Storage and fuel supply covers systems that store energy and supply fuels to the domestic energy system, including utility-scale batteries, hydrogen production and storage, LNG regasification terminals, strategic reserves, fuel depots, gas distribution networks and retail fuel and charging points.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Storage & Fuel Supply as it stands today.
In what is now southwest China, workers drilled deep brine wells and carried the natural gas that rose with the brine through bamboo pipelines to boil the water down, one of the earliest documented uses of piped natural gas as a fuel.
Producers and refiners agreed a common measure for the wooden barrels used to move and store crude oil, ending disputes over inconsistent container sizes and giving the young industry a unit still used to price oil today.
Large hydropower dams have served as energy storage sites for more than a hundred years, making hydropower the most widely adopted form of mechanical energy storage. This established bulk storage as a mature grid capability long before batteries.
A depleted gas field in Welland County, Ontario, was converted into an underground store, using the reservoir's natural trap to hold gas for withdrawal in winter, a technique later adopted for seasonal storage worldwide.
The converted cargo vessel carried liquefied natural gas from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Canvey Island in the United Kingdom, proving that gas could be shipped safely across oceans rather than moved only by pipeline.
Liquefied gas shipped from Arzew to Canvey Island in the United Kingdom demonstrated that natural gas could be cooled, transported by sea and regasified at commercial scale, founding an industry that later became central to global energy security.
Established by industrialised oil-importing countries within the OECD in response to the embargo, the new agency made a minimum strategic stockpile, equivalent to 90 days of net imports, a condition of membership.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act created a government-owned emergency stockpile of crude oil in Gulf Coast salt caverns, a direct response to the supply cuts and price spikes of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
The new cabinet department consolidated federal responsibility for energy policy, including management of the emerging strategic petroleum reserve, after the price shocks and fuel shortages of the 1970s exposed fragmented oversight.
The Japanese company's rechargeable cell, developed from research reaching back to the 1970s, became the base technology for the electrochemical storage that later scaled from consumer electronics into grid-connected power plants.
EPRI found PSH accounted for more than 99 per cent of bulk storage capacity worldwide, around 127,000 MW. This documented the overwhelming dominance of pumped hydro in grid-scale storage.
New provincial mandates paired large solar and wind projects with mandatory storage, and falling battery prices made standalone storage plants commercially viable even without a mandate, extending a build-out that dwarfed additions elsewhere.
State-linked developers awarded contracts for several gigawatt-hours of standalone storage under the national renewable energy programme, intended to let the kingdom burn less crude domestically and free more oil for export.
Brussels relaxed the rigid 1 November 90 per cent deadline introduced after the loss of Russian pipeline gas, allowing a more flexible filling trajectory after two winters in which the rule was blamed for summer price spikes.
New Delhi widened a subsidy scheme designed to close the cost gap between battery storage and conventional peaking power, part of an effort to pair the country's fast-growing solar fleet with capacity dispatchable after sunset.
Russian missile and drone attacks through the winter targeted underground gas storage in the west of the country, some of it holding gas owned by European trading firms, forcing greater reliance on storage capacity leased in neighbouring EU states.
The grid-scale battery, among the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, was built to absorb shocks on the state's transmission network and allow more renewable generation to run without triggering stability constraints.
State reserve managers added underground and tank storage capacity and opportunistically filled it with sanctioned Russian and Iranian crude bought at a discount, pushing reserve cover further above the minimum industry norm.
Buyers in both countries signed or extended long-term offtake agreements with suppliers in the United States, Qatar and Australia, and added onshore storage capacity, seeking greater security of winter supply after years of tight Asian spot markets.
The Department of Energy issued repeated solicitations to repurchase crude for the reserve whenever prices fell within its target range, a slow rebuild after the largest drawdown in the reserve's history.
Work restarted on one of Africa's largest liquefied natural gas developments after a multi-year suspension following a 2021 insurgent attack in Cabo Delgado, with security conditions judged sufficiently improved to remobilise contractors.
Falling battery costs and growing shares of variable wind and solar generation turned standalone battery plants from a niche application into a standard tool for balancing electricity grids worldwide, led initially by China, the United States and Australia.