Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?
science.org
science.org
> 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.
It came from the article.
> Pumping hydrogen out of the ground should be much cheaper, which is why proponents sometimes call the natural stuff “gold.”
If that is the case then there could be vast quantities of hydrocarbons inside the earth.
While coal might actually come from organic matter from the Carboniferous era as you suggested, I think oil and gas may not. Hydrocarbons are the most abundant things in the solar system (the Oort Cloud might outweigh the entire solar system) and the outer planets are mostly hydrocarbons… and yet all the hydrocarbons on earth come from fossil plants?
Thomas Gold wrote a book about it. It’s fascinating reading. Here is a review.
You’re rejecting an empirical and tested field of science because of a single incident?
In any case it was not a single incident. They torpedoed his career and made it impossible for him to get a position at any university. Inbred hacks.
One correction: he didn’t commit suicide but died on an expedition to Greenland.
https://medium.com/swlh/the-delirious-ravings-of-alfred-wege...
As always it’s the political will that’s lacking.
2 FeSiO3 + H2O >> H2 + Fe2O3 + SiO2
As I understand it, this is a "low-pressure" reaction. The FeSiO3 regeneration happens when iron (III) oxide sinks deep into the crust and reacts with silicates, releasing oxygen. I'm not clear on the specifics, but the ultimate energy source is (necessarily) plate tectonics, driven by the decay of uranium, potassium-40 and thorium in the deep Earth. The gross power driving tectonic forces (total underground radioactivity) is estimated with decent confidence at around 30 terawatts; this exceeds humanity's total energy consumption by a small factor (around 2–3), and probably only a fraction of this energy is converted to hydrogen.
So using Brian Cohen's definition [1], I'm not sure geohydrogen is truly "renewable" at world scale, but it's renewed at some scale.
1: http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
More strongly, even if plate tectonics were needed, it doesn’t necessarily take anywhere near 1 TW of power to move enough material to produce 1 TW worth of useful stuff. The energy in question here is chemical, not kinetic.
Where do you think the resources for renewable energy come from? Windmills and solar panels don't come out of thin air.
"No more digging stuff" shows such a disconnected view from reality. Everything is "limited" in some sense. The puritan attitude as if you can somehow avoid using resources, is just wrong. And oil is hardly the most scarce resource that's at the biggest risk of running out right now.
Also, recycling existing renewable resources is another way that Vestas, the largest wind turbine provider, is attempting to pull windmills "out of thin air."[2]
Maybe the way we draw energy will never be perfect but does that mean we shouldn't try?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-iron-air-ba... [2] https://newatlas.com/environment/vestas-cetec-circular-epoxy...
Yes they both run out, but one will run out in the 21st century and the other will run out in the 210th century.
Solar and wind power are extremely inefficient in the most scarce resource. Oil can be cheaply moved from far off locations to locations with scarce space.
That's how today's society developed, except with the side effect that we've also released a large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
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.
Hydrogen has many industrial applications in processes such as oil refining and steel making. But ammonia production is by far the biggest single consumer, using around 50 per cent of global hydrogen production.
Ammonia itself also has many uses, including as a feedstock in the production of nitrogen fertilisers for farming.
But making ammonia releases around 500 million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, or 1.8 per cent of global emissions.
If you're interested in where they're planning to go, see (for starting points):
https://www.fool.com.au/2022/12/09/will-fortescues-green-hyd...
https://ffi.com.au/technology/green-hydrogen/
https://arena.gov.au/blog/fortescue-plans-massive-hydrogen-e...
etc. (there are multiple capital projects on the go ATM)
And as you said, energy storage is a crucial part of decarbonization.
Most of our energy sources are just stored solar energy that would otherwise have gone to waste. The idea with green hydrogen is the same, create hydrogen from energy that would otherwise go to waste.
One can argue that hydrogen isn't the most efficient storage mechanism, but I don't understand why it should be dismissed as a source separately from all other storage mechanisms.
Green Hydrogen is just as much a fuel source as Gasoline is. Do you think it takes no energy to mine, refine and transport gasoline?
