Underground Gas Storage
Underground gas storage (UGS) is an engineering technique to smooth out peaks of gas delivery to consumption markets.
Market gas consumption is not constant, varies according to the market necessities. For instance, Perth community consume gas at different rates: at night the consumption is minimum, in the morning consumption is high since people use it for cooking shower and heaters. Similarly, during summer the consumption is lower than in winter.
However, field wells produces gas at constant rates, since open and shut a well causes well damage and reduces gas recovery form the gas reservoir, for this reason, engineers use underground gas storage where the gas is storage when the market requires low delivery, keeping the wells producing at constant rate, and delivery gas at high rates when market requires.
Below is a cartoon of the gas storage scheme. Normally the engineer chose a depleted gas reservoir, where reservoir pressure is low, so that it is easy to inject gas, and good permeability to deliver gas high rate of gas at short notice.
Currently, Western Australia has two major underground natural gas storage facilities: the Mondarra and Tubridgi filed.