Could “golden” or “white” hydrogen be the fuel of the future?
There is a lot of talk about hydrogen as a substitute for natural gas and fossil fuels in both industry and transport.
The potential benefits of large-scale replacement in high-heat industrial applications are difficult to overestimate. “Replacing fossil fuels currently used in furnaces that reach 1,500 degrees Celsius with hydrogen gas could be a viable substitute for fossil fuels, as Bloomberg also wrote
There is only one problem. Creating hydrogen for these types of industrial applications requires a lot of energy, and the resulting hydrogen is only as green as the energy source used to produce it. Hydrogen is divided into:
- gray hydrogen, produced from fossil fuels which therefore does not solve any problems;
- blue hydrogen, produced from natural gas, but which, at this point, it would be more logical to use directly;
- green hydrogen , produced by hydrolysis with renewable energy, but the amount of energy to be used for the process is enormous, making this gas not very convenient.
The energy needs to produce hydrogen are such that a 2022 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) warns against “the indiscriminate use of hydrogen”, arguing that the extensive use of hydrogen “it may not be in line with the requirements of a decarbonised world”. In particular, the report argues that producing green hydrogen requires large amounts of clean energy that could be better used in other applications, making mass production of green hydrogen counterproductive to meeting climate goals. So hydrogen looks like a
However, there is a hydrogen that until yesterday seemed like a chimera, but which instead seems to be a tangible reality: "golden" or "white" or, simply, natural hydrogen . These are terms used to indicate the hydrogen that occurs naturally in some geological areas of the world (underground geological accumulations, to be precise), sometimes in large quantities. It is produced underground when water reacts chemically with iron-rich rocks or radioactive minerals.
In the past this type of hydrogen had been considered fictitious at worst or unexploitable at best, but in recent years “deposits have been discovered in the United States, Canada, Finland, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil, Oman, Turkey and Mali, leading would-be gold miners to believe there are numerous sources waiting to be discovered,” Reuters recently reported. According to an estimate published in Earth-Science Reviews in 2020, we could extract 23 million tons of hydrogen from the ground every year. And there's already a new wave of startups trying to do just that.
Recently France has also, for the first time, authorized research into this particular type of hydrogen from natural generation, all in an area near the Pyrenees.
One of these, Natural Hydrogen Energy (NH2E ), was founded by Viacheslav Zgonnik, the chemist who wrote the 2020 Earth-Science Reviews article. Zgonnik believes the potential for extracting golden hydrogen is even greater than his article, which is based on a conservative estimate of existing usable reserves, suggests.
“ This is the currently available estimate of geological hydrogen generation from the ground but, in my opinion, the real number should be two to three orders of magnitude higher because we still don't know much about the hydrogen system and have very poor measurements of the hydrogen on the planet ,” he told Reuters.
However, not everyone is as optimistic as Zgonnik. Reports on golden hydrogen are full of caution, and while there is a lot of excitement about the potential of this fuel, it is far too early to declare that natural hydrogen will be the panacea to energy problems. It is almost entirely unexplored: at the moment, the village of Bourakébougou in Mali is the only place in the world where a working hydrogen well is already being used as a fuel source.
Natural, or golden, hydrogen generator in Bourakebougou, Mali
Additionally, a series of studies need to be conducted to determine exactly how clean underground hydrogen is. Many scientists fear that by extracting stored hydrogen, greenhouse gases will also be released. Others fear that hydrogen exploration will lead to the discovery – and use – of new fossil fuel reserves. Still others think that golden hydrogen will be misused for greenwashing purposes, as happened with carbon capture. Furthermore, extraction is not simple: hydrogen is lighter than air and if not channeled, it first disperses into the atmosphere and then comes out.
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The article Can “golden” or “white” hydrogen be the fuel of the future? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lidrogeno-dorato-o-bianco-puo-essere-il-combustibile-del-futuro/ on Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:54:59 +0000.