Hydrogen Might Self-Renew, Reservoir found in France

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Several recent discoveries of naturally occurring hydrogen reservoirs underground (the so-called “white hydrogen”) have prompted the whole world to start searching for more of the stuff. Even though this seems like a gamechanger for the hydrogen economy, I am still sceptical of its viability economically, energetically, and environmentally.

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I’ve been very critical of the so-called  hydrogen economy. But I’ve recently   reconsidered my position because of an  interesting development. A few months ago,   Scientists drilled a hole in southern France  to measure methane levels but instead they   found hydrogen. Indeed, the French might  be sitting on top of one of the biggest  

Naturally occurring hydrogen reservoirs in  the world. And it might not be the only one.   There are now startups all over the world  searching for the stuff. Let’s have a look. This video comes with a quiz that  lets you check how much you remember.

Hydrogen burns cleanly with oxygen to water  while creating energy. That makes it sound like   the ideal fuel. But there are a few problems. At  atmospheric pressure and room temperature hydrogen   is a gas, and to handle it you need to either cool  or, more commonly put it under pressure . Hydrogen  

Is also generally nasty to deal with. It’s  such a small atom that it creeps into any   other material and degrades it rapidly, a  problem known as “hydrogen embrittlement”. But hydrogen is used in the chemical  industry for all kinds of purposes,  

Exactly because it reacts so readily. At the  moment it’s predominantly produced from methane,   also known as natural gas. The reason  isn’t hard to see, if you have a look   at the chemical formula for methane,  that’s C H 4, which is a lot of h’s there. 

You will also notice that methane has that  C in there, so what happens with that? Well   to get hydrogen out of the methane, one uses  a process known as steam reforming. In which one combines the methane with water which   produces hydrogen plus, wait for it,  

Carbon dioxide. Yes, so if you produce hydrogen  from methane that leaves behind carbon dioxide. Now the fans of hydrogen say that you can produce  the hydrogen from water with renewable energy and   also use it for energy storage. And yes that’s a  nice idea in principle but in practice there are  

Only a few tiny test facilities for that and using  hydrogen to store energy is extremely inefficient. You can make hydrogen from biogas, that’s methane  produced basically by letting agricultural waste   rot away. Bio-gas production exists, and it does  work, but it has the rather obvious limitation  

That you need land to grow all the bio-stuff that  you let rot away. And if you crunch the numbers,   bio-gas will realistically not supply enough  hydrogen to power all transport vehicles. And that’s why I think the so-called  hydrogen economy is somewhat of a joke,  

Because it will end up basically  being natural gas. But. Geologists have known for quite some time  that there are hydrogen reservoirs in   Earth’s crust. This in and of itself is  somewhat surprising because, as I said,   hydrogen is a very small molecule. You expect  it to escape. Even if it doesn’t escape,  

It likes to react with something that contains  carbon, and then you get the carbon problem back.   It turns out though that hydrogen doesn’t really  care what geologists think it should be doing. There’ve been a few reports going back to over a  century of hydrogen bubbling out of the ground,  

Sometimes leading to accidental explosions.  A particularly remarkable case is a borehole   in Mali that was shut down in 1987 because  the gas coming out of it tended to explode.   It wasn’t until 2012 that someone figured out it  was almost pure hydrogen gas and made a business  

Out of this. But more often hydrogen is a small  fraction of gases that escape from the ground.  Estimate say that the new hydrogen deposit  which they found in Southern France contains   between 46 million and 260 million metric  tons of hydrogen. This is roughly comparable  

To how much the world produces in one year,  which is 96 million metric tons. That would   mean it’s basically one year without the  greenhouse gas emissions coming from the   usual hydrogen production. Not bad, but not  a game changer in and of itself. The game  

Changer is that there could be more,  much more. And it might be renewable. Just how these hydrogen deposits  come into being is somewhat unclear,   so no one really knows how many there are.  But the leading theory is that the hydrogen  

Is produced when hot water underground reacts  with hot iron rich minerals like forsterite   and other olivine stones. The oxygen in water  bonds to iron, freeing up clean hydrogen atoms   which rise and get stuck in porous rocks much  like methane. Depending on what the geological  

Layers are above the production site, the  hydrogen doesn’t necessarily escape to   the earth’s surface. But if you drill into  the rocks, the hydrogen escapes et voila. If that theory was correct, this would  be very exciting because it’d means that   these hydrogen reservoirs can replenish  if more water runs over the hot rocks.  

They’re basically geothermal wells in  which the hot rocks produce hydrogen.  The US Geological Survey, has estimated in  a 2022 report, that there could be tens of   billions of tons naturally occurring hydrogen  cached globally. If only 1% of this could be  

Extracted that could cover 10 % of the world’s  energy needs. This is why in the past years,   hydrogen mining startups have sprung up  everywhere, such as the Denver based companies   Koloma and Natural Hydrogen Energy, the Spanish  company Helios Aragón, the British company H2Au,  

And the French Francaise de l’Energie. And all that sounds very good, and I will   admit it does make the entire hydrogen  economy thing sound much more plausible. Yet, I’m still kinda sceptical. As we have seen  in our earlier episode on geothermal energy,  

If you dig into the ground all kinds of  gasses can come out, including methane,   carbon dioxide, and nasty sulfuric stuff.  This makes me think it’ll be very rare they   get almost pure hydrogen, more likely they’ll  have to separate it from the carbon-containing  

Stuff and figure out what you do with  the rest. Whether this makes sense,   economically, energetically, and  environmentally, only time will tell. The way that science news is being shared in the   media is both interesting  and sometimes disturbing. Take for example this story about hydrogen  cars at the consumer electronics show. On  

Ground News I can see that this story  has been covered by left leaning media   outlets almost twice as much as right  leaning ones. And if I scroll down,   I can see that these stories are  almost all exactly identical. Funny eh?

Ground News is an app and website who’ve  been sponsoring this video. And, of course,   I have a special offer. If you  use my link ground.news/sabine,   you’ll get 40% off their unlimited access  vantage plan for less than $5/month.

Ground news shows you how a single news story  is being covered around the world and across   the political spectrum with context  about the source of the information. Take this recent article about the fusion  breakthrough in the UK. Again this has a  

Slight left-bias, if not a very pronounced  one. If I scroll down, then besides every   headline there is a tag showing me the political  bias, reliability and ownership of the source. A tool like this is particularly valuable as  we head into election season because it helps  

Separate the facts from the noise. When your  neighbour tells you that one third of Americans   think Biden’s election was illegitimate, you can  look up that story in the Ground News Blindspot   feed and see right away that he’s talking about  a poll back in December that was mostly covered  

By right leaning news sources and the articles  are predominantly of mixed or low factuality. Ground News is supported by their subscribers  and offers plans for as little as $1 per   month to make it really accessible. So,  your subscription directly supports the   development of the platform, where they’re  continuously adding new features like the  

Comparison tool. I really think Ground News is  a gamechanger and I hope you’ll check them out. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.