be gained within the storage of solely inexperienced hydrogen in a salt cavern and its supply and additional use.
The storage facility will likely be one of many first of its variety and is scheduled to start out working by 2024. Uniper will make investments round €10 million within the mission with a storage quantity of as much as 250,000 cubic meters of hydrogen.
Complementing Uniper’s close by Wilhelmshaven website with the “Inexperienced Wilhelmshaven” mission, Krummhoern’s geographic location close to the windy North Sea and its decades-old vitality connections to the fuel and electrical energy grids make it an excellent vitality location, strengthening the significance of the area and Decrease Saxony as an vitality hub in Central Europe.
The hydrogen pilot mission “KRUH2” of Open Grid Europe GmbH (OGE), which can also be funded by the state of Decrease Saxony, is positioned within the rapid neighborhood on the corporate premises. Right here, the main focus is on how inexperienced hydrogen may be produced on website utilizing an electrolyzer and saved in small portions to satisfy a plant’s personal demand for warmth, mobility and electrical energy. Uniper and OGE have been working intently collectively for many years in a variety of technical fields.
