RAG Austria AG

RAG is Austria’s largest energy storage company, and one of Europe’s leading gas storage facility operators. For more than ten years, RAG has been working with hydrogen as an energy carrier in order to store renewable energy seasonally on a large scale. The company develops leading edge energy technologies related to hydrogen and green gas that partner renewables. This enables RAG to play a vital role in attaining Austria’s ambitious climate goals. Our goal is to provide our customers with safe, efficient, environmentally friendly and affordable energy carriers and gas storage services – sustainably and responsibly.

The business focus is storage, conversion and conditioning of energy in gaseous forms. The company has gas storage capacity of about 6.3bn cubic metres (cu m) of natural gas, or about 6% of total capacity in the EU. A large part of RAG’s gas fields have already been converted into storage facilities, which can rapidly withdraw stored energy in large quantities on-demand. In this way RAG is delivering on its vision of “sustainable energy mining”, and decisively reinforcing security of supply in Austria and Central Europe.

Project Goals

Together with a selected group of international partners RAG Austria will demonstrate complete, competitive and qualified large-scale hydrogen storage in a porous subsurface reservoir to enable the energy system integration of European renewable energy sources.
As the leading European gas storage operator, RAG Austria contributes an already existing Underground Hydrogen demonstration facility, developed within the Underground Sun Storage 2030 project and extensive know-how from several decades of energy storage. A broad range of underground hydrogen storage experience will be enhanced to develop beyond state-of-the-art underground hydrogen storage technology and define overarching rules and recommendations for hydrogen underground storage across Europe in cooperation with project experiences from consortium partner’s research activities.

"The foundation for EUH2STARS is RAG’s experience from its first hydrogen storage projects in Upper Austria. RAG was the first company to prove that hydrogen can be stored seasonally and in large volumes in underground natural gas reservoirs. By scaling up this technology, we are demonstrating how the summer sun can be utilized for heat and electricity in winter", says RAG Austria AG CEO Markus Mitteregger.