- 3883
- HYDROGEN FUEL
- could it replace oil? The enthusiasm for natural hydrogen comes as
interest in hydrogen as a clean, carbon-free fuel is surging. Governments are
pushing it as a way to fight global warming, efforts that were galvanized when
Russia invaded Ukraine last year and triggered a hasty search, especially in
Europe, for alternatives to Russian natural gas.
-
------------- 3883 - HYDROGEN FUEL - could it replace oil?
- In 1987
well diggers had come to his village of Bourakébougou, Mali, to drill for
water, but had given up on one dry borehole at a depth of 108 meters. Wind was coming out of the hole in 2012. When
one driller peered into the hole while smoking a cigarette, the wind exploded in
his face.
-
- The color of
the fire in daytime was like blue sparkling water and did not have black smoke
pollution. The color of the fire at night was like shining gold.
-
- It took the
crew weeks to snuff out the fire and cap the well. And there it sat, shunned by
the villagers. In 2012, Chapman
Petroleum discovered that the gas was 98% hydrogen. Hydrogen almost never turns up in oil
operations, and it wasn’t thought to exist within the Earth much at all.
-
- Within a few
months, the team had installed a Ford engine tuned to burn hydrogen. Its
exhaust was water. The engine was hooked up to a 300-kilowatt generator. The company change the name to “Hydroma”,
and began drilling new wells to ascertain the size of the underground supply.
-
- The Malian
discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying
hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all
over the world, like oil and gas, but not in the same places.
-
- These
researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously
generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes
accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen to
meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years.
-
- Since
2018, dozens of startups, many in Australia, are snatching up the rights to
explore for hydrogen. In 2019, a startup completed the first hydrogen borehole
in the United States, in Nebraska.
-
- At the
moment, all commercial hydrogen has to be manufactured, either in a polluting
way, by using fossil fuels, or in an expensive way, by using renewable
electricity. Natural hydrogen might be there for the taking, giving the
experienced drillers in the oil and gas industry a new, environmentally
friendly mission.
-
- 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.
-
- Even though
it is carbon free, hydrogen has its faults as an energy source. One kilogram of
hydrogen holds as much energy as a gallon of gasoline. But at ambient
pressures, that same kilogram of hydrogen occupies more space than the drum of
a typical concrete mixing truck. Pressurized tanks can hold more but add weight
and costs to vehicles. Liquefying hydrogen requires chilling it to –253°C, usually a disqualifying expense.
-
- These storage
issues, along with a lack of pipelines and distribution systems, are the main
reasons why, in the race to electrify cars, batteries have won out over fuel
cells, which convert hydrogen to electricity. Similarly, for domestic heating,
most experts believe electric heat pumps make more sense than hydrogen
furnaces.
-
- Hydrogen
could replace hydrocarbons in heavy-duty vehicles that are ill-suited to
batteries: trucks, ships, and perhaps even planes, all of which can handle
larger tanks and fewer fueling stations.
-
- Industries
such as steel that require high-temperature combustion are another likely
market. And today’s primary markets for hydrogen, it is needed to make ammonia
fertilizers will continue to grow from the current 90 million tons a year.
-
- But to be
climate-friendly, hydrogen needs to be produced cleanly. 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.
-
- Governments
have embraced the concept. In September 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy
said it would spend $7 billion on at least half a dozen hydrogen “hubs”:
production sites for green or blue hydrogen. And in May 2022, the European
Union called for 20 million tons a year of new green hydrogen, half imported,
half domestic, by 2030.
-
- Pumping
hydrogen out of the ground should be much cheaper, which is why proponents
sometimes call the natural stuff “gold.”
Extraction at the Mali site, which benefits from shallow wells and
nearly pure hydrogen, could be as cheap as 50 cents per kilogram.
-
- The oil and
gas industry has punctured Earth with millions of wells. How could it have
overlooked hydrogen for so long? One reason is that hydrogen is scarce in the
sedimentary rocks that yield oil and gas, such as organic-rich shales or
mudstones. When compacted and heated, the carbon molecules in those rocks
consume any available hydrogen and form longer chain hydrocarbons.
