Natural Hydrogen: Something or Nothing?
A breakthrough would redefine hydrogen as a fuel, no longer just an energy carrier.
“If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.” – Heraclitus
We have long held mixed views on the so-called hydrogen economy. Hydrogen could make for a reasonable carrier of energy if created with a fleet of nuclear reactors. It produces only water as a byproduct when burned, circumventing the whole carbon emissions thing, and there are few technical barriers to its wide deployment in society. Some 70 million tons of the stuff are produced in pure form globally each year—mainly for use in the synthesis of ammonia and certain refinery applications—and a further several dozen million tons are produced as gas mixtures. Handling, storage, and transportation challenges have largely been solved (with the notable exception of shipping on the seas, which remains a vexing constraint). We concluded a piece on the topic in mid-2022 as follows:
“We are fully supportive of developing the ancillary technologies needed to exploit the utopian potential of a massive nuclear energy renaissance. Eventually, physics will demand a return to sensemaking. When that happens, the option to pursue a hydrogen economy will no doubt be valuable.”
At the same time, we have had more than our fair share of fun poking holes in various cockamamie schemes involving the use of intermittent renewables to produce hydrogen, approaches doomed to a death of a thousand cuts of inefficiency. Governments around the world seem nonetheless set on wasting scores of billions chasing the impossible, a fact that makes it difficult to take anything associated with the hydrogen economy seriously.
The reigning challenge with leveraging hydrogen as part of our collective energy future has been the need to expend significant upfront energy to produce it. Today, nearly all industrial production of the molecule uses hydrocarbons as the main starting material, and the roundtrip energy efficiency of using hydrogen to power a car or heat a home is quite low. Most people—including us, until quite recently—believed that naturally occurring and economically viable deposits of hydrogen simply did not exist, and we have always been careful to refer to it as a carrier rather than a fuel.
But what if everything people thought they knew about hydrogen suddenly got turned on its head? Over the past several months, our readers have been forwarding a flurry of news articles that chronicle the alleged discovery of huge deposits of natural hydrogen all over the world. Such resources are sometimes referred to as either “white” or “gold” hydrogen to signify the minimal hydrocarbons required for their economic extraction. If true, such developments would indeed be a game-changer. A recent report on OilPrice.com covered one such exciting discovery (emphasis added throughout):
“Two scientists at France’s National Centre of Scientific Research recently found an enormous reserve of white hydrogen, which is the industry term for hydrogen that naturally occurs in the layers of the Earth’s crust underground in northeastern France. Ironically, the scientists were searching for fossil fuels when they discovered the deposit, which could contain between 6 million and 250 million metric tons of hydrogen, making it one of the largest of these kinds of deposits ever discovered.
For a long time, scientists have harbored doubts about whether there is actually enough white hydrogen in nature to justify investing in its exploration and extraction, but the discovery in France is the latest in a recent string of discoveries that have given new credibility to developing such plans. Geoffrey Ellis, a geochemist with the United States Geological Survey, estimates that there may be tens of billions of tons of white hydrogen lurking under the Earth’s surface, dwarfing the 100 million tons a year of hydrogen that is currently produced (mostly through fossil fuels).”
What are we to make of these claims that, if valid, could meaningfully impact global energy supplies for decades? Will the exploitation of natural hydrogen be the next big thing in energy? Longtime readers of Doomberg will know that we apply a simple five-question framework to assess technology claims that go viral, an approach we’ve applied to alleged breakthroughs in room-temperature superconductors, a new cancer wonder drug, and Toyota’s progress in the development of solid-state batteries. It’s been a few months since we last deployed the technique – let’s drill into these natural hydrogen headlines and see if we strike energy gold.