Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-hydrogen-earth-may-hold-vast-stores-renewable-carbon-free-fuel

by onychomys • 3 years ago

98 126 3 years ago

onychomys• 3 years ago

The HN bot took "Hidden" off the front of this headline, which in this case is probably not the right call on its part. The hidden part is important!

pvg• 3 years ago

You can usually edit the title to fix this, otherwise send an email to the contact address at the bottom of the page.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

Yeah, in natural gas deposits

asimpletune• 3 years ago

Natural gas is made of carbon, no?

gerad• 3 years ago

Carbon and hydrogen. CH4 - I believe it's true that most hydrogen today comes out of natural gas deposits [1]. Also helium for that matter [2].

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...

[2] https://geology.com/articles/helium/

diggernet3• 3 years ago

Surprisingly, they are talking about actual hydrogen deposits, in one case 98% pure.

panick21_5• 3 years ago

Why this is interesting, we already have such a fuel, we found it 80 years ago and its called Thorium. And Uranium isn't bad either.

And we don't have to find it, every rare earth mine thorws out absurd amounts of it. We have to much of it without even trying.

We just to dumb and lazy to anything with it.

zopa4• 3 years ago

So many people here cheering for their preferred carbon-free energy source like it’s a sports team. It’s bizarre.

We’re going to need to do lots of different things. There’s no need to fight about it; everybody’s favorite will have a chance.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

They all require funding for more research to hopefully bring them to fruition. In that sense, it's understandable why people who have joined Team Clean X would want to push the message of how it is better than Team Clean Y.

panick21_5• 3 years ago

We’re going to need to do lots of different things. There’s no need to fight about it; everybody’s favorite will have a chance.

Actually this isn't the case. Funding choices matter. And not all technology can get funding. Hydrogen investment for the last 40 years has cost untold billions, and has led to almost nothing. Its has actually delayed real efforts in places like Japan.

Here we have an article asking for investment to find some almost mythical hydrogen that might somehow exists and if only they got money they would find it. Thorium doesn't really need that, we have mines now that produce enough of it that they basically don't know what to do with it.

hasmanean6• 3 years ago

Thorium is most abundant in India. It’s obvious why the United States will not want to push a technology that will benefit others and that it cannot dominate.

Sure there’s seawater…but that is even more difficult to control.

bloppe• 3 years ago

Is hydrogen really more renewable though? It releases energy when combined with Oxygen to make water, and it requires energy to split it from water (electrolysis). In this sense, it's not fundamentally different from fuel, which releases energy and carbon when burned, but requires energy (sunlight) and carbon (CO2) to re-create via photosynthesis. The involvement of carbon is a difference, but either way it's a 2-way street; we can't use either of them forever without reversing the process at some point.

diggernet3• 3 years ago

The article talks about how they believe natural processes are constantly refilling the reservoirs. So in this context renewable means potentially not a limited source.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

The story is about natural hydrogen produced through water-rock reactions.

This means it can be extracted 'for free' like natural gas and is naturally continually renewed.

rgmerk5• 3 years ago

Water reservoirs are naturally renewed. You’re still rate limited, as most irrigation zones around the world have found out.

sp3323• 3 years ago

The main engine of natural hydrogen production is now thought to be a set of high-temperature reactions between water and iron-rich minerals such as olivine, which dominate Earth’s mantle. One common reaction is called serpentinization, because it converts olivine into another kind of mineral called serpentinite. In the process, the iron oxidizes, grabbing oxygen atoms from water molecules and releasing hydrogen.

So we might run out of olivine at some point, but it's going to be a long time.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

But then we burn all that hydrogen and use up all our oxygen. CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, but plants pull the oxygen back off and return it to the air.

Teknoman117• 3 years ago

I imagine so. The main trouble with the biofuels is that you'd have to get everything else right for it to truly be neutral impact. (i.e. not depleting the soil, making the chemical fertilizer, reactions to convert biomass into ethanol, etc.)

Electrolyzing water with wind/solar/nuclear would seem to result in far fewer steps that could go wrong.

shadowofneptune• 3 years ago

Definitely is not renewable if you feel you need to drill for it.

MithrilTuxedo• 3 years ago

If it does, releasing it would cause the exact same problems releasing fossil fuels has caused.

sp3323• 3 years ago

There is one fewer problem, which is that burning hydrogen for fuel doesn't cause global warming.

jakzurr• 3 years ago

So maybe there's a lot, maybe there's not. One quote from the article, though, is so typical:

“We have the concept, we have the tools, the geology. … We only need people able to invest.”

troymc• 3 years ago

Another quote from the same article:

"There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America."

notorandit• 3 years ago

Carbon free is not renewable, isn't it?

