Geoscientists at the University of Edinburgh have received funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) for a £1.4 million research project to investigate the storage of hydrogen.

The project, HyStorPor (Hydrogen Storage in Porous Media), is designed to increase understanding of the whole hydrogen storage system, from fundamental physical and chemical processes to its social acceptability.

The large-scale generation and storage of hydrogen could replace the use of methane for domestic heating, thereby reducing carbon emissions from one of the UK’s largest sources.

Hydrogen storage also offers the potential to balance the inter-seasonal mis-match between energy demand and supply.

The HyStorPor project outputs and on-going dialogue will be co-ordinated by Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage (SCCS) at a new multi-disciplinary information hub on hydrogen usage and storage, based at the University of Edinburgh (www.ed.ac.uk).

Over the next three years, the research team — led by Stuart Haszeldine and including scientists at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and Imperial College London — will use ‘state of the art’ experimental facilities in Edinburgh to investigate how hydrogen reacts and moves in the sub-surface, will establish how to efficiently inject and subsequently recover hydrogen, and will engage with the wider public to ensure that hydrogen storage develops in a way that is both technically feasible and socially acceptable.

Professor Haszeldine said: “On the pathway to cleaner air and in the fight against climate change, it is very likely that the UK will change heating in homes and industry from high-carbon methane gas to zero-carbon hydrogen and ammonia.

"Storing hydrogen made in the summer for use in the winter is a very important part of that change. HyStorPor is the UK’s first project to investigate the basic science we need to make that storage work effectively.”