https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-hydrogen-next-generation-energy …
Exploring for and Producing Hydrogen
Exploration for geologic hydrogen resources is likely to employ many of the same strategies and technologies that are currently used in petroleum exploration, with some added elements taken from mineral and geothermal resource exploration. Because of the potential for hydrogen to cause steel to become brittle, production of hydrogen trapped in reservoirs will require slightly different materials. Otherwise, the same drilling and completion equipment that is currently in use for natural gas development can be used.
However, unlike natural gas fields, some of the gas in natural hydrogen fields may be renewable given the rapid rate of hydrogen generation via water reduction. Moreover, some researchers have proposed that reservoirs, traps and seals may not even be necessary to produce geologic hydrogen. They suggest that we might be able to tap into rocks that are generating hydrogen, or have hydrogen migrating through them, and produce the hydrogen gas as it is being generated. Other scientists go even further and propose that hot water could be injected into iron-rich rocks that are not currently generating hydrogen in order to stimulate generation, somewhat similar to enhanced geothermal energy production.
“If you add up the amount of hydrogen we think might be trapped in reservoirs, plus the amount that might be produced directly as it is generated, and the amount that could be made through stimulation, you get a very large potential resource”, Ellis said.
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Hey, I get it. This contradicts what we have all “known” about hydrogen for… well… as long as I can remember.
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-hydrogen-earth-may-hold-vast-stores-renewable-carbon-free-fuel…
“When I first heard about it, I thought it was crazy,” says Emily Yedinak, a materials scientist who devoted a fellowship at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to drumming up interest in natural hydrogen. “The more that I read, the more I started to realize, wow, the science behind how hydrogen is produced is sound … I was kind of like, ‘Why is no one talking about this?’”
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Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished, says Prinzhofer, who has consulted on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says.
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Yet some scientists have become true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University of Bern, left a career at French oil giant Total because it wasn’t moving fast enough on hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery might end up in the history books alongside one that happened 163 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania. At the time, the world knew about seeps of oil in places such as Iraq and California but was blind to the vast deposits that lay underground. Then on 27 August 1859, a nearly bankrupt prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine and cast-iron drill pipes, struck black gold at a depth of 21 meters, and began collecting it in a bathtub. Before long, U.S. companies were harvesting millions of bathtubs of oil every day.
“I am thinking we are not very far from that with hydrogen,” Gaucher says. “We have the concept, we have the tools, the geology. … We only need people able to invest.”
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