About 35 years ago well drillers came to the Bourakébougou in Mali in an attempt to find the water table so the village could enjoy a more reliable source of fresh water. They had given up on a dry hole when one of the drillers felt a breeze coming out of it. Peering in, he discovered smoking can be bad for your health. The explosion and fire didn't kill him, but left him with painful burns. The fire burned for weeks without smoke and was bright enough to light up many of the surrounding fields at night. Weeks passed before the well was finally capped.
About twenty years ago an African oil company bought the rights to the area thinking it must be some kind of natural gas deposit. That turned out to be partly correct. Analysis showed the gas was 98% hydrogen. That, of course, seened impossible. Hydrogen is rarely associated with fossil fuel deposits. It didn't seem like enough for viable production at the time, but an old car engine was modified to run on hydrogen. It turned a small generator which produced electricity for lighting the village. The head of the oil company started Hydroma with the goal of finding profitable hydrogen wells.
You've probably seen hydrogen associated with a variety of colors. Brown and black hydrogen is produced by coal gasification and results in the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas using a steam reforming process that currently releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Very dirty, but inexpensive and common ways to produce a clean burning gas. Blue hydrogen is essentially grey hydrogen where most of the carbon dioxide is captured and stored. Green hydrogen is produced using the technique you probably used in school when you were eight or nine - electrolysis. It can be used as a storage mechanism for intermittent "green" power sources like wind and solar. There are a few other colors made from more obscure techniques, but the common thread is each technique recognizes that hydrogen is bound to some unrelated molecule and has to be split off. Think of it was a battery of sorts.
There's a lot of hydrogen in the Universe - about 90% of regular matter or about 75% by mass. About 62% of the atoms that make up you - 9.5% by mass - happen to be hydrogen. When the Earth was formed, the gravitational pull wasn't strong enough to capture and hold any molecular hydrogen in the vicinity. It had been assumed that small pockets could be trapped in the Earth, but these would be small. Bourakébougou was viewed as an unlikely exception. It seemed likely hydrogen was produced in certain iron-rich rocks in the upper mantle where the temperature could be high enough to release hydrogen.1 Entirely different locations than where one finds fossil fuels and therefore poorly explored.
A few new mines have been found and characterized. So far they're modest in size. Current hydrogen demand is on the order of 100 million tons a year and these deposits are more on the order of tens of thousands of tons. But recently geologists have projected the possibility of much larger amounts. It isn't clear how much would be reachable or the cost, but there's excitement in what's being called gold hydrogen.
As a fuel, and gold hydrogen is a fuel, hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. Although hydrogen's energy density per unit mass is high, its volumetric energy density is low making it impractical for current aviation technology. It seems more useful for large transport - long distance trucks and ships as well as power plants, but green hydrogen as a battery may be more cost effective as well as being a natural battery for intermittent green energy sources. Time will tell. Gold hydrogen in potentially commercial quantities came as a surprise to me.
The Universe is peppered with gravitationally assembled hydrogen fusion power plants - our Sun being the most familiar. We use only the tiniest amount of the power that falls on the Earth and that, in turn, is only a tiny fraction of the star's power output. It's a question of capture, conversion and transmission. We know how to do many of those things, but..
If you're lucky enough to be in the path of totality of the North American solar eclipse in about six weeks you might get a sense of the Sun's activity. Up close it's much more dramatic. Here's a nice video showing 11 days looking out from a side mounted camera on the Parker Solar Probe - part of a mission of highly elliptical orbits that get closer and closer to the Sun. A few months ago it came with 7.26 million kilometers of the Sun's surface and was trucking along at over 635,000 kilometers per hour at perigee - far and away the fastest probe humans have made. (it takes much more energy to move towards the Sun than away from it) The video flies through a coronal mass ejection.. it's amazing stuff! (while I'm a fan of Beethoven, I think this is better appreciated without the music)
And finally the Seagull Nebula - a nearby cloud of mostly hydrogen. It's too dim for our eyes, but is close enough to appear large in the sky. It was one of the first things I looked for with the telescope I made as a teenager. To see its real spender you need very long exposures - something unavailable to me in the day. APOD is a wonderful site.
__________
1 There are a half dozen potential mechanisms. This one, involving the mineral olivine, has been observed and is likely to be the most important.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.