It might not fit in your current view of the world where the cost of our environment is zero sum to you, but that cost MUST be factored into it.
The fact that these systems often burn their own fuel as power while exporting a premium should show that yes, extracting and producing oil and gas is net energy contributing in a way green hydrogen is not.
The important point is whether or not the energy used to create it was "free". From a human perspective, the energy that was spent creating oil was "free". But if you have an intermittent surplus of renewable power and use it to create green hydrogen it is also "free".
This ignores every competing method of energy storage.
“We have the concept, we have the tools, the geology. … We only need people able to invest.”
"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."
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.
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.
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...
One of those books BTW: Abraham Gesner, A practical treatise on coal, petroleum, and other distilled oils.
<https://archive.org/details/apracticaltreat01unkngoog>
As the opening pages note, naturally occurring freely-flowing seeps of tars and oils were well known throughout history.
For holes-in-the-ground blowing pure hydrogen ... we've one extant example that powered a Ford for a few years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure it is. Just because it ships with other things, eg railcar size but on ship, doesn't invalidate this truth.
It is a solved thing, it is not complex, it is merely that we haven't needed whole tanker shipping yet.
There's no doubt we can do it if money is no object; whether we can do so at scale cheaply enough to be worth doing is another question entirely.
If we can do that cost effectively, h2 shipping at immense volume is trivial.
So we might run out of olivine at some point, but it's going to be a long time.
The entire history of industrial civilization has added 140 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere. For CO2, that's too much. But Oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere, or 210,000 parts per million. I think we'll be ok for a while.
Unfortunately, insects and fungi are just as good at eating plant matter and exhaling the CO₂ back again (aided somewhat by fires) so it goes right back in to the air again.
Sure, but they DO reduce the level over time and they also grow faster with the higher concentration. The CO increase is less than all the CO2 we've produced with industry.
It's not ok to say there is 21 percent oxygen and this proposed process won't put a dent in it. One might have thought that about burning hydrocarbons. The question of how long can we "burn rocks" still stands. Is it 10k years or 10M or something else?
I'm moderately interested in how much hydrogen we could burn without noticeably adding to sea-level rise. Probably quite a bit.
Electrolyzing water with wind/solar/nuclear would seem to result in far fewer steps that could go wrong.
This means it can be extracted 'for free' like natural gas and is naturally continually renewed.
What is this? Chat-GPT writing "sciency" fairytales?
Yes, exactly my point, alpha particles are helium nuclei, so I'm assuming that's what the author meant and simply made a mistake highlighting the beta decay of uranium instead of the alpha particles it emits.
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.
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.
Whyes, mossuredly!
If this is your concern your priority should be shutting down every thermal plant immediately.
Wasn't the plan for renewables?
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
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.
So it seems to be renewed - the next question that matters then is at what timescale and amount.
They couldn't replace a few spark plugs?
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?
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.
[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d also be interested to hear roughly how much public funding you think is implied by the article. My takeaway was that it suggested: 1) some geological surveys, 2) maybe some regulatory fixes, 3) a bunch of private investment. All of which are the next thing to free by government standards.
You seem to make the mistake to believe that government funding and government planning in regards to energy is rational and focused on finding the long term best solution.
... but it isn't.
If they don't want much government investment I don't have a problem with them trying.
But in general, historically the whole concept of a hydrogen economy has consumed huge amounts of government money with very little to show for it.
In terms of research, sure, research a whole bunch of stuff, that's good.
At some point however you have to rationally look at the problem and come up with a comprehensive solution. At that point the 'yes, and' mentality hurts as much as it helps.
French historical example is interesting here. When they did their nuclear program in the 70/80s they didn't say 'yes, and' they picked basically 1 type of reactor and simply mass produced it. Within 20 years the mostly solved the green electricity problem (without even trying). Its the opposite of 'yes, and', its analyzing the problem, creating a plan and executing that plan.
Very big countries like the US and China will have a much more 'yes, and' approach simply because they are so much bigger, with so much more people and so much more demand that they can actually do that.
Sure there’s seawater…but that is even more difficult to control.