Thursday, February 23, 2023

3883 - HYDROGEN FUEL - could it replace oil?

 

-  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.

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                 -------------  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.

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-   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.

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-    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.

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-  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.

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-    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.

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-   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.

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-     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.

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-    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.

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-    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.

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-    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.

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-  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.

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-     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.

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-     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.

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-    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.

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-     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.

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-    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.

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-    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.

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-  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.

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-    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.

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-     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.

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-   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.

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-     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.

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-    Primordial hydrogen, trapped soon after the planet’s birth in its iron core, is seeping to the surface through thousands of kilometers of rock.

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-    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

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-    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%.

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-     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.

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-    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.

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-     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.

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-   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.

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-    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.

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-    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.

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-    In 2019, the startup Natural Hydrogen Energy drilled the first U.S. hydrogen well amid corn and soybean fields in Nebraska. 

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-    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.

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-   But the size of the prize may understate the promise. Because Earth makes hydrogen so much faster than oil.

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            February 21, 2023      HYDROGEN  FUEL  -  could it replace oil?       3883                                                                                                                        

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