They went hunting for fossil fuels. What they found could help save the world

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/29/climate/white-hydrogen-fossil-fuels-
climate/index.html

When two scientists went looking for fossil fuels beneath the ground of
northeastern France, they did not expect to discover something which could
supercharge the effort to tackle the climate crisis.

Jacques Pironon and Phillipe De Donato, both directors of research at
France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, were assessing the amount
of methane in the subsoils of the Lorraine mining basin using a “world
first” specialized probe, able to analyze gases dissolved in the water of
rock formations deep underground.

A couple of hundred meters down, the probe found low concentrations of
hydrogen. “This was not a real surprise for us,” Pironon told CNN; it’s
common to find small amounts near the surface of a borehole. But as the
probe went deeper, the concentration ticked up. At 1,100 meters down it
was 14%, at 1,250 meters it was 20%.

This was surprising, Pironon said. It indicated the presence of a large
reservoir of hydrogen beneath. They ran calculations and estimated the
deposit could contain between 6 million and 250 million metric tons? of
hydrogen.

That could make it one of the largest deposits of “white hydrogen” ever
discovered, Pironon said. The find has helped fuel an already feverish
interest in the gas.

White hydrogen – also referred to as “natural,” “gold” or “geologic”
hydrogen – is naturally produced or present in the Earth’s crust and has
become something of a climate holy grail.

Hydrogen produces only water when burned, making it very attractive as a
potential clean energy source for industries like aviation, shipping and
steel-making that need so much energy it’s almost impossible to meet
through renewables such as solar and wind.

But while hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it
generally exists combined with other molecules. Currently, commercial
hydrogen is produced in an energy-intensive process almost entirely
powered by fossil fuels.

A rainbow of colors is used as a shorthand for the different types of
hydrogen. “Gray” is made from methane gas and “brown” from coal. “Blue”
hydrogen is the same as gray, but the planet-heating pollution produced is
captured before it goes into the atmosphere.

The most promising from a climate perspective is “green” hydrogen, made
using renewable energy to split water. Yet production remains small scale
and expensive.

That’s why interest in white hydrogen, a potentially abundant, untapped
source of clean-burning energy, has ratcheted up over the last few years.

‘We haven’t been looking in the right places’
“If you had asked me four years ago what I thought about natural hydrogen,
I would have told you ‘oh, it doesn’t exist,’” said Geoffrey Ellis, a
geochemist with the US Geological Survey. “Hydrogen’s out there, we know
it’s around,” he said, but scientists thought big accumulations weren’t
possible.

Then he found out about Mali. Arguably, the catalyst for the current
interest in white hydrogen can be traced to this West African country.

In 1987, in the village of Bourakébougou, a driller was left with burns
after a water well unexpectedly exploded as he leaned over the edge of it
while smoking a cigarette.

The well was swiftly plugged and abandoned until 2011, when it was
unplugged by an oil and gas company and reportedly found to be producing a
gas that was 98% hydrogen. The hydrogen was used to power the village, and
more than a decade later, it is still producing.

When a study came out about the well in 2018, it caught the attention of
the science community, including Ellis. His initial reaction was that
there had to be something wrong with the research, “because we just know
that this can’t happen.”

Then the pandemic hit and he had time on his hands to start digging. The
more he read, the more he realized “we just haven’t been looking for it,
we haven’t been looking in the right places.”

The recent discoveries are exciting for Ellis, who has been working as a
petroleum geochemist since the 1980s. He witnessed the rapid growth of the
shale gas industry in the US, which revolutionized the energy market.
“Now,” he said, “here we are in what I think is probably a second
revolution.”

White hydrogen is “very promising,” agreed Isabelle Moretti, a scientific
researcher at the University of Pau et des Pays de l’Adour and the
University of Sorbonne and a white hydrogen expert.

“Now the question is no longer about the resource… but where to find large
economic reserves,” she told CNN.

A slew of startups
Dozens of processes generate white hydrogen but there is still some
uncertainty about how large natural deposits form.

Geologists have tended to focus on “serpentinization,” where water reacts
with iron-rich rocks to produce hydrogen, and “radiolysis,” a radiation-
driven breakdown of water molecules.

White hydrogen deposits have been found throughout the world, including in
the US, eastern Europe, Russia, Australia, Oman, as well as France and
Mali.

Some have been discovered by accident, others by hunting for clues like
features in the landscapes sometimes referred to as “fairy circles” –
shallow, elliptical depressions that can leak hydrogen.

Ellis estimates globally there could be tens of billions of tons of white
hydrogen. This would be vastly more than the 100 million tons a year of
hydrogen that is currently produced and the 500 million tons predicted to
be produced annually by 2050, he said.

“Most of this is almost certainly going to be in very small accumulations
or very far offshore, or just too deep to actually be economic to
produce,” he said. But if just 1% can be found and produced, it would
provide 500 million tons of hydrogen for 200 years, he added.

It’s a tantalizing prospect for a slew of startups.

Australia-based Gold Hydrogen is currently drilling in the Yorke Peninsula
in South Australia. It targeted that spot after scouring the state’s
archives and discovering that back in the 1920s, a number of boreholes had
been drilled there which had very high concentrations of hydrogen. The
prospectors, only interested in fossil fuels, abandoned them.

“We’re very excited by what we’re seeing,” said managing director Neil
McDonald. There is more testing and drilling to do but the company could
get into early production possibly in late 2024, he told CNN.

Some startups are seeing eye-popping investments. Koloma, a Denver-based
white hydrogen start-up, has secured $91 million from investors, including
the Bill Gates-founded investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures –
although the company remains tight-lipped about exactly where in the US it
is drilling and when it is aiming for commercialization.

Another Denver-based company, Natural Hydrogen Energy, founded by
geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, has completed an exploratory hydrogen
borehole in Nebraska in 2019 and has plans for new wells. The world is
“very close to the first commercial projects,” Zgonnik told CNN.

“Natural hydrogen is a solution which will allow us to get get to speed”
on climate action, he said.

From hype to reality
The challenge for these businesses and for scientists will be translating
hypothetical promise into a commercial reality.

“There could be a period of decades where there’s a lot of trial and error
and false starts,” Ellis said. But speed is vital. “If it’s going to take
us 200 years to develop the resource, that’s not really going to be of
much use.”

But many of the startups are bullish. Some predict years, not decades, to
commercialization. “We have all necessary technology we need, with some
slight modifications,” Zgonnik said.

Challenges remain. In some countries, regulations are an obstacle. Costs
also need to be worked out. According to calculations based on the Mali
well, white hydrogen could cost around $1 a kilogram to produce – compared
to around $6 a kilogram for green hydrogen. But white hydrogen could
quickly become more expensive if large deposits require deeper drilling.

Back in the Lorraine basin, Pironon and De Donato’s next steps are to
drill down to 3,000 meters to get a clearer idea of exactly how much white
hydrogen there is.

There’s a long way to go, but it would be ironic if this region – once one
of western Europe’s key coal producers – became an epicenter of a new
white hydrogen industry.


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