As climate change and international supply-chain disruptions have exposed the chronic vulnerabilities of our global systems, there is an urgent need to develop new strategies that can strengthen resilience and reduce dependence on fragile supply chains. This session provides a platform for new ideas, multidisciplinary approaches, and alternative strategies for building a more resilient future by using the subsurface to store energy carriers and other critical products. The subsurface offers significant potential for providing large-scale, long-duration storage that can help buffer fluctuations in supply and demand and strengthen the security of critical resources.
We invite submissions encompassing a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including feasibility studies, techno-economic analyses, energy-system modelling, life-cycle assessments, real-world case studies, and field projects. All innovative ideas are welcome, and here we provide only suggestions of potential topics:
• As climate change accelerates, new approaches and methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that make use of the subsurface are urgently needed. We invite contributions exploring sustainable energy storage solutions, including hydrogen storage—either as pure hydrogen or as chemical hydrogen carriers (e.g., methanol and liquid organic hydrogen carriers)—as well as heat storage, compressed-air energy storage, and other innovative approaches.
• Current and future supply-chain disruptions may also require the stockpiling of critical products, for which the subsurface could provide a safe and efficient storage solution. We invite contributions addressing the storage of critical products, such as ammonia for fertiliser production or helium for future industries, with a focus on storage operations, life-cycle assessment, and other approaches to evaluating their technical, economic, and environmental feasibility.
• Strategic energy reserves (SERs), such as the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, have played a vital role in enhancing the resilience of our societies. But how will these carbon-based, large-scale and ultra-long-term energy storage systems evolve in the future? As electricity use continues to increase and efforts to decarbonise the energy system accelerate, what might future strategic energy reserves look like? What energy carriers should they store, and how will their design and operation need to change to meet the demands of a low-carbon energy system?