https://newatlas.com/energy/geologic-hydrogen-gold-rush/
There's enough natural hydrogen trapped underground to meet all projected demands for hundreds of years. An unpublished report by the US Geological Survey identifies it as a new primary resource, and fires the starter pistol on a new gold rush.
The "black gold" oil rush in the US started in 1859, when one Edwin Drake drove a stake into the Pennsylvania soil and oil started flowing out. The gold hydrogen rush may have a similar moment to point back to; in 1987, as one Mamadou Ngulo Konaré tells the story, well diggers gave up on a 108-m (354-ft) deep dry borehole, but he and other villagers in Bourakébougou, Mali, noticed that wind was blowing out of it. When one of the drillers looked in, smoking a cigarette, it blew up in his face, causing severe burns as well as a huge fire.
That fire, as Science quoted Konaré, burned "like blue sparking water, and did not have black smoke pollution. The color of the fire at night was like shining gold." It took weeks to put the fire out and plug the hole, but subsequent analysis showed the gas coming out was 98% pure hydrogen. Celebratory mangos were served. Some years later, a little 30 kW Ford generator was hooked up, and Bourakébougou became the first village in the world to enjoy the benefits of clean, naturally occuring hydrogen as a green energy source.
...
Either way, the situation has now changed, big time. Geoffrey Ellis, of the US Geological Survey, has been investigating the global potential of geo-locked "gold" hydrogen as a new primary resource. In a Denver meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he previewed the results of an as-yet unpublished study, according to the Financial Times.In short, there are as many as 5.5 trillion tons of hydrogen in underground reservoirs worldwide. It may have been generated by the interaction of certain iron-rich minerals with subterranean water. In some cases, it may be mixed in with other gases such as methane, from which it would need to be separated. But it's there, in such extraordinary quantities that analysts are expecting a gold hydrogen rush at a global scale.
It may not be super easy to get to: "Most hydrogen is likely inaccessible," Ellis told the Financial Times. "But a few per cent recovery would still supply all projected demand – 500 million tonnes a year – for hundreds of years."
Gold hydrogen won't won't hog renewable energy like electrolyzers, or divert it away from other decarbonization opportunities. In that sense, you could argue it'll have the potential to be significantly greener than green hydrogen. On the other hand, if tapping it releases methane into the atmosphere, that's a serious issue; methane is around 85 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 28, @10:44AM (16 children)
Burning this underground free hydrogen in large scale definitely will remove oxygen from atmosphere, adding itself to sea levels at the same time.
Not sure if this is what you want.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday February 28, @11:12AM (9 children)
It is strange that you ignore the oxygen that will be used up when burning fossil fuels, the by-products of which are far more harmful to people. Or do you think that this is trivial?
The by-products of hydrogen fuel are far less harmful to us. Burning hydrogen will also create potable water which some parts of the world desperately need both to support human life and the successful cultivation of enough food to feed everyone. As TFS states this will also provide power in areas that currently have very little.
Of course, the oxygen in the atmosphere is continually being replaced. Perhaps if we stop cutting down the trees that we have (and need!) there will be an acceptable balance to be found.
TFS does not provide all the answers. But it shows that there is fuel aplenty if we use it wisely, but more research and development is needed before we have a practical exploitable system.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 28, @12:01PM (1 child)
That is not strange. Oxygen burned from fossil fuels (carbohydrates) into CO2 can be easily recycled by plants, as usual in famous planetary reproduction cycle.
Water just stays water and its consumed oxygen stays consumed. And we already know what industrial metrics are capable of.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @12:56PM
Total mass of Earth's atmosphere: 5.5 quadrillion tons
Oxygen content: 21% -> 1150 trillion tons of atmospheric oxygen
Water content by mass: 2 parts Hydrogen, 16 parts Oxygen
For every ton of hydrogen burned, 8 tons of atmospheric oxygen will be converted to water
USGS estimate for hydrogen extraction rate: 500 million tons per year, burned would use 4 billion tons of atmospheric oxygen per year
4 / 1150000 = 0.000003478 or 0.0003478% of atmospheric oxygen consumption per year, or 287 years to consume 0.1% of current atmospheric oxygen.
Oxygen contained in crust in compounds such as iron oxide, calcium carbonate, etc.: Significant.
My vote: we start burning the hydrogen, which will be mostly capturing oxygen rereleased by photosynthesis from the 50 years of extremely high hydrocarbon burning of the last 50 years, and study the problem for the next 50 years before freaking out about it.
