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by bryanlarsen 705 days ago
A water reservoir is a heck of a lot cheaper to make large compared to a hydrogen tank.
1 comments

Hydrogen on this scale would be stored underground, preferably in solution mined salt caverns. This is a well established technology, although it's more used for storing natural gas. These caverns are very inexpensive to build, which is why they are used.

Alberta, as it turns out, is underlaid by kilometers of sedimentary rock that includes salt formations.

Still sounds more expensive than a holding pond.
If one compares the heat of combustion of hydrogen stored at 100 bar and 20 C, to the energy of water elevated by 100 meters, the former exceeds the latter (per unit volume) by a factor of 1000. So that "holding pond" is going to be much, MUCH larger than the solution-mined cavern for storage systems of equal capacity (and remember one needs two reservoirs.)