The water curtain—a successful means of preventing gas leakage from high-pressure, unlined rock caverns

In Norway, high-pressure air is stored in ten unlined rock caverns, called air cushion surge chambers. These surge chambers are characterized by pressures up to 7.7 MPa and volumes up to 110,000 m3. This paper describes the successful use of water curtains to prevent air leakage from three such caverns, even when the storage pressure head is twice the thickness of the overburden.