Challenges: if we don't burn the hydrogen very near the points of extraction, it will start accumulating in the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, altering the chemistry of the strato/mesosphere and continuing our warming woes.
https://www.edf.org/blog/2022/03/07/hydrogen-climate-solution-leaks-must-be-tackled [edf.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @03:09PM (4 children)
This is fantasy. The water which comes out of a hydrogen-burning engine is not going to be potable, for the exact same reasons that the water which comes out of a dehumidifier is not potable (ever noticed that dehumidifiers are plastered with warnings that say don't drink the water?). This technology will not do anything to solve drinking water shortages in poor areas because the problem in these areas is not the lack of access to water, it is the lack of access access to safe water.
And with respect to agriculture, which currently makes up around half of all the world's water usage (with most of the rest being industrial uses), this is not going to produce water in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever.
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Wednesday February 28, @03:37PM (3 children)
It is a lot easier to purify water that you have than to have no water at all.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @03:47PM (2 children)
If the people who currently do not have good access to safe water had the resources to do proper water treatment, then the problem of access to safe drinking water is already solved.
Giving poor people more sources of dangerous-to-drink water doesn't help anyone at all. Basically everyone alive has reasonably easy access to dangerous-to-drink water. This is simply not a problem that needs solving.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Wednesday February 28, @06:00PM (1 child)
One of the things that is needed to keep a water supply flowing through a purification system is a pump. If they are using hydrogen to generate power then they can use some of that power to drive the pump and the purification plant. It isn't a problem where YOU live, but for many people just getting enough water to drink IS a problem.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 29, @01:56PM
I kinda feel, if they're doing that, then they're doing it wrong on several levels. Hydrogen is a poor means to store or transport energy. Even generating energy on site via hydrogen is pretty iffy. Much like methane, there are limited reasons to use hydrogen on site - the locations are typically remote and often don't generate enough power to justify moving the power elsewhere (as electricity).
One possibility is using hydrogen as a carbon substitute in steel and aluminum production (at a glance [woodmac.com], they combined to contribute over 10% of all CO2 equivalent emissions in 2020 (4 Gt of 35 Gt CO2 equiv)).
Another is to convert it to easy to burn hydrocarbons like methane or long chains like octane. That also would increase energy storage capacity and reduce leakage. There is significant energy consumption because turning hydrogen+CO2 into methane or other is an endothermic reaction, but it's about a sixth of the energy content of the resulting fuel (165 kJ per mole for Sabatier reaction versus ~920 kJ per mole of methane). Again the green draw here would be fossil fuel displacement.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 28, @09:07PM (1 child)
The only issue with burning H2 is stoichiometrically it'll burn hot enough to fix nitrogen, actually worse than with regular fossil fuels. You'll need a somewhat larger/better catalytic converter on a car engine that burns H2, but it'll be roughly the same cat technology as a gasoline-burning engine.
WRT to sulfur output it'll be cleaner. WRT nitrogen compound output it'll be worse. Carbon output doesn't matter it's only relevant to financial scams. It's roughly a wash.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @10:07PM
>Unlike most fuels, hydrogen does not produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) when burned: instead, it yields water.
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/hydrogen#:~:text=Unlike%20most%20fuels%2C%20hydrogen%20does,different%20parts%20of%20our%20economy. [mit.edu]
>The only issue with burning H2 is stoichiometrically it'll burn hot enough to fix nitrogen, actually worse than with regular fossil fuels.
In a 10:1 compression ratio engine, maybe. I'm willing to bet that there are economically viable processes which can burn the hydrogen in atmosphere to produce electricity, starting with steam turbines.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @11:25AM
The number mentioned -- 500 million ton, or about 10^11 litres water -- is pretty negligible: at any point in time, there's about 10^16 litres water vapor present in the atmosphere, i.e. 1 part per 100,000. Do note though that the number mentioned is for the current use of hydrogen in industry, i.e. that number does not take into account hydrogen-fueled traffic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @01:00PM (4 children)
Estimates of 500 million tons of hydrogen extraction per year translate to 4.5 billion tons of clean fresh water per year at the points of burning - that's not a bad thing....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @03:39PM (3 children)
The world currently uses more than 4 trillion tonnes of fresh water per year. So even if you can somehow recover 100% of the water produced by this process (you can't), this is equivalent to reducing water usage by one tenth of one percent. It is a totally irrelevant amount of water and (perhaps outside of a few niche applications) will simply not be worthwhile to build the infrastructure needed to collect it
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @05:25PM (2 children)
I agree, it's a "trivial" amount of water, until your hydrogen vent is located in a desert. Somewhere with little rain could benefit from running the product of combustion through a condenser...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @07:30PM (1 child)
Using the hydrogen to power a tanker truck carrying water will give you orders of magnitude more water than you can possibly hope to recover from the combustion. If someone's running a hydrogen extraction operation in the middle of the desert with literally no other sources of water, they probably have to build a road first to get equipment and personnel in and out. Even if there is no way to drive a tanker truck in, airlifting the water is probably still more cost effective.
