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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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Iâve been very critical of the so-called hydrogen economy. But Iâve 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 Â
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. Letâs 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 Â
Is also generally nasty to deal with. Itâs such a small atom that it creeps into any  other material and degrades it rapidly, a problem known as âhydrogen embrittlementâ. But hydrogen is used in the chemical industry for all kinds of purposes, Â
Exactly because it reacts so readily. At the moment itâs predominantly produced from methane,  also known as natural gas. The reason isnât hard to see, if you have a look  at the chemical formula for methane, thatâs C H 4, which is a lot of hâs there.Â
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, Â
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 thatâs a nice idea in principle but in practice there are Â
Only a few tiny test facilities for that and using hydrogen to store energy is extremely inefficient. You can make hydrogen from biogas, thatâs methane produced basically by letting agricultural waste  rot away. Bio-gas production exists, and it does work, but it has the rather obvious limitation Â
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 thatâs why I think the so-called hydrogen economy is somewhat of a joke, Â
Because it will end up basically being natural gas. But. Geologists have known for quite some time that there are hydrogen reservoirs in  Earthâs 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 doesnât escape, Â
It likes to react with something that contains carbon, and then you get the carbon problem back.  It turns out though that hydrogen doesnât really care what geologists think it should be doing. Thereâve been a few reports going back to over a century of hydrogen bubbling out of the ground, Â
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 wasnât until 2012 that someone figured out it was almost pure hydrogen gas and made a business Â
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 Â
To how much the world produces in one year, which is 96 million metric tons. That would  mean itâs 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 Â
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 Â
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 Â
Layers are above the production site, the hydrogen doesnât necessarily escape to  the earthâs surface. But if you drill into the rocks, the hydrogen escapes et voila. If that theory was correct, this would be very exciting because itâd means that  these hydrogen reservoirs can replenish if more water runs over the hot rocks. Â
Theyâre 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 Â
Extracted that could cover 10 % of the worldâs 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 AragĂłn, the British company H2Au, Â
And the French Francaise de lâEnergie. And all that sounds very good, and I will  admit it does make the entire hydrogen economy thing sound much more plausible. Yet, Iâm still kinda sceptical. As we have seen in our earlier episode on geothermal energy, Â
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 itâll be very rare they  get almost pure hydrogen, more likely theyâll have to separate it from the carbon-containing Â
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 Â
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 Â
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 Â
Separate the facts from the noise. When your neighbour tells you that one third of Americans  think Bidenâs election was illegitimate, you can look up that story in the Ground News Blindspot  feed and see right away that heâs talking about a poll back in December that was mostly covered Â
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 theyâre continuously adding new features like the Â
Comparison tool. I really think Ground News is a gamechanger and I hope youâll check them out. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.
43 Comments
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Always these pessimistic views. There's not only steam reforming, hydrogen can also be separated from carbon by pyrolysis. With pyrolysis, "waste" isn't CO2, but pure carbon.
Also, the fact that there are few electrolysis factories for hydrogen today doesn't mean it'll be the same in 5 years. Excess electricity only starts to appear, it'll be much more in the coming years. Electrolysis is well known and with ~80% pretty efficient. These nuclear plants you always promote don't exist either, after all. Dealing with climate crisis means changing things, a quite positive process.
What's wrong with your map?
Crimea is Ukraine.
Please, correct your map
This may be a dumb question but if hydrogen can be naturally produced by hot water and iron rich layers underground, why canât this be reproduced on the surface artificially?
Iâm going to assume the answer is actually âcost, itâs expensiveâ rather than something specific restricting it.
What will happen to the earth (the earths crust and temp) and eco system? I don't mean this as a tree hugger. I am just curious. I mean H binds with everything. It has to have a reaction.
Why Crimea is marked as russia on your map? Don't you know that it's Ukraine? Don't you know that Germany recognizes the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders? Don't you know that Germany is one of the many civilized countries that help Ukraine stand against russian agression?
If we can get precious metals from asteroids âď¸, we can get hydrogen from the sun đ
100 million metric tons is pretty un SI way to go. Letâs seeâŚ2+6+3+3=14âŚ. 100 terragrams, or better for H2, 50 Tmol. SI Ftw.
The most promising part here for me seem to be the (common)rock+heat= hydrolyse.
If we could produce way cheaper hydrolyse device that can work on heat it would be a/the game changer.
Heat waste wouldn't be wasted anymore and that represent a colossal amount of energy, that could be readily send back into the system depending on case.
If it is compact enougth it could use the heat waste of a car to produce hydrogen from water in tank or atmo and send it in the combustion cycle, witch "bypass" the need for storage for exemple.
Possibilities are mind bogeling.
