Middle-Pressure, Large-Volume Hydrogen Storage
A building block of the hydrogen economy
Both producers and consumers of green hydrogen need buffer storage capacities for the magnitude of tens of tonnes hydrogen to operate smoothly on industrial scale. Solutions are available for both small size (< 1 t) and large size (>100 t) hydrogen storing facilities, but middle range can not be build using existing solutions.
The 1–100 tonne buffer storage is most demanded building block of the hydrogen economy, yet existing solutions are unworkable for this range.
Liquid Hydrogen (LH₂) , LOHC, Ammonia
- High liquefaction or conversion energy and operating cost
- Designed for export-scale (≈1000 t+), not site buffers
- Unsuitable for daily cycling and frequent dispatch
Mobile Compressed/Liquid Hydrogen Tube trailers
- Practical only for sub-5 t quantities
- Logistically inefficient for continuous industrial supply
- High transport and handling overhead
Stationary Compressed Hydrogen Storage – De‑Facto Option
- Practically implemented as clusters of COPV/steel vessels
- Capacity scaled by multiplying many small tanks
- Multiplies maintenance, risk and failure paths
- Becomes impractical at multi-tonne industrial scale
Largest known practical hydrogen storage facilities are in order of up to 5 tonnes, being rare and very expensive, because single tanks capable of storing 1 tonne of compressed hydrogen doesn't exist.
Why scaling tanks fails?
A 10-tonne facility built from today available tanks would require 400 of individual vessels. For example: 25 kg per tank - 400 tanks for 10 tonnes.
If we assume for illustration purposes per-tank survival probability of 99.9%, to calculate the system survival probability we need to multiply 99.9 by itself 400 times. So facility survival rate = 0.999^{4000} =67%, which is absolutely unacceptable by any standard.
There is a massive structural gap between hydrogen demand projections and physically deployable above-ground hydrogen storage: demand is being planned in hundreds of tonnes but available surface storage tech tops out at single-digit tonnes.
This is not a small gap. It’s a missing layer of infrastructure.