Sure, in extremely specific niche applications it is probably possible to find some uses for the water generated by hydrogen fuel that make economic sense. It will not be normal, just like it is not normal to collect the water that results from burning hydrocarbon fuels today.
For a real-world example of such a niche application, the Apollo CSM did use the water produced by its hydrogen fuel cells (this also turned out to be a bit of a problem once [wikipedia.org]).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @10:00PM
>they probably have to build a road first to get equipment and personnel in and out
That's pretty normal and routinely done for oil wellheads the world over for a century now.
>If someone's running a hydrogen extraction operation in the middle of the desert with literally no other sources of water
Or just a shortage of water, like the local population is already stretching it thin and the new crew to run the generator station will make it worse, except they won't because they'll be making all the water _they_ need for people to maintain the power station, plus surplus for the locals.
>Even if there is no way to drive a tanker truck in, airlifting the water is probably still more cost effective.
If you can put it in bottles with tropical island branding on them, you can literally profit after shipping it worldwide - to certain sucker-markets. Not that that's a good idea, but it has been done for decades.
>It will not be normal, just like it is not normal to collect the water that results from burning hydrocarbon fuels today.
Except: hydrocarbons and soot aren't great in your drinking water. Control the combustion of H and O and you do get a clean product without fussy filtering / purification.
https://www.anl.gov/article/six-things-you-might-not-know-about-hydrogen [anl.gov]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @11:11AM
The US Geological Survey concerning hydrogen was already finished (and known about) in Spring 2023, and came about due to increasing interest in natural hydrogen -- a key paper in the field was published in 2018, and a review [sciencedirect.com] of the science in 2020. One of the things the survey establishes are the criteria for geological hydrogen production -- from the top of myy mind, a water temperature of several hundred degrees Celsius, iron-containing rock, and a hydrogen-blocking cap on top of that. Preliminary (theoretical) determination of such locations looked (very) promising. (I'll have to consult my local library to find the exact references.)
Anyway, here are the slides of a presentation [energy.gov] made by the lead scientist for the USGS survey in October 2023, and here is another presentation [aapg.org] of January this year. If I remember correctly, petroleum companies are very interested in this (see e.g. the last linked presentation).
(Score: 4, Informative) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @11:47AM
Thought someone might be interested in an overview of geological (aka 'natural') hydrogen [energy.gov] exploration techniques developed by ARPA-E [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 28, @03:09PM (12 children)
It now would seem that Helium may be quite a bit more scarce than Hydrogen.
So how about Hydrogen filled balloons for office parties.
Or a singing chicken bringing a huge bundle of balloons to your door for your birthday.
On another topic, would Hydrogen vehicles be lighter wait than EVs ?
People who think Republicans wouldn't dare destroy Social Security or Medicare should ask women about Roe v Wade.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @03:28PM (1 child)
Since the Toyota Mirai exists this question is reasonably straightfoward to answer: no.
According to Wikipedia, the Mirai (both versions) has a curb weight of about 1.9 tonnes [wikipedia.org]. This is more than basically every battery-electric vehicle of a similar size to the Mirai.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @06:47PM
That is only 300 kg more than my Diesel Alfa 156. In contrast, the Tesla Model S, 2020 model, has a curb weight of 2,241 kg -- or 300+ kg more than the Toyota Mirai, and 600 kg more than my 156. The 2023 Tesla Model X weights even more, at 2,550 kg curb weight.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @04:26PM (4 children)
> On another topic, would Hydrogen vehicles be lighter wait than EVs ?
Not necessarily, but you won't have to weight for them to charge.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday February 28, @05:18PM
EV charging needs a serious wait loss program.
People who think Republicans wouldn't dare destroy Social Security or Medicare should ask women about Roe v Wade.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @05:35PM (2 children)
Most "practical" hydrogen storage and retrieval methods developed for vehicles involve absorption and release beds for the gas. If you try to treat it like CNG or LP it will have tremendous leakage, which is itself an environmental problem even if you can afford the loss in a short term economic analysis.
Keeping the universe's smallest, lightest molecule contained in gaseous form is actually quite a challenge. If you go for LH2, that requires a temperature of 20K or less which is quite a challenge to both achieve and insulate / maintain in a 300K environment.
