Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?(science.org)

98 pointsby onychomys3 tahun yang lalu126 comments

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

136 comments

Rimintil3 tahun yang lalu

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.

DennisP3 tahun yang lalu

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.

Rimintil3 tahun yang lalu

> That has very little to do with the article

It came from the article.

rcme3 tahun yang lalu

Yea, but that wasn't the point of the article.

> Pumping hydrogen out of the ground should be much cheaper, which is why proponents sometimes call the natural stuff “gold.”

sigmoid103 tahun yang lalu

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.

chmod6003 tahun yang lalu

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

The idea that oil and gas come from decaying organic matter is the prevailing theory in the west but some people including Thomas Gold had the idea that they come from the primordial material the earth is made of, and seep up to the crust.

If that is the case then there could be vast quantities of hydrocarbons inside the earth.

https://youtu.be/lr42BP3wvOw

MarkusQ3 tahun yang lalu

It's the prevailing theory because there's so much evidence for it. We have good models for how it works, they are predictive, we find deposits at various stages in the process, we find fossils of the expected sort throughout coal fields, we find other bio-markers, isotope ratios, as we would expect, etc. We even know why the bulk of the deposits formed when they did -- after plants had evolved cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin but before fungi had evolved the ability to digest these molecules.

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

A whole lot of evidence=a lot of hysterisis. That evidence may have been misinterpreted to support a wrong theory.

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.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1701266114

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

Somehow I find geologists unconvincing ever since they drove poor Wegener to suicide.

JumpCrisscross3 tahun yang lalu

> I find geologists unconvincing ever since they drove poor Wegener to suicide

You’re rejecting an empirical and tested field of science because of a single incident?

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

I really should put a satire label on that comment.

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...

stuaxo3 tahun yang lalu

The problem isn't that we will run out of hydrocarbons - we already have enough known reserves to make the earth uninhabitable to us.

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

If we can green Mars, surely we can think of a way to green the Sahara.

As always it’s the political will that’s lacking.

cafard3 tahun yang lalu

We can green Mars? I hadn't heard.

scythe3 tahun yang lalu

In principle, hydrogen is produced underground when iron (II) silicate reacts with water:

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/...

amluto3 tahun yang lalu

I think it’s renewable in a somewhat weaker sense: there is a lot of iron (II) (and perhaps other minerals that can also reduce water) in the crust, and there is a lot of water, and water percolates and finds these minerals at a rate that may produce hydrogen continuously at a sufficient rate for humanity.

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.

machina_ex_deus3 tahun yang lalu

Well then, why don't we stop digging for lithium for the batteries, rare earth minerals for all electronics, metals etc.

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.

troyvit3 tahun yang lalu

A lot of organizations _do_ want to stop digging for lithium for the batteries.[1] Forward thinkers see Lithium (and other rare earth minerals) as a stop-gap to get us off of the more destructive technologies we've been relying on. Yeah yeah we'll always have to do a little digging, but that doesn't mean we can't try to minimize it.[1]

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...

flangola73 tahun yang lalu

1 pound of resources used to build a solar panel will provide power for years or decades. 1 pound of gasoline might provide power for 30 minutes.

Yes they both run out, but one will run out in the 21st century and the other will run out in the 210th century.

machina_ex_deus3 tahun yang lalu

The most limited resources aren't what we pull from the ground. Space is the most limited resource, especially in areas crowded with people. Just look at real estate prices compared to oil. It's negligible.

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.

Tagbert3 tahun yang lalu

Space in general is not limited. The price for the land varies significantly and solar and wind are generally located in the lower price areas where there are not crowds of people.

panick21_3 tahun yang lalu

1 pound of uranium ...

Moissanite3 tahun yang lalu

...and you'll be warm for the rest of your life.

tgsovlerkhgsel3 tahun yang lalu

No, we don't. We can also keep digging for limited stuff and use that for cheap energy temporarily, while technology advances and other sources become much cheaper even without research specifically directed at that.

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.

ch4s33 tahun yang lalu

If the goal is to de-carbonize why is underground hydrogen a bad alternative to natural gas and coal?

canthaveitall3 tahun yang lalu

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

_8j503 tahun yang lalu

And geopolitical implications like hydrogen wars.

senectus13 tahun yang lalu

not really. it would kick start a customer base for renewable businesses to supply.

senectus13 tahun yang lalu

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.

bryanlarsen3 tahun yang lalu

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.

fortran773 tahun yang lalu

If bursty, uneven sources of energy like wind and solar can be used to produced hydrogen via electrolysis, it could still be a win for reducing carbon emissions even though more energy was used to separate the water than can be achieved by burning the resulting hydrogen. It is a way to store the energy, admittedly at a loss, from wind and solar.

defrost3 tahun yang lalu

Ammonia is a major product itself:

    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.