Wasn't the plan for renewables?

DennisP4• 3 years ago

Does it have to be? Climate change is getting pretty urgent. Maybe we should fix that first, and then worry about the ideal solution for the next ten thousand years.

However, from the article:

natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

The title says "renewable", so yes, it has to be renewable, otherwise it is dishonest clickbait.

Also from the article:

"For Prinzhofer, the question of where natural hydrogen comes from is academic. “Maybe we are all completely wrong,” he says. “It doesn’t matter for the industry.” The oil industry sprang up long before it understood oil’s origins, he says. Similarly, what matters for the natural hydrogen industry is simply whether there is enough of the stuff to go after."

And lastly:

"No one anywhere in the world will produce hydrogen commercially anytime soon"

Not really convincing and alltogether it all sounds code, to continue drilling for gas, with the vaint hope, that some of it might be hydrogen, warranting a green label.

noselasd• 3 years ago

"These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously generate hydrogen, "

So it seems to be renewed - the next question that matters then is at what timescale and amount.

barathr• 3 years ago

I was hoping to see in the article -- but didn't -- an analysis of the CO2e per KJ produced from natural hydrogen. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and it'd be important to do the math to see how much better it is vs. other alternative fuels. (I expect it to be better, but how much is the question.)

jojobas• 3 years ago

You don't have to release it as vapor. Otherwise energy is energy and depositing it into the atmosphere raises the equilibrium liquid/vapor point.

sp3323• 3 years ago

Putting water into the air at low altitudes doesn't do much for global warming. The best way to reduce the effects of water vapor at high altitudes is... to reduce warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_v...

DennisP4• 3 years ago

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas but it's not a driver of global warming, because of rain. Total water vapor is a function of global temperature, not the other way around. Put extra water vapor in the air, and it will just rain out.

credit_guy2• 3 years ago

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas

No. Or rather, yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it has a halflife measured in days, compared to CO2, which has a halflife measured in decades. So, for all practical purposes, water vapor can be deglected when talking about global warming.

b1125• 3 years ago

water vapor can be deglected

Whyes, mossuredly!

pwg• 3 years ago

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and it'd be important to do the math to see how much better it is vs. other alternative fuels.

With about 71% of the earth's surface covered by water, which constantly emits water vapor due to evaporation, the amount of water vapor added by also burning green hydrogen would likely be minuscule compared to the amount from natural surface evaporation.

The huge advantage would be no carbon dioxide emissions from burning green hydrogen.

Schroedingersat• 3 years ago

Water vapor from combustion is dwarfed by vapor from steam generation.

If this is your concern your priority should be shutting down every thermal plant immediately.

hydrobore• 3 years ago

I thought it was a really captivating and well written article. News on hydrogen often seems to swing between too expensive to produce and its the future. Out of the blue, news in the UK this week says hydrogen will be added to the natural gas supply from 2025.

elecush• 3 years ago

I mean it's the second most abundant element in the universe.

foota• 3 years ago

Isn't it mostly in stars?

starbase• 3 years ago

In what sense is fossil hydrogen renewable?

Arrath• 3 years ago

Good question...uh.. a geological timeframe?

diggernet3• 3 years ago

"Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished, says Prinzhofer, who has consulted on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says. "

greenthrow• 3 years ago

This is a very poor quality article. Mining the earth for fuel when wind and solar are already the cheapest form of power is really stupid.

zopa4• 3 years ago

Wind and solar are a great source of electricity, but not everything is easy to electrify right now.

Also —- we have massive amounts of human and physical capital invested in digging flammable stuff out of the ground. If we can redirect some of that away from breaking the planet and into hydrogen, that’s a huge win, even if it’s not what we’d go after if we were designing our energy mix from scratch.

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

"awe have massive amounts of human and physical capital invested in digging flammable stuff out of the ground"

And look where we are.

More to the point, the companies that would do this are among the most sociopathic entities in the history of the human race. So we are going to trust that some "big hydrogen find" isn't actually methane that is gray hydrogen extracted?

For the same reason I have ZERO faith that all the schemes for carbon sequestration by pumping a GAS that WANTS TO COME TO THE SURFACE into the ground. Into likely the same formations that were fracked and had groundwater lighting on fire and other signs that there are LOTS of places for the CO2 to escape.

Sure.

To your point, these entities have decades of human capital and bribery to prevent progress on global warming, to prop themselves up with government subsidies that should 100000% be going to alternative energy instead, that avoid carbon taxes, that destabilize governments, corrupt political institutions, and likely outright atrocities in the third world. The ignore regulations, cut short safety, and paper over disasters or make other entities pay for it. Pipeline breaks, train disasters, and, in case we forgot, that little incident in the gulf.