-
- Any
hydrogen the oil encounters as it migrates to a porous “reservoir” rock such as
a sandstone tends to react to form more hydrocarbons. Hydrogen can also react
with oxygen in rocks to form water or combine with carbon dioxide to form
“abiotic” methane. Microbes gobble it up to make yet more methane.
-
- 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.
-
- Scientists
diving in submersibles have seen this process up close at the volcanic
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where tectonic plates are tugged apart and mantle rocks
rise up to create fresh slabs of ocean crust. At a site known as Lost City for
the towering “white smoker” chimneys gushing
mineral-rich hot water, researchers measured high amounts of hydrogen
spewing from the sea floor.
-
- As
radioactive elements in the crust such as uranium and thorium decay, they emit
alpha particles, helium nuclei, along with other radiation that can split water
molecules underground and generate an extra trickle of hydrogen.
-
- Primordial
hydrogen, trapped soon after the planet’s birth in its iron core, is seeping to
the surface through thousands of kilometers of rock.
-
- The Earth
produces orders of magnitude more hydrogen each year than the 90 million tons
that humans manufacture. But it’s not only that flow that matters, it’s the
size of the underground stock
-
- Hydrogen from one borehole, drilled in 1921 on
Kangaroo Island had produced as much as 80% hydrogen. Another well, on the
nearby Yorke Peninsula, was close to 70%.
-
- In the
United States, the birthplace of fracking and the shale gas boom, the regulatory
environment is looser. Ellis is now
using geophysical data to assess promising U.S. terrain for hydrogen
generation. He says the United States likely sits on two rich veins.
-
- One is
about 10 to 20 kilometers off the Eastern Seaboard, where iron-rich mantle
rocks lie about 10 kilometers beneath the seabed. Hydrogen created in those
rocks may be migrating up and toward shore through porous sediments, perhaps
explaining why Carolina bays are found all along the East Coast.
-
- Another
potential hot spot is in the Midwest, where a volcanic rift failed to split
North America a billion years ago. It brought iron-rich mantle rocks close to
the surface in a band from Minnesota to Kansas.
-
- In 2019,
“Natural Hydrogen Energy” completed its 3.4-kilometer-deep well in the middle
of a “water basin” and surrounded by corn and soybean fields. The well, near
Geneva, Nebraska, sits close to deep faults that might connect it to the rocks
of the failed rift zone. In April 2022, the company HyTerra bought a stake in
the operation. A HyTerra presentation says gas from the well “burned with a
clear flame”, a sign that hydrogen is predominant.
-
- Gaucher
believes the first target for natural hydrogen explorers should be shallow
accumulations that sit under impermeable caps within a kilometer or two of the
surface. But if the source rocks themselves are within reach, he says, hydrogen
could be collected from them directly, like oil from fracked shale; water could
even be injected into the iron-rich rock to stimulate production.
-
- While
collecting hydrogen, the well could also tap the geothermal energy in the
heated water that returns to the surface. Best of all, if carbon dioxide were
dissolved in the injected water, it could react with magnesium and calcium in
the iron-containing rocks and be locked up permanently as limestone,
sequestering carbon dioxide and producing hydrogen at the same time.
-
- In 2019,
the startup Natural Hydrogen Energy drilled the first U.S. hydrogen well amid
corn and soybean fields in Nebraska.
-
- With 30
wells drilled across the Bourakébougou field, Brière says he can now formally
assess “the prize”, oil industry jargon for the recoverable quantity in a
reservoir. The field is large: It contains some 60 billion cubic meters of
hydrogen, or about 5 million tons, trapped under expansive horizontal sills of
ancient volcanic rock.
-
- But the size
of the prize may understate the promise. Because Earth makes hydrogen so much
faster than oil.
-
February 21, 2023 HYDROGEN FUEL
- could it replace oil? 3883
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---------------------
--- Thursday, February 23, 2023 ---------------------------
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