Science

Caribbeans

(1,038 posts) Wed Dec 18, 2024, 04:50 PM Wednesday

Model suggests Earth's subsurface may hold up to 5.6 10⁶ million metric tons of natural hydrogen - Phys.org

Model suggests Earth's subsurface may hold up to 5.6 × 10⁶ million metric tons of natural hydrogen

Bob Yirka | Phys.org | DECEMBER 16, 2024

A pair of geologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, has created a model that shows Earth's subsurface may hold up to 5.6 × 106 million metric tons of natural hydrogen. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, Geoffrey Ellis and Sarah Gelman added factors to a geological model to produce estimates regarding the likely amount of hydrogen in parts of the Earth.

Prior research has shown that hydrogen can be produced artificially by applying electricity to water molecules to break them apart, leaving oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen is also produced naturally, via chemical reactions between rocks when they come into contact with one another. But until relatively recently, it was thought that very little hydrogen was made this way.

When geologists found huge natural reservoirs of hydrogen gas in Albania and West Africa, that thinking changed. Now, researchers believe that there are huge stores of hydrogen below our feet—the question remains, however, how to find it.

In this new study, the researchers made estimates regarding the likely amount of hydrogen contained in rocks and reservoirs in the Earth's subsurface, which is loosely defined as the stratum...more
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-earth-subsurface-million-metric-tons.html

RELATED:

'Astonishing results' | Natural hydrogen purity of up to 95.8% discovered at drill site in South Australia
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/astonishing-results-natural-hydrogen-purity-of-up-to-95-8-discovered-at-drill-site-in-south-australia/2-1-1651222

2 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

Model suggests Earth's subsurface may hold up to 5.6 10⁶ million metric tons of natural hydrogen - Phys.org (Original Post) Caribbeans Wednesday OP

Oh my dweller Wednesday #1

No matter how many times we hear this fossil fuel greenwashing wishful thinking scam, the fact will still be true... NNadir Wednesday #2

dweller

(25,242 posts)

1. Oh my

Reply to Caribbeans (Original post)

Wed Dec 18, 2024, 04:59 PM

Wednesday

But whatever can be done with all of that naturally occurring hydrogen?
🤔

And let’s just knock off all that rock rubbing against each other , right now !

✌🏻

NNadir

(34,841 posts)

2. No matter how many times we hear this fossil fuel greenwashing wishful thinking scam, the fact will still be true...

Reply to Caribbeans (Original post)

Wed Dec 18, 2024, 07:25 PM

Wednesday

...that the world has been drilled on every continent, except perhaps Antarctica, without running into a shit load of hydrogen.

If, however, geological hydrogen has formed from geological reformation of a dangerous fossil fuel, it will definitely be in the presence of carbon dioxide.

The chemical reaction for methane is CH₄ +2 H₂O -> 6H₂ + CO₂.

This is the same reaction by which the bulk of the world's hydrogen is made right now, which is why hydrogen is a rather filthy fuel, although fossil fuel companies never tire of advertising it as "green" with a bait and switch.

To find any of this "astonishing" one either has be rather uneducated.

The full paper, not the bullshit wishful thinking interpretation of the paper is here:

Geoffrey S. Ellis, Sarah E. Gelman, Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources. Sci. Adv.10, eado0955(2024)

Given the uncertainties in the model construction and the inputs, the model results should be viewed as a first-order approximation of the magnitude of the potential in-place geologic hydrogen resource. The model makes no predictions about the distribution of the hydrogen in the subsurface, which is critical for the economic viability of any potential resource (21). Given what is known about the distribution of petroleum and nonpetroleum fluids (e.g., helium and CO2) in the subsurface, it is likely that recovery of most subsurface hydrogen can be expected to be in accumulations that are too deep, too far offshore, or too small to be economically recovered. However, if even a small amount of the most probable predicted in-place resource (~5.6 × 106 Mt) was recoverable, this could represent a substantial resource.

I added the bold.

The operative words in the full paper are words like "suggests," "could."

Now, I fully recognize that people selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," couldn't give a rat's ass about the extreme global heating we now observe after 5 decades of hydrogen bullshit, but the paper also contains this sentence, which "suggests" a time scale:

Furthermore, there is a approximately 94% probability that the subsurface endowment of natural hydrogen will exceed future extraction capacity through the year 2100 and a greater than 75% probability of this being the case beyond the year 2200.

Since, as of 2024, it is already far too late to address extreme global heating, this wishful thinking won't mean shit to the future generations suffering on a destroyed planet, a planet destroyed by fossil fuel marketing, including the rebranding of fossil fuels as "hydrogen," with "bait and switch" graphics of huge stretches of wilderness industrialized for solar industrial plants.

In any case, if one really is interested in telling the truth, a good approach is to go to the original source, rather than a dubious interpretation, especially one that is deliberately dishonest, clearly disingenuous marketing.

Right now the planet is in flames, this after close to half a century of "hydrogen will save us" bullshit largely handed out by fossil fuel companies to encourage wishful thinking and of course, to convince people to use their product, since the production of hydrogen from dangerous fossil fuels degrades the energy value overall according to the second law of thermodynamics, of which fossil fuel companies expect, regrettably correctly, most to be ignorant.

First issue (1976) : International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

All this wishful thinking actually kills people, since fossil fuels kill people in vast numbers while morons carry on about tritium from Fukushima, which doesn't kill people.

Hydrogen is a dirty fuel, and is likely to remain a dirty fuel in any "drill, baby, drill" scenario to recover it from geological sources.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Reply to this discussion