THESE COMPANIES CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

THE HYDROGEN INDUSTRY, which is these companies, CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

This is borne out in the enormous daily quantity of press releases, watered down news articles, etc, all of which have the #1 goal of FUD to slow down the current inexorable economic victory of solar, wind, BEVs, and batteries.

No I do not care what specific industrial use they have. If hydrogen has a legitimate specific use case, guess what? It will get used for that. QUIETLY. Do I see daily articles on refinement in steel production or many other aspects in various industrial processes in HN? No.

Hydrogen? I see it every day, and it is NOT intended to inform people of some obscure industrial application. It is to desperately stall the destruction of the oil and gas global industrial complex and multinational lobby/corruption/bribe structure.

Do not trust these people, do not trust these industries, do not trust these companies, and do not trust these stories.

rgmerk5• 3 years ago

Yes, but a) we need a lot of hydrogen for chemical processes such as fertiliser making, and b) particularly in northern latitudes, there’s a mismatch between peak solar production and peak energy demand. If there was abundant cheap clean hydrogen available, it could be used to fill that gap and reduce the amount of overbuild and transmission lines you’d need.

Rimintil2• 3 years ago

I think this is important to note about hydrogen as a 'clean' fuel source:

Today’s hydrogen is “gray,” made by reacting methane with steam at high pressures or using fossil fuels in other ways. Those processes emit some 900 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, almost as much as global aviation. In principle, that carbon could be captured and sequestered underground, yielding “blue” hydrogen. But most hopes rest on “green” hydrogen—using renewable solar or wind power to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen with electrolyzers.

_Today_, it is not a clean source of energy for vehicles.

DennisP4• 3 years ago

That has very little to do with the article, which is about actual hydrogen retrievable from underground deposits. It wouldn't be made from anything, just piped out of the ground.

sigmoid10• 3 years ago

While it would still be an upgrade over fossils, I think that would be a slap in the face for renewables. We need sustainable energy production, not more digging for stuff that is limited by design.

Rimintil2• 3 years ago

That has very little to do with the article

It came from the article.

senectus13• 3 years ago

this is like saying that the knife industry is setup for murders.

your statement completely ignores the rapidly developing green hydrogen industry.

Those are TODAY sources. just because there are large number of non-clean doesn't mean the clean ones dont exist.

bryanlarsen2• 3 years ago

Green hydrogen is not a fuel source. It takes more energy to create green hydrogen than it provides as a fuel, so green hydrogen is a energy transport mechanism, not a source.

rgmerk5• 3 years ago

This is interesting, but it does strike me as a little surprising that if there’s a lot of extractable hydrogen available we haven’t had more indications of it already (yes, I read the article).

It’s worth noting here that a disadvantage of hydrogen is that unlike coal, oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas it’s hard to put it in a ship and transport it. So in a world where there’s cheap hydrogen in Mali and few other locations, it’s more likely that some hydrogen-intensive or energy-intensive industries will shift to Mali rather than Mali exporting lots of hydrogen to Europe, North America or Asia.

b1125• 3 years ago

h2 is shipped all the time, by boat, rail, road, pipeline and more. It is not hard to ship, it's easy to store and transport, this is a solved problem.

That said, obviously ... local generation is best. The same goes for oil extraction, and power production (dam or nuclear or solar or wind), local is best.

rgmerk5• 3 years ago

Bulk H2 is not currently shipped. There was considerable fanfare in 2022 when an experimental hydrogen carrier shipped hydrogen from Australia to Japan: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-first-hy...

Ammonia is routinely shipped but as I understand it the conversion process has considerable inefficiencies which would push up the cost of using it as an energy carrier to unviable levels.

fock3• 3 years ago

A second mechanism, radiolysis, may generate the rest. As radioactive elements in the crust such as uranium and thorium decay, they emit beta particles, aka helium nuclei,

What is this? Chat-GPT writing "sciency" fairytales?

hn_throwaway_992• 3 years ago

Seems a bit harsh. Uranium decays by both alpha and beta decay, so assuming the author just meant alpha particles in the quoted sentence.

fock3• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle well ...

taneq• 3 years ago

Off-by-one errors are notoriously difficult to avoid, after all ;)

uptown• 3 years ago

Worked out well for Stan Meyer.

https://youtu.be/NuH72G5qXow

FooBarBizBazz• 3 years ago

Here's an interesting talk about some of the reactions that are hypothesized to occur (albeit here in an extraterrestrial context). The speaker indicates that temperatures would need to be around 300C for these reactions to occur at an appreciable rate. Maybe that is found, deep enough in the Earth?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df8L0khbrts

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

Today's magic hydrogen story!

