The Belgian chemical company Solvay will use its salt caverns in Germany to store energy. In the caverns, compressed air or hydrogen will be stored to be used later again as an energy provider.
Solvay has signed an Option Agreement to provide four salt caverns to the Irish company Corre Energy, which will develop a Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) facility. These four caverns are located in Solvay’s flagship brine field in Epe, Germany, and will be allocated to Corre Energy until 2069, with the first handover in 2027.
Compressed Air Energy Storage consists in converting excess energy into potential energy by pumping compressed air into a cavern. The stored energy is released by expanding the compressed air through a turbine to generate electricity.
“The site will store up to 80 GWh of clean energy in the form of compressed air with 640 MW of installed generation capacity,” says the press release. “The partnership with Corre Energy is a key milestone in Solvay’s roadmap to make additional salt caverns available for clean energy storage.”
Energy transition
New forms of clean energy storage, like compressed air or hydrogen, are required for the European energy transition as more intermittent renewable electricity will integrate the energy mix.
For hydrogen alone, according to a study carried out by Gas Infrastructure Europe in 2021, Europe will run out of storage capacity by 2030: a maximum of 50 TWh will be available, whereas 72 TWh will be required.
“Solvay’s salt caverns offer a large-scale, long-duration, and readily dispatchable solution for clean energy storage – in the form of compressed air or hydrogen – that will play a vital role in the European energy transition,” the company proudly announces.
“Salt caverns can store hundreds of GWh of energy for long-duration ranging from days to months, offering much larger capacity than any battery nowadays,” Solvay continues. “Due to their configuration, they can be filled and emptied very fast, providing a good solution for renewable electricity intermittency.”
Second life
“We are delighted to partner with Corre Energy to give a second life to our salt caverns as clean energy storage,” said Philippe Kehren, President of Solvay’s Soda Ash & Derivatives business. “Salt caverns are a key enabler for a successful energy transition journey.”
“We salute Corre Energy for acting at the right time, considering that it takes up to ten years to develop salt caverns for storage purposes fully. We count on European governments, especially those involved in the development of hydrogen, to support such initiatives to meet the future European needs for clean energy storage,” he added.
“This landmark agreement adds a key market to our portfolio and doubles our capacity in Europe,” said Keith McGrane, CEO of Corre Energy. “The site will be ready for adoption within three years, and early discussions show there is very strong customer demand, buoyed by the proximity of the caverns to the grid.”
“Our team of experts will work closely with Solvay, future partners, and all relevant stakeholders to bring forward this major new storage solution as we support the global transition to clean energy,” he concluded.
Corre Energy is a Dutch scale-up with headquarters in Groningen but a stock exchange listing in Ireland. The company has different large-scale storage projects in Europe for compressed air and hydrogen.
To be prepared
“In Germany, we have over 100 salt caverns, old and new ones, Kehren stipulates. “Those holes are situated more than 1 km under the ground, and some of them are already used to store natural gas. It’s the first time that we will now use compressed air.”
There is one important condition: “If we extract as much salt as possible, the caverns are not suitable anymore for storage,” concludes Kehren. “If we know that there will be a storage project, we can ‘design’ the cave to make it fit for storage. It has a small effect on the price of salt, but our caverns have a residual value then.”
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