Some of the people involved in mining and moving 16x the annual US iron ore production here in Australia have plans to dominate the global green hydrogen market, first with traditional electrolysis and later with recent breakthrough technologies using novel catalysts and filters.

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)

bryanlarsen3 tahun yang lalu

You're reinforcing my point by showing that green hydrogen has similar use cases to batteries. Nobody considers batteries a fuel source. Batteries and green hydrogen are energy storage, not fuel sources.

And as you said, energy storage is a crucial part of decarbonization.

ikekkdcjkfke3 tahun yang lalu

The market will hopefully decide if it is efficient and not government regulation

imhoguy3 tahun yang lalu

Rather lobbying and subsides decide what is efficient.

fortran773 tahun yang lalu

?? This is a non-sequitur.

yellowapple3 tahun yang lalu

That's true of literally any fuel AFAICT, the sole possible exception being naturally-free hydrogen in e.g. space (and even that's ignoring the oxygen needed to combust it). Just because nature paid the energy costs to make that gallon of oil doesn't mean said energy costs are ignorable.

Kon5ole3 tahun yang lalu

We can call hydrogen a source or a transport, but it is just semantics. If we call green hydrogen a transport then oil is also a transport, and if oil is a source then green hydro is also a source. It takes more energy to create oil, gas or hydropower than we get out of it as well.

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.

senectus13 tahun yang lalu

this is so much bullshit.

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.

JumpCrisscross3 tahun yang lalu

> it takes no energy to mine, refine and transport gasoline

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.

Kon5ole3 tahun yang lalu

Gasoline is a transport mechanism for solar power just like green hydrogen is. The difference is only that oil was stored by nature millions of years ago while green hydro is stored by humans today.

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".

JumpCrisscross3 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

_hypx3 tahun yang lalu

Practically no competing energy storage idea is going to be as cheap. With hydrogen, the only raw material is water. Nothing else can claim that they are utilizing resources that plentiful.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

jakzurr3 tahun yang lalu

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.”

troymc3 tahun yang lalu

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."

hydrobore3 tahun yang lalu

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.

elecush3 tahun yang lalu

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

foota3 tahun yang lalu

Isn't it mostly in stars?

Animats3 tahun yang lalu

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 tahun yang lalu

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.

Animats3 tahun yang lalu

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...

dredmorbius3 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for that, and yes, the odds of there being vast untapped viably accessible hydrogen seems ... low.

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.

_hypx3 tahun yang lalu

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.

dredmorbius3 tahun yang lalu

Thanks. That adds another few known cases, but still nothing like the record for coal, oil, and gas prior to the industrial age.

_hypx3 tahun yang lalu

People can say that in hindsight. But no one in the early to mid-1800s believed that oil seeps implied anything significant, or that oil was a plentiful substance. It was a geological curiosity at the time. Most people had no idea they even existed.

rgmerk3 tahun yang lalu

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.

b1123 tahun yang lalu

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.

rgmerk3 tahun yang lalu

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.

b1123 tahun yang lalu

Bulk H2 is not currently shipped

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.

rgmerk3 tahun yang lalu

That's like pointing to Climeworks and saying that direct air capture is a solved problem.

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.

b1123 tahun yang lalu

We ship sawdust to China, and it comes back glued into fake wood, as cheap furniture.

If we can do that cost effectively, h2 shipping at immense volume is trivial.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

bloppe3 tahun yang lalu

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.

sp3323 tahun yang lalu

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.

phkahler3 tahun yang lalu

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.

DennisP3 tahun yang lalu

Plants aren't doing that job all that effectively, or the CO2 levels wouldn't be going up.

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.

MarkusQ3 tahun yang lalu

Plants do a great job pulling out CO₂ -- that's why CO₂ levels fall in the northern hemisphere's spring and early summer (see https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ ).

