ADMIRE is a science lab for
the safest, largest and most efficient battery for renewable energy!
Why? Successful transition towards a green world depends highly on the significant increase of the renewable resources in the energy mix. The progress in harvesting renewable resources, such as solar and wind energy, is expected to keep its increasing rate. Beside scaling-up their production, successful integration of these renewable energy resources with the grid depends highly on the ability to store and reclaim them at various rates (daily to seasonal) safely, fully, and efficiently at large scales.
To provide a sense, The Netherlands consumption of energy during 2019 was about 800 TWh, equivalent to 8 billions of an electric car battery. If renewable energy is converted into green gas, specially hydrogen and green methane, it can be stored at large-scale quantities in subsurface geological formations.
ADMIRE stands for
Adaptive Dynamic Multiscale Integrated Reservoir-Earth
What? Geological formations are highly heterogeneous at multiple scales and often times entail complex features such as fractures and faults. In addition, they are highly uncertain as for being thousands of meters below the surface. Geophysical and geological characterisation and multi-resolution data integration technologies can only provide approximate information about the subsurface properties.
As such, major breakthroughs are required to address 2 major challenges of (1) multiscale multi-physics coupled processes and (2) uncertain, heterogeneous, and sensitive nature of these formations. Storing energy in the subsurface space is also adding one more challenge: (3) cyclic loading & transport at various frequencies and magnitudes! ADMIRE is all about these breakthroughs!
ADMIRE develops a toolbox
for rapid site selection, and technical feasibility study!
How? appropriate models along with meaningful parameter ranges are necessary to describe cyclic (multiphase) transport of green gas (e.g. hydrogen) in porous rocks and salt cave formations. At the same time, the hosting earth crust formation, including the reservoir undergoes cyclic deformation, with nonlinear elastic/plastic behaviour. The coupled models are also expected to be solved over large scales, both in space & time. Transformation of these systems at multiple scales is crucial due to (1) simulation efficiency & consistency & (2) uncertainty reduction. While item (1) may be trivial, item (2) is as important, if not more! The challenge in uncertainty reduction is 'how to use multi-resolution sparse data' to develop 'high-fidelity narrow ranges for model parameters' in order to 'reliably predict & optimise the process'. ADMIRE develops such a toolbox which conceptualises, operationalises & modularises the complex logical stems; allowing for 'rapid scenario investigation' & 'rapid site selection' and 'safe & efficient operational protocols'.
