Northern German energy company EWE wants to explore how hydrogen storage works under practical conditions. To this end, it is building a cavity around 1,000 metres underground, a so-called cavern, in Rüdersdorf near Berlin, Kallanish learns from the company.

According to EWE. the soil in the region provides the geological conditions for this. Around 150 million years ago, there was still an ocean here, which left an underground saltstone formation thousands of metres thick.

Construction of the cavern will start in February 2021. A six-month test phase is scheduled to follow in spring 2022, when the cavern will be filled with hydrogen for the first time. The investment volume of the project amounts to almost €10 million ($12.2m) of which €4m will be EWE's own funds. The remaining sum will be a funding from the German transport ministry as part of the National Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Innovation Programme.
 
For the project, which will figure under the name HyCAVmobil, EWE has a project partner in the German Aerospace Center Institute for Networked Energy Systems. EWE has already been using this location for the safe operation of natural gas caverns since 2007. However, the new test cavern for storing hydrogen will have a size of only 500 cubic metres - one thousandth of the size of as the last natural gas cavern built at the site.