Hydrogen embrittlement only occurs in metal with oxide impurities, such as a welds. To prevent embrittlement the weld needs to be heat treated to bake out the oxides.
Brilliant, as usual. However, I have a request – please do variations in clothing and color. No need to go beyond 5 outfits, but now I'm getting an awkward vibe . And NO, this is not me representing "the patriarchy" or similar BS. I'm just distracted from the message. In the same way I would be if a male presenter was sporting only one T-shirt.
H2au is quite a cool, but also a very 'to the point' business name….. Hydrogen 2 Gold……
Least it explains their business model pretty succinctly
If we make too much CO2 in the process we can just blow it away with the big fans we've been putting everywhere đ¤
hi Sabine, love your show, isn't converting methane to hydrogen and CO2 an 80 to 1 good thing?
Ground News sounds like Facebook fact checkers with more steps… And a price tag.
a company called sunhydrogen is working on nanotech that creates hydrogen with no external energy sources needed
It might renew just like other so-called 'fossil' fuels do.
Hydrogen economy? One word. KABOOM đĽ
Hydrogen is not a good idea because it's a powerful greenhouse gas and it damages the ozone layer. Leaks of 5 % – about what is realistic – make the whole hydrogen economy thing not rly viable.
Does anyone else think this brilliant scientist and teacher is hilarious. Sometimes I have to pause and finish laughing. Love this and learning.
collider side effect
Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel for any application, and is useless as a fuel inside the Earth's atmosphere.
Only fools imagine it is possible to create a Hydrogen economy – even if Hydrogen were free.
And Hydrogen is most certainly not free, nor will it ever be.
The deck is stacked against Hydrogen, as it is incredibly dangerous, and extremely expensive to store and transport.
Saying Hydrogen is "quite volatile" is like saying nuclear weapons "produce some heat".
What about heliumđ˘
Hydrogen is a horrible way to store energy. It leaks through all materials and in the process damages them. It has horrible energy density by volume unless it is compressed to absurd pressures like 15,000 PSI, which requires expensive carbon fiber pressure vessels which can become bombs in a collision. And it burns with an invisible flame.
So fracking for hydrogen? I can see people resisting that. But those tend to be the same that would reject viable solutions like nuclear.
"Fossil Fuel is Nuclear Waste" at CanadaFreePress > fission produces elemental atoms, under high temperature and pressure form elemental molecules
When concrete 'cures' the water gives up oxygen to form the cement, out gassing hydrogen. So seems almost obvious that this is also occurring deep underground. There's a lot of oxygen in many minerals. If it was as common as these reports suggest (hope) shouldn't this would've been noticed before now? or that curing concrete might pose a fire or explosion hazard?
this effort to push the hydrogen economy will be one of the funniest things we will laugh about in 20 years.
What happened to passing electricity through water?
Ukraine is shown without Crimea on the map at 3:27. Please don't spread the Russian narratives that violate Ukraine's integrity.
And why should we trust groundsource news?
if Hydrogen Self- Renews… then Hydrocarbons most likely do too. That theory has been around for a long time.
Any carbohydrates associated with this hydrogen is most likely formed in the same process, hydrogen reacting with carbondioxide to form methane (and other carbohydrates) and water (the reverse reaction of steam reforming). So, these hydrocarbons are just as renewable as the associated hydrogen. As long as we find ways to sequester the carbondioxide, we can continue to use hydrocarbons forever.
06:05 The benefit/cost balance sheet could go cost side big time.
All the tons are metric.
Hydrogen can be a product of radioactive decay. Biden is a product of social decay.
The 60ghz frequency breaks hydrogen from oxygen.
All we need to store is water as this method requires a lot less energy than is stored in HHO and is cleaner than electrolysis or chemical reactions.
I believe that compressing laser light can also ignite water.
Well, consider a dam adjustible tunnel system along the Bering sea. I calculated the displacement of a two square mile area in terms of Knetic energy to be 288 trillion pounds per year. This is low tech. Figure super condensation in a closed system unified and hauled to the Majove (to improve Kramer Junction) and that's another fairly low tech approach. Figure a way to contain hydrogen and make metallic hydrogen in bulk, using magnatism, which would, if not besting Tesla, it would be on par with his best..
4:00 All Hail!! Great Goddess of Cosmological Reality!!!
Sabine Hossenfelder always has a stab at conservatives at the end of her reviews; surprised she doesn't just come out and tell us how great socialism is
you totally discounted gama radiation fields strip hydrogen from water … think fukasima explosions
BUT – what is the rate of renewal ? Oil and coal both renew but it takes a very long time for them to reform.
Russian geologist Larin predicted this decades ago.