The Call for Evidence: What the Government Actually Asked
On 8 June 2026, Ireland's Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment launched a formal Call for Evidence for Hydrogen Geological Storage Development in Ireland, with submissions open until 17 July 2026. The call invites interested parties, from energy developers and geological engineers to utilities and research institutions, to submit evidence on the potential for developing underground hydrogen storage facilities in Ireland. It's a technical-sounding document with a genuinely significant strategic implication: Ireland is formally beginning the process of assessing whether its geology can support large-scale hydrogen storage, and whether that storage could become a pillar of its long-term energy security and decarbonisation strategy.
This isn't a procurement or a funding announcement. It's a structured information-gathering exercise designed to build an evidence base before formal policy decisions are made. But the fact that the Department is running it now, in June 2026, and has set a July deadline, signals clearly that hydrogen storage is no longer a theoretical question for Irish energy policy. It's becoming a practical one, and the government wants to understand the real-world feasibility before the next phase of investment and regulatory decisions has to be made.
Why Underground Storage and Why Now
To understand why geological hydrogen storage matters, it helps to start with the basic physics of Ireland's energy transition. Ireland has committed to generating 80% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, up from around 35% as recently as 2020. The vast majority of that renewable electricity will come from wind, both onshore and offshore, with offshore alone expected to deliver 5GW by 2030 under the current programme. Wind power is variable by nature: it produces a surplus when the wind blows and a deficit when it doesn't. Managing that variability at the scale Ireland's 2030 grid will operate at requires storage, and lots of it.
Battery storage handles short-duration variability well, balancing supply and demand over minutes and hours. But for seasonal storage, storing surplus summer wind output to cover winter demand gaps across weeks and months, batteries are not yet a realistic option at the scale required. That's where hydrogen comes in. Surplus renewable electricity can be used to produce hydrogen through electrolysis, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. That hydrogen can then be stored, transported and converted back to electricity when needed. Underground geological storage, specifically in depleted gas fields, salt caverns and aquifer formations, is the most cost-effective way to store hydrogen at the scale that would meaningfully affect a national grid.
Ireland's geology includes several candidate formation types. Preliminary academic research, including work by UCD's School of Earth Sciences, has identified Permian and Triassic basin structures with salt cavern geostorage potential, provisionally estimated at a hydrogen working gas capacity of around 1.6 terawatt-hours for a planned facility at Islandmagee in Northern Ireland. The island-wide geological picture is still being mapped systematically, which is precisely why this Call for Evidence matters: it invites the people who actually know the geology, the engineering requirements and the commercial feasibility to put their evidence on the table before government sets policy.
The Wider Hydrogen Strategy This Fits Into
The Call for Evidence doesn't sit in isolation. Ireland's National Hydrogen Programme Implementation Plan, published in 2025, set out a clear architecture for how hydrogen would be regulated, produced and integrated into the energy system. It committed to pilot projects for hydrogen blending in the gas network beginning in 2026, the development of regional hydrogen clusters including the Shamrock Hydrogen Valley in the Shannon Estuary and the proposed Cork Hydrogen Valley before 2030, and a target to transpose the EU Hydrogen and Decarbonised Gas Market Package by 2026, including designating a national Hydrogen Network Operator and establishing the governance framework for hydrogen transport and storage. Gas Networks Ireland is already a signatory to the European Hydrogen Backbone initiative, under which 33 infrastructure operators are developing a pan-European hydrogen transport plan. Ireland's participation in that backbone depends, in part, on having indigenous production and storage capacity to connect into it.
The Shannon Estuary is a particular focus because it combines three things: proximity to planned offshore wind generation zones, access to existing gas infrastructure that could be repurposed or extended, and a deepwater port with potential for future hydrogen export to European markets. For regional businesses and local authorities in Clare, Limerick and Kerry, the hydrogen cluster ambition represents the most significant new industrial opportunity attached to the energy transition in their areas since the wind farm development of the 2000s.
What Happens After the Call for Evidence Closes
When submissions close on 17 July 2026, the Department will analyse the evidence and use it to inform formal policy decisions on whether and how to develop a regulatory and licensing framework for hydrogen geological storage. If the evidence is broadly positive, as the preliminary research suggests it might be, the next steps would likely include a formal licensing process for geological surveys, followed by feasibility studies at the most promising sites, followed by pilot storage projects. The timeline from Call for Evidence to operational first storage facility in Ireland is realistically measured in years rather than months, but the decisions made in the July-to-December window of 2026 will set the direction for what Ireland's energy storage infrastructure looks like in the 2030s.
For energy businesses, engineering firms, research institutions and local authorities with relevant geological or infrastructure assets, the 17 July deadline for submissions is a concrete near-term action point. The Call for Evidence is a genuine invitation to shape policy, not a box-ticking exercise.
The Bottom Line
Ireland's Call for Evidence on hydrogen geological storage is a quiet but significant policy step: the formal beginning of a process to determine whether Ireland's geology can support the kind of long-duration energy storage that the country's renewable electricity ambitions will ultimately require. With submissions open until 17 July, the next month is a real opportunity for Irish industry and research to shape the energy infrastructure decisions of the next decade.
Sustainability Pulse covers climate, energy, ESG and environmental policy through an Irish lens. Subscribe to the Sustainability Pulse Briefing — every Wednesday.