Gas storage, like other forms of energy storage, is needed to meet load variations and to improve the resilience and cost effectiveness of energy infrastructure, especially for seasonal variations.
Quintessa’s capabilities relate primarily to risk assessment of the storage integrity, building on work on this topic that Quintessa carried out for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE RR606) and subsequent work on reservoir storage for a commercial natural gas operator. More recently, Quintessa developed a risk assessment methodology for geoenergy technologies, which was applied to assess the risks of underground coal gasification (UCG) in a hypothetical site. The flexible risk assessment methodology that Quintessa developed can be applied at any stage in a geoenergy project, between initial planning and final site abandonment.
Quintessa’s expertise on gas storage, including methane and hydrogen storage, draws on its wider experience of underground storage of carbon dioxide, hazardous waste and radioactive wastes. In particular, the highly developed risk assessment and performance assessment methodologies used in these related areas are directly applicable to gas storage. One example of this is Quintessa’s development and maintenance of an online database of Features, Events and Processes of potential importance to CO2 geological storage.
Quintessa has also supported the HyStorPor project via the industrial advisory board role to help investigate the fundamental questions of what happens when hydrogen is being injected and withdrawn from subsurface reservoirs.