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.

zdragnar3 tahun yang lalu

Plants also respirate C02 when they use the sugars they generate from photosynthesis. It's why you can grow plants in a completely sealed terrarium. Some do better than others- they generally don't prefer a perfect balance, but they can survive in it.

entropicgravity3 tahun yang lalu

Yes my understanding is that before there were fungi that could deal with the fallen trees they just stacked up on the ground and eventually became coal while the earth turned into snowball earth for a few million years. Sucking up CO2 has been too much of a good thing under some past circumstances.

phkahler3 tahun yang lalu

>> Plants aren't doing that job all that effectively, or the CO2 levels wouldn't be going up.

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?

pfdietz3 tahun yang lalu

Indeed. The amount of ferrous iron in the Earth far exceeds the capacity of the atmosphere's oxygen to oxidize. The Earth is mostly reduced, with a very thin layer of oxidation on top.

gilleain3 tahun yang lalu

I think that the 21% of the air that is oxygen is unlikely to be used up any time soon? Maybe i'm wrong...

anonymouskimmer3 tahun yang lalu

You're right. We would need to burn the equivalent of about 1000 times the total biomass of the earth to convert the majority of the oxygen in the air into carbon dioxide (or water in this process).

I'm moderately interested in how much hydrogen we could burn without noticeably adding to sea-level rise. Probably quite a bit.

Teknoman1173 tahun yang lalu

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.

diggernet3 tahun yang lalu

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.

mytailorisrich3 tahun yang lalu

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.

rgmerk3 tahun yang lalu

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

shadowofneptune3 tahun yang lalu

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

fock3 tahun yang lalu

> 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_993 tahun yang lalu

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 tahun yang lalu

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

hn_throwaway_993 tahun yang lalu

I don't understand your "well..."

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.

fock3 tahun yang lalu

where exactly does the electron catch the proton?

taneq3 tahun yang lalu

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

barathr3 tahun yang lalu

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.)

DennisP3 tahun yang lalu

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.

sp3323 tahun yang lalu

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...

pwg3 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

credit_guy3 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

b1123 tahun yang lalu

water vapor can be deglected

Whyes, mossuredly!

credit_guy3 tahun yang lalu

Ok. Can you provide some links where any climate scientist includes the water vapor emissions in their calculations? (by the way contrails are not water vapor emissions)

b1123 tahun yang lalu

No. My whole purpose was to make fun of made up, conjoined words. :P

jojobas3 tahun yang lalu

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.

Schroedingersat3 tahun yang lalu

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.

notorandit3 tahun yang lalu

Carbon free is not renewable, isn't it?

Wasn't the plan for renewables?

DennisP3 tahun yang lalu

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

hutzlibu3 tahun yang lalu

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.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

noselasd3 tahun yang lalu

"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.

mountainboy3 tahun yang lalu

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?

AtlasBarfed3 tahun yang lalu

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?

dontlaugh3 tahun yang lalu

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.

FooBarBizBazz3 tahun yang lalu

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

uptown3 tahun yang lalu

Worked out well for Stan Meyer.

https://youtu.be/NuH72G5qXow

starbase3 tahun yang lalu

In what sense is fossil hydrogen renewable?

diggernet3 tahun yang lalu

"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. "

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

Arrath3 tahun yang lalu

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

onychomys3 tahun yang lalu

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!

pvg3 tahun yang lalu

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

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

nonethewiser3 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, in natural gas deposits

diggernet3 tahun yang lalu

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

asimpletune3 tahun yang lalu

Natural gas is made of carbon, no?

gerad3 tahun yang lalu

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/

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

MithrilTuxedo3 tahun yang lalu

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

sp3323 tahun yang lalu

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

greenthrow3 tahun yang lalu

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.

zopa3 tahun yang lalu

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.

AtlasBarfed3 tahun yang lalu

"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.

rgmerk3 tahun yang lalu

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.

panick21_3 tahun yang lalu

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.

zopa3 tahun yang lalu

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.

panick21_3 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

zopa3 tahun yang lalu

If thorium is cheap, there should be plenty of funding to go around. If it’s expensive, what’s the point?

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.

panick21_3 tahun yang lalu

> If thorium is cheap, there should be plenty of funding to go around.

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.

Mountain_Skies3 tahun yang lalu

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.

zopa3 tahun yang lalu

Sure, but it’s wildly counterproductive. The result is free-floating negativity about all the possible solutions. Until we’re meeting the scale of the problem, we should all be focusing on “yes, and”

panick21_3 tahun yang lalu

The problem is that 'yes, and' mentality is not reality. Every country and company has limited budget, you can just say 'yes' to everything.

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.

hasmanean3 tahun yang lalu

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.