While salt caverns are well established for natural gas and petroleum storage, their emerging use for hydrogen introduces new challenges, as greater temperature and pressure variations demand exact operational control. This study’s objective was to advance thermo–physical modeling of underground hydrogen storage by explicitly coupling cavern thermodynamics with wellbore heat transfer and incorporating temperature-dependent rock salt thermal conductivity. Developments were verified with two contrasting case studies: the Fischells Brook salt dome (700 m) in Newfoundland, Canada, and the Boree Salt Formation (1650 m) in Queensland, Australia. Results show that neglecting wellbore heat transfer leads to modest underestimation of cavern temperatures, particularly in deeper settings where differences reach 2.9%. Assuming constant thermal conductivity further underestimates temperatures, adding discrepancies of up to 4.6%. Together, these refinements demonstrate that peak cavern temperatures are higher than predicted and that neglecting both effects introduces significant yet avoidable errors, particularly in deep caverns where elevated baseline temperatures amplify the constraints during injection cycles.
Bachand et al. (Mon,) studied this question.