Underground natural gas storage serves as a critical pillar of U.S. energy reliability, balancing seasonal demand, moderating price volatility, and safeguarding supply during peak consumption, particularly in winter months. However, the U.S. gas storage system is under increasing strain. While natural gas demand is projected to grow by approximately 4.5 Bcf/d through 2030, storage capacity expanded by only 0.1% annually between 2014 and 2023, well below the 1% in the prior decade. As a result, several regions now operate storage utilization exceeding 90%, creating an urgent need for new storage facilities to meet expanding demand from industrial growth, LNG exports, data centers, and renewable energy backup needs.
This webinar, the first in a three-part series, introduces the fundamentals of underground gas storage. Topics include storage reservoir types, key operational parameters, working gas and cushion gas concepts, and operating envelopes required to maintain reservoir and well integrity. This sets the stage for subsequent webinars covering the conversion of depleted oil and gas reservoirs to store gas and the application of underground gas storage and COâ‚‚-EOR technologies to carbon capture and sequestration. Together, the series explores how underground storage plays a growing role in energy security, infrastructure planning, and long-term carbon footprint reduction.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Tuba Firincioglu is the Managing Director at Nitec LLC. She is a career reservoir engineer and a numerical simulations expert. She has performed or managed reservoir studies involving dry gas, gas condensate, volatile oil, and black-oil fields, including modeling and design of many conventional and unconventional EOR applications. Her experience covers most geological environments from fluvial sands to carbonates. She has worked on all the major unconventional basins in the United States, including Bakken, Eagle Ford, Permian, and others.
Dr. Firincioglu holds an M.S. degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. degree from Colorado School of Mines, both in Petroleum Engineering.