Back on January 29, 2024 I posted a diary: Hydrogen - fuel of the future? There may be some changes coming. I described some of the pros and cons of using hydrogen as a non-fossil fuel and for energy storage, some ways a hydrogen economy is taking shape — and how this could all be affected by the possibility that there are extensive natural reserves of green hydrogen in the ground waiting to be found and tapped. The big item behind this discussion was a Yale Environment 360 report entitled: Natural Hydrogen: A Potential Clean Energy Source Beneath Our Feet.
The big question is — do such reserves actually exist, and what does it take to find them? The Yale article cited a spring in West Africa where hydrogen bubbling up is being collected and used to provide power for the local village where the spring is. The article describes where the hydrogen may be coming from, and how it is being created by geochemical processes. There’s a hunt underway to find reserves that can be tapped.
Well, we may have an example or two of just what people have been looking for. Ars Technica has the news:
Problems at a chromium mine in Albania traced to nearly pure hydrogen in a fault.
“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.
The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.
The mine had been producing chromite, but after workers broke through what was a fault, they started having explosions in the mine. It appears they had inadvertently tapped a hydrogen reservoir, and hydrogen was leaking into the mine,
The mine was bought by a Chinese company in 2017, and the new owners immediately sent their engineering teams to deal with explosions. They did measurements and found the hydrogen concentration in the mine’s galleries was around 1–2 percent. It only needs to be at 0.4–0.5 percent for the atmosphere to become explosive. “They also found the hydrogen was coming from the fault drilled through back in 2007. Unfortunately, one of the explosions happened when the engineering team was down there. Three or four people died,” Donzé said.
Measurements found the gas is about 84% hydrogen. (Other compounds were not listed in the article.) They estimated 200 tons were leaking out every year. The mine in Albania gave them an idea of what kind of rock formations to examine as potential hydrogen sources:
So here's the list. The first thing to look for is ophiolite, a remnant of oceanic crust formed roughly 100 million years ago that has been uplifted by tectonic changes and made part of the continental crust. In Europe, an ophiolite massif extends for over 3,000 kilometers from Turkey to Slovenia. But the rock type alone won’t cut it. “Look for specific types of ophiolite: harzburgite, dunite, and the one with the ore—chromite. I would look for places that have all three,” Donzé said.
They appear to have found another potential site in central Russia — in a mine which has also been having explosion problems. A paper describing their findings has been published in the journal Science
A quick web search has found other articles on this discovery. For those interested in more, take a look at:
These reports are all working from the same basic facts — there’s only the one scientific paper so far — but the evidence that hydrogen is out there to be found is going to spur further work on this. The Albanian discovery is probably not large enough for commercial exploitation, although it might useful for producing energy on site. It’s proof that there are at least some hydrogen deposits out there, which will help incentivize the search for others
The Yale Environment 360 article, written before the February announcement of the discovery, has several relevant points as well as more information on the overall significance of tapping hydrogen:
Geoffrey Ellis, a geoscientist at the USGS in Denver, agrees that “geoscientists have not looked for natural hydrogen in the right places with the right tools.” He and colleague Sarah Gelman will shortly publish a new modeling tool aimed at filling the gap.
Ellis’s early calculations suggest there may be something like 10 trillion tons of natural, or “geologic” hydrogen buried underground worldwide. Many reserves will be too deep or remote to tap easily — around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, for instance. But if Ellis is right, then just a small fraction could meet the world’s needs for centuries. And it could in places be tapped for less than $1,000 per ton, says Emily Yedinak of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy making it substantially cheaper than manufactured hydrogen.
And...
In recent months, prospectors have been rushing to find it — drilling for hydrogen in northeast France, Australia, Spain, Morocco, Brazil, and, in the United States, in Nebraska, Arizona, and Kansas. Even Bill Gates has joined the hydrogen rush, making a major investment in a company that is exploring for hydrogen in the Midwest.
It’s still very early in the search to find hydrogen reserves, but we now know there is at least one potential site and what to look for. It remains to be seen how many more can be found, and whether or not it can be profitable enough to support the infrastructure needed to make it commercially viable.
One more note: to head off all of the comments that hydrogen is dangerous, has low energy density, we don’t have the infrastructure to handle it, etc. etc.
1) It’s still significantly better and cleaner than fossil fuels.
2) It’s essentially ‘free’ energy ready for use once extraction, refining, and transport costs are figured in.
3) While battery storage to capture and make available power produced from clean renewable sources offers some advantages, battery materials have their own costs in resources and manufacturing, waste disposal, and the weight penalty when used in vehicles.
4) We have a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure that’s going to need to be replaced; replacing it with the functional equivalent for hydrogen would be part of the transition process that’s underway in any case.
5) Hydrogen is not just useful to provide energy, it’s also useful as a feedstock for some chemical processes and replacing fossil fuels in specialized applications like making steel and cement.
6) Hydrogen is not the magic bullet that can meet all of our needs for clean energy (what is?), but it is already playing a limited role. If there are vast green reserves that can be tapped to obtain it at a reasonable cost, it may end up playing a much larger role.
We can’t afford to ignore it.