CNN –
When two scientists set out to search for fossil fuels underground in northeastern France, they didn’t expect to discover anything that could boost efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Jacques Pironon and Phillipe De Donato, both research directors at the French National Center for Scientific Research, determined the amount of methane underground in the Lorraine mining basin using a “world-first” special probe capable of analyzing gases dissolved in the water of rock formations deep underground .
A few hundred meters deeper, the probe detected low concentrations of hydrogen. “This wasn’t really a surprise to us,” Pironon told CNN; It is common to find small amounts near the surface of a well. But the deeper the probe went, the stronger the concentration became. At a depth of 1,100 meters it was 14% and at 1,250 meters 20%.
That was surprising, said Pironon. It suggested the presence of a large hydrogen reservoir underneath. They made calculations and estimated that the deposit could contain between 6 and 250 million tons of hydrogen.
That could make it one of the largest deposits of “white hydrogen” ever discovered, Pironon said. The discovery helped stimulate the already high level of interest in the gas.
White hydrogen – also referred to as “natural,” “golden,” or “geological” hydrogen — is produced naturally or occurs in the Earth’s crust and has become something of a climate holy grail.
Hydrogen produces only water when burned, making it very attractive as a potential clean energy source for industries such as aviation, shipping and steelmaking, which require so much energy that it is almost impossible to replace it with renewables such as solar and wind cover.
Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it generally occurs in combination with other molecules. Currently, commercial hydrogen is produced using an energy-intensive process that runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
A rainbow of colors is used as an abbreviation for the different types of hydrogen. “Gray” is made from methane gas and “brown” is made from coal. “Blue” hydrogen is the same as gray, but the resulting planet-heating pollution is captured before it enters the atmosphere.
From a climate perspective, the most promising is “green” hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy to split water. Nevertheless, production remains small-scale and expensive.
For this reason, interest in white hydrogen, a potentially abundant, untapped clean-burning energy source, has surged in recent years.
“If you had asked me four years ago what I thought about natural hydrogen, I would have told you, ‘Oh, it doesn’t exist,'” said Geoffrey Ellis, a geochemist with the US Geological Survey. “Hydrogen is out there, we know it’s there,” he said, but scientists didn’t think large accumulations were possible.
Then he found out about Mali. The trigger for the current interest in white hydrogen is probably this West African country.
In 1987, in the village of Bourakébougou, a driller suffered burns after a well unexpectedly exploded because he leaned over the edge of the well while smoking a cigarette.
The well was quickly capped and abandoned until it was removed by an oil and gas company in 2011 and reportedly produced a gas that was 98% hydrogen. The hydrogen was used to power the village and more than a decade later it is still producing.
When a study about the fountain was published in 2018, it caught the attention of the scientific community, including Ellis. His first reaction was that there must be something wrong with the research, “because we just know that can’t happen.”
Then the pandemic hit and he had time to start digging. The more he read, the more it became clear to him: “We just weren’t looking for it, we weren’t looking in the right places.”
The recent discoveries are exciting for Ellis, who has worked as a petroleum geochemist since the 1980s. He witnessed the rapid growth of the shale gas industry in the United States, which revolutionized the energy market. “Now,” he said, “here we are, in what I think is probably a second revolution.”
White hydrogen is “very promising,” agreed Isabelle Moretti, a scientific researcher at the University of Pau et des Pays de l’Adour and the Sorbonne University and an expert on white hydrogen.
“Now the question is no more about the resource … but where to find large economic reserves,” she told CNN.
Dozens of the processes produce white hydrogen, but there is still some uncertainty about how large the natural hydrogen is Deposit form.
Geologists have typically focused on “serpentinization,” where water reacts with iron-rich rocks to produce hydrogen, and “radiolysis,” a radiation-induced breakdown of water molecules.
White hydrogen deposits have been found around the world, including in the USA, Eastern Europe, Russia, Australia, Oman as well as France and Mali.
Some were discovered by accident, others by searching for clues such as features in the landscape sometimes called “fairy circles” – shallow, elliptical depressions from which hydrogen can leak.
Ellis guesses There could be tens of billions of tons of white hydrogen worldwide. This would be significantly more than the 100 million tonnes of hydrogen per year currently produced and the 500 million tonnes expected to be produced annually by 2050, he said.
“Most of it will almost certainly be in very small clusters or very far offshore or just too deep to actually be economically exploited,” he said. But if just 1% could be found and produced, it would provide 500 million tons of hydrogen for 200 years, he added.
For many startups, this is a tempting prospect.
Australia-based Gold Hydrogen is currently drilling on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. She set her sights on the site after searching the state archives and discovering that several wells had been drilled there in the 1920s that had very high concentrations of hydrogen. The prospectors who were only interested in fossil fuels abandoned them.
“We’re very excited about what we’re seeing,” said managing director Neil McDonald. More testing and drilling is still needed, but the company could potentially begin early production in late 2024, he told CNN.
Some startups are seeing eye-popping investments. Koloma, a Denver-based white hydrogen startup, has secured $91 million from investors including the Bill Gates-founded investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures – although the company remains tight-lipped about where exactly it is drilling in the US and when does commercialization aim?
Another Denver-based company, Natural Hydrogen Energy, founded by geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, completed a hydrogen exploration well in Nebraska in 2019 and plans to build new wells. The world is “very close to the first commercial projects,” Zgonnik told CNN.
“Natural hydrogen is a solution that will allow us to make faster progress on climate protection,” he said.
Natural Hydrogen Energy LLC
Aerial view of Natural Hydrogen Energy’s drilling operations in Kansas.
The challenge for these companies and scientists will be to turn hypothetical promises into a commercial reality.
“There could be a period of decades where there is a lot of trial and error and false starts,” Ellis said. But speed is crucial. “If it takes us 200 years to develop the resource, it won’t really do much good.”
But many of the startups are optimistic. Some predict commercialization will take years, not decades. “We have all the necessary technology we need, with some minor changes,” Zgonnik said.
Challenges remain. In some countries, regulations represent an obstacle. Costs also need to be clarified. According to calculations based on drilling in Mali, producing white hydrogen could cost about $1 per kilogram – compared to about $6 per kilogram for green hydrogen. But white hydrogen could quickly become more expensive if large deposits require deeper drilling.
Back in the Lorraine Basin, Pironon and De Donato’s next steps are to drill to a depth of 3,000 meters to get a clearer idea of exactly how much white hydrogen is present there.
There’s still a long way to go, but it would be ironic if this region – once one of Western Europe’s top coal producers – became the epicenter of a new white hydrogen industry.