'There is enough natural hydrogen underground to meet all demand for hundreds of years', says US government agency
Geologists expect 'gold rush' for natural H2 resources, conference told
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“Most hydrogen is likely inaccessible, but a few per cent recovery would still supply all projected demand — 500 million tonnes a year — for hundreds of years,” he said, during a preview of the USGC report at the conference.
This means that investment is likely to begin flowing into natural hydrogen production imminently, Mengli Zhang, research assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines told the Denver audience.
Until a few years ago, the scientific consensus was that naturally occuring hydrogen underground would be destroyed by microbes or chemical processes close to the Earth’s surface.
But Alexis Templeton of the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the conference that geologists now believe subterranean hydrogen is generated in large quantities when iron-rich minerals react with water.
“We haven’t looked for hydrogen resources in the right places with the right tools,” said Ellis.
However, it has yet to be proven that natural hydrogen can be commercially exploited at scale, partly due to the fact that it always seems to be mixed with other gases such as methane, from which it will need to be separated, and partly due to the size of the reserves discovered to date.
The only current use of natural hydrogen anywhere in the world is in a village in Mali, west Africa, where it is burned — unseparated from other gases — to generate electricity.