Doug Smith’s Placement Report

Placement Location

Environment Agency

Placement Dates

Start Date : June 20, 2024
End Date : September 20, 2024

Report

I spent 3 months with the Environment Agency as part of the Chief Scientist’s Group, under the supervision of Helen Brooks and Sian Loveless. In that time my task was to gather information and then write a report on the geomechanical impacts of hydrogen storage in salt caverns.

Increasing energy storage is vital to meeting Net Zero targets and using salt caverns to store hydrogen is likely to be part of the solution. This method of storing hydrogen allows community-sized quantities of energy to be saved for when demand is high, and it is a technology that can be implemented relatively quickly. The Environment Agency therefore wanted to understand more about potential environmental impacts of using salt cavern storage, an existing technology that is utilised differently, in this way.

As well as gathering information from academic, industry and government reports, the project gave me the opportunity to speak to regulators within the Environment Agency and Health and Safety Executive, researchers in the subject from academia and experts from industry. This enabled me to compile a report and present my findings to the regulators, hopefully assisting the Environment Agency to understand how the technology can be used safely. The project allowed me to improve my knowledge of a subject that is closely related to my ongoing research and also required me to adapt my communication to a non-academic audience, with a particular focus on the topic I was researching.