Please stop building cheap renewable alternative energy! Keep using fossil fuels while we wait for the hydrogen breakthrough that hasn't happened in the past 20 years but is right around the corner!

Enjoy FUD and lies from pro hydrogen lobbies and startups! Listen to mendacious exaggerations of solar panel / battery / fiberglass disposal/ bird deaths!

Listen to dismissal of fundamental entropy laws, cherry picked stats, and lies about grey and green hydrogen.

Watch handwaving over infrastructure, transportation storage and refuelling station engineering and costs.

Anyway, have we ever hit a hydrogen vein in centuries of fossil fuels exploration? Or will oil and gas just say that the methane they are extracting is hydrogen?

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

Indeed. It’s especially ridiculous since there is a much more straightforward short term solution: biofuels.

All diesel engines run on biodiesel (or almost any oil) and almost all petrol engines run on ethanol. Both can be obtained from growing a variety of plants.

mountainboy• 3 years ago

quote from article: "The Ford engine ran until its spark plugs gave out a few years ago and a newly installed fuel cell—quieter and more efficient—has not yet been hooked into the village grid. Bourakébougou is dark, waiting for a hydrogen future to arrive."

They couldn't replace a few spark plugs?

Animats2• 3 years ago

There are startups in this area, but they're kind of sketchy.[1] These people claim to have drilled a well, and are "finalizing plans to conduct an extended flow test". No numbers, though.

Desert Mountain Energy has a well that produces about 4% helium, 4% hydrogen, and the rest is mostly nitrogen. They barely mention the hydrogen. The helium is far more valuable. Separating out 4% hydrogen is possible but complicated, and requires energy input.

There's a huge industry in drilling holes deep into the ground, for water, oil, gas, sulfur, and heat. The US alone has over a million oil wells. If there was concentrated hydrogen to be found, you'd expect that more would have been found by now.

[1] https://hyterra.com/home/

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

This: "If there was concentrated hydrogen to be found, you'd expect that more would have been found by now."

That there are occasional instances of concentrated mineral hydrogen is a new concept to me, but not entirely surprising.

That there might exist hydrogen deposits rivaling the largest oil fields ever found seems ... unlikely.

Virtually all presently-exploited fossil hydrocarbon reserves were known in antiquity. I did some digging around into old books published following the Titusville, PA, a few years ago (several of these are at the Internet Archive, I need to do some digging to turn up titles). What struck me was that largely all the major US oil fields were already being described by the 1870s and 1880s: Pennsylvania and New York (the original oil boom), Texas and Louisiana, California, and further deposits in the Orinoco basin (Venezuela), Baku (Russia), and of course the middle east.

Most useful minerals derive from some geological ore- or lode-forming process. In the case of oil, that's ancient shallow sea beds, and a map of the present world's oil-bearing regions is in fact a map of ancient shallow seas and wetlands. This makes prospecting for oil far more straightforward than it might otherwise be.

And tectonic forces also come into play. The major middle east oil fields seem to have been smushed together as the African and Asian plates merged together, focusing what oil was in the region into huge and highly-concentrated regions.

(That's my interpretation based on tectonics and geography, the actual geology may differ.)

Point being that at least from the overview in the linked article, it doesn't seem that mineral hydrogen would follow similar patterns. It might be concentrated near serpentine and olivine rock formations, which Wikipedia tells me form near mid-oceanic rifts and subduction zones ... neither are particularly long-lived concentrating regions as far as I understand.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite>

The prospect (so to speak) of a mineral resource which is reasonably evenly distributed across the Earth's crust might avoid the more pernicious aspects of hydrocarbon-driven geopolitical machinations, but seems a challenge from an economic front.

Solar power is, of course, also largely evenly distributed, though with intensity decreasing at high latitudes.

Animats2• 3 years ago

Here's a map of drilling density of the world.[1] About a third of the world's land masses have been fairly well explored. In developed countries, even the unpromising areas show considerable drilling. Note the well density in Europe and Japan, areas not noted for oil reserves.

Other than in one location in Mali, nobody has found substantial deposits of hydrogen.[2][3]

The level of hype associated with this is excessive for the results obtained.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-oil-and-gas-well-d...

[2] https://hydroma.ca/about-us-our-history/

[3] https://geoscientist.online/sections/unearthed/natural-hydro...

_hypx3• 3 years ago

Should be noted that natural hydrogen was also known since antiquity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

The problem is that no one cared or knew what it was. This is not that dissimilar to petroleum itself, which was also ignored until the 19th century. Before then, it was seen as a curiosity and similarly ignored or misunderstood.

Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

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