“Geological hydrogen deposits may point to an inexhaustible resource.”
That’s the heading on an extensive article by one of the world’s leading media organisations, as the potential of natural hydrogen goes truly mainstream.
Reuters Events, a division of world media leader Thomson Reuters, is the latest to turn its focus to natural hydrogen.
In a series of articles, it said that in recent years “reservoirs have been discovered in the United States, Canada, Finland, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil, Oman, Turkey, and Mali”.
The articles take a substantial look at how hydrogen is forming in various ways underground, and most importantly highlight growing beliefs that it is a renewable resource.
It quoted the CEO and founder of Natural Hydrogen Energy (NH2E), Viacheslav Zgonnik: “White hydrogen is a renewable source of clean energy continuously generated in the Earth through natural, inexhaustible processes.”
The company holds exploratory drilling permits in the US, and he said available data suggested an estimate of some 23 million tons of hydrogen could be extracted a year from the ground. “That is likely a deep underestimation of the real potential,” the article said.
The articles highlighted the projects of Helios Aragon, established in 2018 and owning gas exploration permits in the north of Spain covering around 220,000 acres; and the best documented find of natural hydrogen in Mali, which is already powering a town there.
“Similar digs in France, by La Française d’Énergie, and Australia, by Gold Hydrogen, point to how lucrative striking hydrogen is expected to be,” the article said.
A second article said the reserves of natural hydrogen were potentially massive.
A research geologist at Central Energy Resources Science Center for the U.S. Geological Survey, Geoffrey Ellis, said: “The range of uncertainties are very large, from maybe thousands of megatons to billions of megatons … if you focus on the median value, it is in the order of tens of millions of megatons, and we tried to be conservative in the inputs that we used within a range of values that seemed reasonable.
“The estimate right now is that, by the year 2050, they think that demand for hydrogen globally is going to be around 500 megatons per year. If we had 10 million megatons in the subsurface and we could just find 1% of that, and that 1% was shallow enough and findable, and we could produce that economically, that would meet all of those 500 megatons per year for 200 years,” he says.
The articles can be found here:
Geological hydrogen deposits may point to an inexhaustible resource
Startups race to strike hydrogen gold
Also worth a read is this piece about how the US is grappling to understand how climate-friendly manmade hydrogen, so-called green hydrogen sourced from solar and wind farms, really is.
Meanwhile, the uses for natural hydrogen continue to mount up, with a gas-powered Toyota Hilux in development. (Story is behind the Times’ paywall).