The Albanian mine: "The researchers found that the gas bubbling from the pool was more than 80 per cent hydrogen, with methane and a small amount of nitrogen mixed in. It was flowing at a rate of 11 tonnes per year, almost an order of magnitude greater than any other flows of hydrogen gas measured from single-point sources elsewhere on Earth’s surface. To determine the source of the gas, the researchers also modelled different geological scenarios that could produce such a flow. They found the most likely scenario was that the gas was coming from a deeper reservoir of hydrogen accumulated in a fault beneath the mine. Based on the geometry of the fault, they estimate this reservoir contains at least 5000 to 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen. “It’s one of the largest volumes of natural hydrogen that has ever been measured,” says Eric Gaucher, an independent geochemist focused on natural hydrogen. But it still isn’t a huge amount, says Geoffrey Ellis at the US Geological Survey."
This is the second or third time someone found modest amounts of hydrogen underground, and then started making claims of vast quantities being available. There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now. The "gold hydrogen" enthusiasts claim well depths of a few kilometers are enough. Oil and natural gas wells routinely go that deep.
So far, nobody has a "natural hydrogen" well producing. Even though this startup [1] said they would have one by the end of 2024. Their "news" releases are all about going to meetings, making deals, and such. Not much mention of drilling, unlike the statements they made a few years ago.
There's one well in Mali which yields enough hydrogen to run an auto engine driving a generator. That's it for actual output. That deposit been known since the late 1980s, and invested in since 2012.
Exploratory wells were drilled in 2018. Results from that are, somehow, hazy.[2] Not finding followups since 2018.
> There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now.
I'd believe it because geologists are thorough. I'd also not be that shocked if nobody was testing for hydrogen because it is a gas. I'd imagine it is possible to drill through a hydrogen deposit and not even notice it is there. Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
I suppose if they found a real lode of the stuff it might accidentally blow up the drilling crew. That'd make headlines.
> Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
Yep .. checking for everything really - the costs for drilling bore samples are high enough that it's commonplace to log bores to have the data to store or onsell even if specific targets aren't found.
The major explorers have petabytes of surface chemisty, seismic, EM, borehole samples and logs, radiometrics, magnetics, gravity, etc. in primary archives scattered across the globe and routinely digitised and merged into private reserve estimations.
As a prospector myself, this is false. Assays are expensive for traditional minerals and we never assay for hydrogen as that requires a totally different set of procedures.
Yeah I've sat on an exploration drill rig and I have a vague grasp of the physics and chemistry. That is why I'm a little sceptical - what exactly would the process be for identifying a hydrogen resource?
We're dealing with a light gas that would probably escape from core samples very quickly; especially under normal conditions. They'd need to get an accurate read during core drilling or be able to identify specific a non-magnetic gas with density of 0 underground which sounds pretty challenging - especially since it seems to have no special commercial interest for most of history. Is there a standard that you have to have a gas monitor attached to the drill hole? I don't remember anyone pointing one out to me or complaining that theirs was broken but stranger things have happened. Can hydrogen even be detected with magnets or surface chemistry analysis?
The way sound waves bounce around underground makes it quite challenging to pick things up. The geologists have put a lot of effort into this exact problem but prospecting for hydrogen sounds damn difficult and I'd be surprised if we had global coverage for it.
Right, most analyses of cores might not find small traces of hydrogen. But if someone looking for natural gas drilled into a sizable hydrogen deposit, it would be hard not to notice that the methane had way too much hydrogen.
In the drill core, even after gas escapes, there'd be specific types of capping material that can trap hydrogen under pressure, below that there'd be a reduced density of more porous material.
Hydrogen prospectors looking backwards at drill core logs would be looking for signature transitions and retesting fields, looking again at the seismic results to find ROI's in historic results.
Des FitzGerald on geophysical exploration for naturally occurring hydrogen. Des outlines the current state of exploration for natural hydrogen and discusses geological mechanisms for hydrogen generation.
If they have to theorycraft a resource based on traces of where the hydrogen used to be, but no longer is then it is entirely possible that big hydrogen deposits have just been missed. That seems to be literally what the article today is about. For 90% of minerals they can just say what is in the drill sample is what is underground, exploration geologists aren't generally in the business of imagining what might have been in the core independently of what was directly measured.
If we need to apply specific theories to the exploration samples then the "There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now" logic doesn't hold. Since the evidence has to be interpreted before we can know if there is a deposit it is quite possible that it was interpreted wrongly on a mass scale. You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on.
