equipment_sizingenergy_mass_balancecostinghydrogen
Screening levelized cost of storage (LCOS) for hydrogen in solution-mined salt caverns: working capacity, annual throughput, injection energy and EUR/kg storage cost.
Usable (working) hydrogen inventory per storage, excluding cushion gas.
min 50 · max 3000 · step 10 · t
Full charge/discharge cycles per year. Salt-cavern H2 is canonically seasonal (1-2/year); raise to 4-12 only for arbitrage/daily-cycled designs. Cycling drives throughput and dominates LCOS.
min 1 · max 365 · step 1 · cycles/year
Share of total inventory held as cushion gas (~30% in salt caverns).
min 0 · max 0.6 · step 0.01 · fraction
Electricity to compress H2 into the cavern (~2.2 kWh/kg, Aftab et al.).
min 0 · max 10 · step 0.1 · kWh/kg
Delivered electricity price for injection compression.
min 0 · max 300 · step 1 · EUR/MWh
Installed CAPEX per kg working H2 at the reference size (Argonne ~35 USD/kg at 500 t).
min 5 · max 100 · step 1 · EUR/kg
Annual O&M as a fraction of CAPEX (salt cavern ~2-10%).
min 0 · max 0.2 · step 0.005 · fraction
Used to compute the capital recovery factor (CRF).
min 0 · max 0.2 · step 0.005 · ratio
Economic lifetime for CAPEX annualization (Argonne 30 yr).
min 1 · max 50 · step 1 · years
Working gas capacity
Total capacity (incl. cushion gas)
Annual H2 throughput
Injection compression energy
Annual injection electricity
Scaled specific CAPEX
Total storage CAPEX
Annualized CAPEX
Total annual cost
Levelized cost of storage (LCOS)
Calculator context
Screening calculator for underground hydrogen storage in salt caverns. Computes working and total (incl. cushion gas) capacity, annual throughput from cycling, injection/compression electricity, total and annualized CAPEX via the capital recovery factor, and the levelized cost of storage (LCOS, EUR/kg of H2 cycled). Grounded on the Argonne National Laboratory / US DOE bottom-up cost study (Papadias & Ahluwalia), Forschungszentrum Julich (Caglayan et al.) capacity data, EWI / iScience LCOS ranges, and Aftab et al. (~2.2 kWh/kg compression). Cushion gas is folded into specific CAPEX per the Argonne convention.
9 assumptions used in the calculations
Structural unit constant for comparisons, cushion split, load hours and CRF.
Structural zero constant for guards.
Mass unit conversion t to kg.
Market range Exact.
Lower bound on the injection-energy load factor (no benefit below nominal).
Upper clamp on the injection-energy load factor.
Reference working capacity (500 t) at which specific CAPEX is quoted.
Economy-of-scale exponent: specific CAPEX falls from ~95 to <19 USD/kg over 100-3000 t.
Market range Equivalent to ~5x cost drop over 30x size.
Lower clamp on the CAPEX scaling multiplier.
Upper clamp on the CAPEX scaling multiplier.
Primary reference
Argonne National Laboratory / US DOE (Papadias & Ahluwalia); FZ Julich (Caglayan et al.); EWI
