McDermott International Ltd. has been awarded a front-end engineering design contract from Hydrostor Incorporated for the Silver City Energy Storage project located in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. Under the contract scope, McDermott will provide the full suite of FEED services for a 200MW advanced compressed air energy storage facility that can provide up to eight hours of energy discharge at a time. The award follows the successful completion of pre-FEED services by io consulting, a McDermott joint venture, who will continue to contribute during the FEED phase.

McDermott will also leverage its storage business, CB&I, to determine the best thermal liquid storage solution. This approach aligns with Hydrostor's strategy to harness renewable energy and storage technology. Silver City is being developed using Hydrostor's unique A-CAES technology for energy storage that provides equivalent reliability, scale, duration and operating life as pumped hydro storage.

It also offers greater flexibility and reduces water use by up to ten times and land use by twenty times. Work on the project will be executed by McDermott's teams in The Hague, the Netherlands; Brno, Czech Republic; and Perth, Australia.