I'm not saying geologists are ignorant, just that Animats' logic doesn't hold for hydrogen. There could be massive deposits that we technically already have the data for except nobody ever bothered to look for it.
It goes to motivation, until recently there's been a lot of talk about 'pure' hydrogen extraction but little actual pragmatic hydrogen exploration; specifically funded hydrogen targetted developable resource programs.
Now that there's growing economic justification for investing time and money (at least a decade, easily on the order of a billion (that seems low) outlay before return) in hydrogen, serious exploration starts.
As in all exploration phases the money funnel begins with prospects which means record crawling looking for patterns - actively developing prospects and mapping prospect fields expands on the current pattern knowledge and that better understanding, trained on emperical results, gets cycled back into the record crawling phase.
This goes to the original question, there is already detailed data, seventy years worth of logged geophysical, vaulted by major explorers; prospectors who look at a $50 million USD TSX prospectus as the absolute minimum low bar of any interest in capital rasing mineral development projects.
Buried in that data is almost certainly (confidence) patterns that identify most of the larger near surface deposits.
NB: the italic stresses are deliberate, across the entire globe, looking back from 50 years after today, that seems likely to stand up as a geostatistical statement of formal E(xpectation).
In the course of going forward from today a better understanding of how to read the tealeaves wrt hydrogen will develop, and this:
> You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on.
will look exactly right only flipped: we have a big historic data archive, we need to develop a better prospect filter for a new resource of interest.
Years ago a similar thing happened with gold data, a big historic data archive got reprocessed with better algorithms using the latest <cough> learnings </cough> and then a few years after that watered down academic papers appeared, eg:
Natural gas is methane. Methane is composed of hydrogen, but it is mostly carbon by weight. Chemicals are different than their components. Water is also made of hydrogen but it takes work to split it.
Natural gas depending on source can have a couple percent free hydrogen. Adding more is apparently becoming more popular.
In some markets, it comes from LNG which is pretty pure methane, in others it comes from wells which has more hydrogen as well as other contaminants like sulfides.
Often an explorer looking for gold finds something else like copper or nickel. Oil however is generally found in a different environment. H2 is created through serpentinization in areas more prone to mineral discovery.
Global production of hydrogen is about 75 million tons, about half from ammonia, half from capture during petroleum products (refining). That's a problem primarily due to it is plateaued and there isn't capability to increase supply unless someone makes ammonia crackers more efficient. The other major obstacle is natural gas has been artificially inexpensive due to the abundance of supply due to fracking. It's hard to compete with it. It's possible to build turbines that burn ammonia, but no-one wants it.
Hydrogen is used to produce ammonia, not the other way around. There is no natural source of ammonia. The first link is all about the use of hydrogen. The third is about ammonia cracker which may be useful to transport ammonia and turn back into hydrogen.
Most hydrogen is produced by steam reforming methane, called gray hydrogen.
I think what’s even worse is this paper is not connected to any kind of reality. They just make up some data from their computational imaginations and clicked submit. In places where we do have observations we don’t see much gas coming out.
The number of holes made to probe the dimensions of oil and gas fields greatly exceeds the number of holes made to get oil out .. and the number of holes drilled to estimate mineral reserves (copper, gold, kimberlite (diamonds), bauxite, etc. etc. etc) is large in comparision to oil wells.
The point of all those holes is to log layers, horizons, sediments, etc and to map out the geology of very large areas .. much much much larger than the combined bore hole diameter areas.
Of course boreholes are the final step in "proofing" siesmic results that map out many layers across large areas and allow geologists to rule out many areas as not having the structures required to trap gases.
This is the second or third time someone found modest amounts of hydrogen underground, and then started making claims of vast quantities being available. There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now. The "gold hydrogen" enthusiasts claim well depths of a few kilometers are enough. Oil and natural gas wells routinely go that deep.
So far, nobody has a "natural hydrogen" well producing. Even though this startup [1] said they would have one by the end of 2024. Their "news" releases are all about going to meetings, making deals, and such. Not much mention of drilling, unlike the statements they made a few years ago.
There's one well in Mali which yields enough hydrogen to run an auto engine driving a generator. That's it for actual output. That deposit been known since the late 1980s, and invested in since 2012. Exploratory wells were drilled in 2018. Results from that are, somehow, hazy.[2] Not finding followups since 2018.
The hype is strong here.[3]
[1] https://helios-aragon.com/news/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
[3] https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-8518695...