Texas Reliability Underground: How Salt Cavern Storage Enables the Energy Expansion & Transition

Sam is Co-Founder and CEO of NeuVentus, a developer-owner-operator of salt cavern storage and interconnecting pipeline infrastructure.  Sam has 20 years of legal, finance and project development experience across the energy transition and midstream sectors. From representing KKR in its acquisition of TXU as a young M&A attorney in Simpson Thacher’s NYC office; to experiencing firsthand the impact of the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima fallout as a mid-level M&A attorney in Simpson Thacher’s Tokyo office; to working on developing a salt dome near Corpus Christi for natural gas storage in support of LNG exports as general counsel; to developing and tax equity financing hundreds of solar projects at SunPower; to representing the largest renewable energy sponsors in project development, construction financing and tax equity financing transactions in the Project Finance group at Norton Rose Fulbright; Sam has seen the global energy system and the contracts that comprise it from many angles. Sam is a graduate of Columbia Law School, the University of Utah and Stanford’s Inter-University Center for Japanese language studies.  NeuVentus is a portfolio company of Lotus Infrastructure Partners, a private investment firm specializing in infrastructure investments along the entire value chain of energy and related sectors. 

Abstract:

Energy delivery infrastructure is vital to modern life.  As the developing world strives to modernize, the developed world is striving to modernize even further toward an AI-driven, electrified future.  The entire world is demanding ever more energy, which implicitly means demand for more energy delivery infrastructure is also increasing commensurately.  As energy leaders and politicians face the “energy trilemma” of affordability, reliability and cleanliness, reliability – and the energy delivery infrastructure needed to support it – is often the easiest to overlook and take for granted.  That is, until a reliability event occurs. 

Against this backdrop, NeuVentus is developing salt cavern storage facilities and interconnecting pipelines along the Texas Gulf Coast.  Salt caverns are unique in their ability to store large volumes of molecules in both gaseous and liquid states in a highly-responsive manner, allowing for fast injection and withdrawal. 

In this talk, we will explore the basics of salt cavern storage development.  We will also explore the wide range of salt cavern storage applications: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; natural gas storage for LNG exports; natural gas storage for power grid applications; natural gas liquids storage; hydrogen storage; long-duration energy storage; etc.  And we will take a closer look at NeuVentus’s “TRU Hub” project.  Standing for Texas Reliability Underground, the TRU Hub project in Liberty County, TX will play a vital role ensuring that energy is delivered reliably across vectors (both molecules and electrons), even as global energy systems rapidly expand and evolve.