Hydrogenization of underground storage of natural gas: Impact of hydrogen on the hydrodynamic and bio-chemical behavior

The intermittent production of the renewable energy imposes the necessity to temporarily store it. Large amounts of exceeding electricity can be stored in geological strata in the form of hydrogen. The conversion of hydrogen to electricity and vice versa can be performed in electrolyzers and fuel elements by chemical methods. The nowadays technical solution accepted by the European industry consists of injecting small concentrations of hydrogen in the existing storages of natural gas. The progressive development of this technology will finally lead to the creation of underground storages of pure hydrogen. Due to the low viscosity and low density of hydrogen, it is expected that the problem of an unstable displacement, including viscous fingering and gravity overriding, will be more pronounced. Additionally, the injection of hydrogen in geological strata could encounter chemical reactivity induced by various species of microorganisms that consume hydrogen for their metabolism. One of the products of such reactions is methane, produced from Sabatier reaction between H2 and CO2. Other hydrogenotrophic reactions could be caused by acetogenic archaea, sulfate-reducing bacteria and iron-reducing bacteria. In the present paper, a mathematical model is presented which is capable to reflect the coupled hydrodynamic and bio-chemical processes in UHS. The model has been numerically implemented by using the open source code DuMuX developed by the University of Stuttgart. The obtained bio-chemical version of DuMuX was used to model the evolution of a hypothetical underground storage of hydrogen. We have revealed that the behavior of an underground hydrogen storage is different than that of a natural gas storage. Both, the hydrodynamic and the bio-chemical effects, contribute to the different characteristics. © 2015, The Author(s).