Enabling Clean Energy Resilience with Machine Learning-Empowered Underground Hydrogen Storage

To address the urgent challenge of climate change, there is a critical need to transition away from fossil fuels towards sustainable energy systems, with renewable energy sources playing a pivotal role. However, the inherent variability of renewable energy, without effective storage solutions, often leads to imbalances between energy supply and demand. Underground Hydrogen Storage (UHS) emerges as a promising long-term storage solution to bridge this gap, yet its widespread implementation is impeded by the high computational costs associated with high fidelity UHS simulations. This paper introduces UHS from a data-driven perspective and outlines a roadmap for integrating machine learning into UHS, thereby facilitating the large-scale deployment of UHS.

A Critical Review of Physics-Informed Machine Learning Applications in Subsurface Energy Systems

Machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool in various fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition. It can unravel hidden patterns within large data sets and reveal unparalleled insights, revolutionizing many industries and disciplines. However, machine and deep learning models lack interpretability and limited domain-specific knowledge, especially in applications such as physics and engineering. Alternatively, physics-informed machine learning (PIML) techniques integrate physics principles into data-driven models. By combining deep learning with domain knowledge, PIML improves the generalization of the model, abidance by the governing physical laws, and interpretability. This paper comprehensively reviews PIML applications related to subsurface energy systems, mainly in the oil and gas industry. The review highlights the successful utilization of PIML for tasks such as seismic applications, reservoir simulation, hydrocarbons production forecasting, and intelligent decision-making in the exploration and production stages. Additionally, it demonstrates PIML's capabilities to revolutionize the oil and gas industry and other emerging areas of interest, such as carbon and hydrogen storage; and geothermal systems by providing more accurate and reliable predictions for resource management and operational efficiency.

Predictive Scale-Bridging Simulations through Active Learning

Throughout computational science, there is a growing need to utilize the continual improvements in raw computational horsepower to achieve greater physical fidelity through scale-bridging over brute-force increases in the number of mesh elements. For instance, quantitative predictions of transport in nanoporous media, critical to hydrocarbon extraction from tight shale formations, are impossible without accounting for molecular-level interactions. Similarly, inertial confinement fusion simulations rely on numerical diffusion to simulate molecular effects such as non-local transport and mixing without truly accounting for molecular interactions. With these two disparate applications in mind, we develop a novel capability which uses an active learning approach to optimize the use of local fine-scale simulations for informing coarse-scale hydrodynamics. Our approach addresses three challenges: forecasting continuum coarse-scale trajectory to speculatively execute new fine-scale molecular dynamics calculations, dynamically updating coarse-scale from fine-scale calculations, and quantifying uncertainty in neural network models.