Safe Underground Hydrogen Storage in Porous Subsurface Reservoirs (SHINE): A New European Interdisciplinary Project Exploring the Hydrogen Interaction with Porous Reservoir

We present a project named SHINE (Safe underground Hydrogen storage IN porous subsurface rEservoirs) recently funded under the Horizon 2020 scheme, which involve a consortium of five Universities and six energy companies. The main target is to explore the feasibility and address technical, geological, biological and hydrogeological challenges related to hydrogen storage across subsurface porous reservoirs by training 10 new PhD students. In this contribution we will introduce the main scope of the proposal and the research package structure. The novelty behind SHINE is that it focuses at integrating analytical, monitoring and computing techniques to explore how hydrogen may react with the subsurface minerals, fluids and microbial community potentially affecting the storage operations; it will also model the stress field changes across hydrogen reservoir/caprocks and monitor its geomechanics response during repeated injection/production cycles. This approach will radically improve our understanding of this technology, implement and de-risk its application to potential sites providing the necessary insights into underground hydrogen storage for decision makers in government and industry. SHINE will contribute at training a future generation of geo-researcher ready to have an impact into the EU transition energy challenges.