Located in Delta, Utah, the Advanced Clean Energy Storage hub, employing solution mined salt caverns, is expected to be the USA’s largest hydrogen storage facility when it enters operation, initially having a capacity of over 300 GWh, with enormous capability for more.
Said to be the first project to combine utility and industrial scale renewable hydrogen production, storage, and transmission, the Advanced Clean Energy Storage hub will support Intermountain Power Agency’s ‘IPP Renewed’ project, the main component of which is construction of an 840 MW hydrogen-capable combined cycle power plant. This will employ two M501JAC gas turbines that will initially run on a blend of 30% green hydrogen and 70% natural gas, starting in 2025 and incrementally expanding to 100% green hydrogen by 2045. Building on this initial flagship project, the plan is to deploy hydrogen hubs across the United States.
Origins of a first mover
Innovation, collaboration, and problem solving on a massive scale are required for a project like this. The story of ACES Delta starts in the 70s, when geologists recognised the large salt anomaly present in Utah and were excited to pursue the potential for oil. When they realised it was a dry hole, they just catalogued it and moved on. This record sat in a filing cabinet for decades.
Then, in 2007, a geologist named Rob Webster (Magnum Development) came across these records and became interested in their potential – he had studied similar developments in the Gulf Coast and realised that the one in Utah was one of the only ones present in the Western US. Here, he immediately recognised the potential for storing commodities relevant to the energy sector.
In 2017, when Mitsubishi Power got involved, the idea for hydrogen storage emerged, and here we are today. We are looking to operate at 100% hydrogen by 2045. But now, the next obstacle: Where are we doing to get the hydrogen from?
Enter the hydrogen production hub concept. All this is to say that collaboration, honest conversations, and building relationships are required to make things on this scale happen. While we know that those interactions don’t come without their own share of obstacles, we do believe that relationships are the key to a successful, reliable, and sustainable hydrogen future.
Is the first phase of the project on schedule?
Yes. We closed and began construction on the world leading integrated clean hydrogen hub in June of 2022. At 100 metric tonnes per day of electrolytically produced hydrogen, and with 11 000 metric tonnes of hydrogen storage, we will be the world’s largest single storage site for any type of hydrogen and one of the largest renewable hydrogen projects under construction. We closed on the first renewable energy loan in over a decade from the US Department of Energy, some $504 million. And we are demonstrating the industry’s vanguard market application of hydrogen as a seasonal energy storage asset.
Since June of 2022 both caverns are drilled and were completed ahead of schedule; at nearly 1 mile beneath the earth, we are creating storage caverns the size of the Empire State building with little more than a 15-feet tall wellhead above ground to show for it.
Both hydrogen-capable gas turbines for the IPP Renewed project arrived at site in 2023 and all of the above ground facilities to house and operate the plant continue to progress.
In 2023, we saw the first shipment of electrolysers rolling in on rail cars and being set on foundations. We continue to move forward with construction and progress towards coming on-line alongside Intermountain Power Agency’s new power plant in 2025, bringing an end to nearly 30 years of coal fuelled power generation IPA’s Intermountain Power Plant.
Innovation and collaboration
The entire premise of the ACES project is based on innovation and collaboration. Conversations between Mitsubishi Power and Magnum Development regarding how to best utilise the natural formations of the site in the face of the 2012 shale boom are how we got to the idea of hydrogen in a gas turbine. The idea picked up significant momentum around 2019.
One particular obstacle we overcame was the entire perception that this investment, this exploration into ACES Delta and everything it could be capable of, was a science project. People thought we were throwing our money away and responding poorly to the market, but through our collaborative efforts, we turned that perception around pretty quickly. The whole idea across our teams was to operate as one team, one goal, and when we shifted into that thinking, we started solving problems that had never been solved before, namely: where to fit electrolysers into the infrastructure ecosystem, and at a scale never seen before. That means: no existing contracts for people to reference, market needs that hadn’t existed before, and having a team that solved not only today’s challenges, but anticipating the challenges and mitigating those that might arise down the road.
Traditionally, in the power sector, our discussions would typically be with utilities and IPPs. While we still have those same dialogues, we found the need – and opportunity to – interact with an extremely diverse set of stakeholders necessary to get a project to the finish line. From power to mobility to heavy industrial users; from natural gas suppliers to renewable energy suppliers; from electrolyser manufacturers to autothermal reformer providers; and from US ports to European ports – the collaboration landscape opportunity for this molecule is vast. As part of that, collaborations, JVs, and partnerships are paramount to success.
Taking it one step further, we see a huge opportunity for use case and sector coupling of hydrogen projects. Let’s take for example some of our views on hydrogen’s ability to support power market decarbonisation. We’ve run power market studies from the West to ERCOT to individual utilities. What we consistently see amongst scenarios with hydrogen as a decarbonisation asset on the grid are:
- greater carbon reductions at
- lower system-wide costs with
- a more reliable grid.
We can also see how hydrogen works in concert with other technologies, like battery energy storage. While batteries are fantastic at solving intra-daily energy arbitrage, they are ill-suited for long duration balancing. Meanwhile, hydrogen is ideal for seasonal shifting: taking the excess renewables we are seeing on today’s grid from the winter and spring months and shifting them to the summer when we typically see deficits. As our grid increases its reliance on intermittent resources, the need for this type of balance will equally grow.
Public–private partnership and collaboration has made the ACES Delta hub project a reality. It was the result of working together with industry and government, with the ACES Delta Hub receiving the first loan coming out of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office for renewable energy in over a decade, as already noted.
The ACES Delta hub project also reflects four years of collaboration between Mitsubishi Power and Chevron USA. Inc’s New Energies Company (formerly Magnum Development), and is supported by the $500+ million in US Department of Energy funding.
Key storage and transportation challenges remain for the widespread deployment of clean hydrogen – something that the ACES Delta hub project is working to solve.
As hydrogen-fueled power production ramps up, the hydrogen will have to come from somewhere, creating the need for storage technology.
Once we have green hydrogen production, ample storage via these salt domes and we’re able to build pipelines from the site, hydrogen can flow wherever it is needed to support decarbonising power, transport and other industries across the region.
In the future, the Delta salt dome has the capacity to accommodate 70-100 caverns. This gives us the ability to store just a truly massive amount of hydrogen, enough to provide storage for the entire western United States.