LN2 "only" requires 77K or less. Early MRI magnets operated on LH2, getting the superconductors to work at LN2 temperatures dropped the cost of operation tremendously.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @06:55PM (1 child)
Could you perhaps point to more information about those absorption and release beds? Here is a map [h2.live] of hydrogen fuel stations in Germany and Europe (170 opened, 45 in various stages of implementation); these apparently use what's called LOHC technology (scroll down to linky 08 Information about the LOHC Technology), which seems to be a variant of what you're mentioning.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @07:58PM
It has been a while (almost 30 years for this article) I hope they've advanced since then:
https://www.just-auto.com/features/the-hydrogen-promise-of-mazdas-rotary-engine/ [just-auto.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @06:30PM (3 children)
> would Hydrogen vehicles be lighter wait than EVs ?
Depends -- are you restricting to fuel cell electric vehicles? ICE Hydrogen is also possible, the fuel tanks weigh more, but not nearly as much as current large BEV batteries. The rest of the engine/powertrain is likely about the same as a normal gasoline car.
As noted elsewhere, storing Hydrogen is troublesome, so this could be best for high usage cases where the tank(s) on the vehicle are filled frequently. If you leave a Hydrogen car at the airport parking lot for a few weeks there may not be much H2 left...
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday February 28, @07:03PM (2 children)
This is a canard. There are 1,600 miles of hydrogen pipeline [energy.gov] in the United States alone and, if they are about the same age as the ones in Europe, a lot of that mileage was constructed in the 50s and 60s. Apparently it is not even that hard to convert existing natural gas pipelines for hydrogen transport, through means of a polyester film on the inside (Europe), while you guys in the US are thinking towards fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) pipelines (for new pipelines).
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @09:57PM
> This is a canard.
May I politely suggest that *you* are a canard as well? Comparing pipelines that are built once and stay in place is a far different problem than a tank designed for a vehicle.
First off, natural gas pipelines that I'm aware of operate at a pressure ranging from 30 to 200 bar. The big G tells me that, "The carbon fibre-reinforced plastic tanks store the hydrogen [in Toyota MIRAI] at a pressure of 700 bar". There are plenty of other differences in these two use cases as well--comparing oranges and apples is rarely successful.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 28, @10:15PM
Pipelines leak, it's one of their primary attributes.
Non-leaking hydrogen pipelines across miles will be expensive to construct and maintain - far more expensive than current oil pipelines.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 28, @09:10PM
Funny you should mention that, my immediate first guess about the 2% from "98% pure hydrogen" was it's probably helium.
Lots of helium comes from natgas production so I was guessing it might show up in similar h2 production sites.
I would imagine the H2 sources are so rare as to be a tiny decimal place in global energy use yet global energy use is so huge that even a tiny decimal place is still billions of dollars. So it likely won't change our lives but it'll make some people very rich.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @06:33PM (1 child)
With all this H2 about to come on the market, I hope someone is keeping track of the deuterium and tritium content--maybe some sources will have more of these useful isotopes?
Useful for fusion (still 20 years away?) but I think they are also used for other sorts of things, maybe nuclear medicine?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, @07:42PM
Tritium does not exist naturally anywhere on the planet. All of the tritium on Earth was produced in nuclear reactors.
Deuterium is easy enough to come by, making up about 0.02% of all hydrogen in the oceans (and can be separated fairly easily by fractional distillation of the water).
(Score: 2) by Zoot on Thursday February 29, @03:46AM
The funny thing is that in the energy world, practically the first thing out of someone's mouth when you ask about Hydrogen as a fuel/energy source has always been: "Hydrogen is an energy transport medium, not an energy source, because there are no Hydrogen wells to get it from, so you have to use some other energy source to liberate it from water etc."
(Score: 2) by Username on Thursday February 29, @10:16AM (1 child)
So they're making a come back?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 29, @01:55PM
Yes in the past zeppelins could go places and nowadays weather forecasts are better. But there are only a few things they do better than ships, planes, trains, trucks/buses and helicopters.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday February 29, @05:46PM
Hydrogen appears to be a strong indirect greenhouse gas, by stabilising methane in the atmosphere and creating tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapour.
The climate impact of hydrogen is about 34 times higher than CO2 when measured over a 20-year period, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. Looking at the impact over 100 years, the global warming potential reduces to between eight and 13 times.
There is hence a need to effectively monitor hydrogen leakage, especially considering what happened with methane: until quite recently, nobody really bothered to look into methane leakage associated with oil and gas exploration. According to the Environmental Defense Fund though, around half of global methane gas leaks could have been avoided at no cost because selling the gas would have recovered the cost of intervention.
Source here [euractiv.com].
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday February 29, @11:36PM
I'm curious if this H2 contains an appreciable amount of He. It'd be a shame to throw it away like we did with the Natural Gas boom.