RII Track-4: NSF: Fundamental study on hydrogen flow in porous media during repetitive drainage-imbibition processes and upscaling for underground energy storage

Long-term grid-scale energy storage technologies are urgently needed for the United States and the rest of the world. In addition, the net-zero carbon emission objective has promoted transforming carbon-heavy industry sectors with cleaner energy resources. Hydrogen (H2) has been attracting global attention as one of the primary future low-carbon energy carriers, and underground hydrogen storage (UHS) has been identified as a promising option to address these national challenges.

However, a thorough understanding of multiphase fluid transport involving H2 and other fluids in a porous geologic storage reservoir is critically needed for the success of UHS. This Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-4 EPSCoR Research Fellows project will provide a fellowship to an Assistant Professor and training for a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

The fellowship will greatly enhance the research and education capacity of the PI’s home institution by replicating Idaho National Laboratory (INL)’s experimental study platform on hydrogen production and storage and the multi-scale and multi-physics numerical study platform at UNL. Further, the expected research findings will be incorporated into PI’s newly developed courses on Multiphysics numerical modeling.

The fellowship will also enable a graduate student to visit the INL scientists along with the PI, thus helping train a STEM workforce. At the regional level, the fellowship will boost collaborative research with Nebraska-based hydrogen producers, public power companies, and many faculty members at UNL and other universities in Nebraska.

The overall goal of this EPSCoR RII Track-4 fellowship is to build the research capacity of the PI and of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) that will enable the advancement of the fundamental understanding of H2 migration in porous materials during repeated injection-and-extraction cycles via pore-scale experimental studies, pore-scale numerical modeling, and upscaled reservoir-scale simulations. To accomplish this goal, the PI will collaborate with scientists at the host site, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), to achieve two research objectives: (1) elucidate the H2 transport, storage, and loss in porous media during repetitive drainage-imbibition processes at the fundamental pore scale and (2) upscale the repetitive H2 injection-extraction processes to reservoir-scale modeling by leveraging the existing gas injection/extraction and storage research portfolio at INL.

For these efforts, the PI will leverage the fellowship to learn new techniques, develop new collaborations, and advance existing research collaborations by visiting INL, along with a graduate student. The proposed research will be among the first to examine in-depth the saturation of gases and liquids, relative permeability, and their relations, as well as diffusion and dissolution of hydrogen, during repeated injection-extraction cycles at the fundamental pore-scale level.

In addition, the proposed numerical study will help to advance our understanding on fluid dynamics for H2-cushion gas-brine systems at different scales. Lastly, this fellowship will shift the PI’s research toward transformative new directions aligned with geologic energy storage.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.