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That’s Big: Natural Hydrogen Could Power World for 100,000 Years, Survey Finds | Sabine Hossenfelder
A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of a fuel (often hydrogen) and an oxidizing agent (often oxygen)[1] into electricity through a pair of redoxreactions.[2] Fuel cells are different from most batteries in requiring a continuous source of fuel and oxygen (usually from air) to sustain the chemical reaction, whereas in a battery the chemical energy usually comes from substances that are already present in the battery.[3]Fuel cells can produce electricity continuously for as long as fuel and oxygen are supplied.
Hydrogen is the perfect fuel in some aspects – it burns cleanly and is efficient – but unfortunately it’s currently mostly produced from fossil fuels, which isn’t clean at all. According to a new paper, though, reserves of hydrogen stored in subterranean reservoirs are more common than you’d think and could supply energy for the world for 100000 years. Really? Let’s take a look.
Natural hydrogen resource accumulation in the continental crust. NATURE Review Article Published: 13 May 2025
Abstract
Naturally occurring hydrogen accumulations could be an important source of clean hydrogen for hard-to-abate industry use and energy, but societally important reserves have yet to be proven. In this Review, we explore the conditions that enable the development of natural hydrogen resources in the geological subsurface, by examining the processes of hydrogen generation, migration, accumulation and preservation. Natural hydrogen is generated within the continental crust by two key mechanisms, water–rock reactions where Fe2+, dominantly in ultramafic rocks, is oxidized to Fe3+, and by radiolysis of water via radioactive elements U, Th and K found in upper-crustal rocks. These two generation reactions operate on very different timescales, ranging from thousands to millions of years for water–rock reactions in highly fractured rocks, to tens to hundreds of millions of years for water-limited water–rock and radiolysis reactions. Different globally widespread terrane types have the potential for hydrogen accumulations: continental margin ophiolite complexes, alkaline granite terranes, large igneous provinces, and Archaean greenstone belts and tonalite–trondhjemite–granodiorite granitic batholiths. Exploitation of natural hydrogen would have a low-carbon footprint, but continental systems do not provide a regenerating system on decadal to centennial timescales, and should not be considered a renewable resource. Calculating hydrogen generation by water–rock reactions is subject to more uncertainty than radiolysis reactions, but improving these estimates should be a priority for future research.
Key points
- Over the past billion years, the Archaean crust alone has generated volumes of hydrogen energy equivalent to ca 170,000 years of present-day societal oil use. However, it is not known how much of this hydrogen has been preserved in societally relevant accumulations.
- Natural hydrogen accumulation requires a source rock, water within the source rock, transport and a trap to retain the hydrogen. The generation and preservation of a gas phase is essential for economic recovery.
- Gas accumulations of high-purity (>90%) hydrogen are known to occur (such as the Bourakebougou reserve found in Mali), but hydrogen mixed with helium, nitrogen and other gases are predicted in many settings.
- Helium, readily detected in near-surface fluids, provides a critical analogue to hydrogen, and can illustrate regional controls on deep gas release, transport and gas-phase formation.
- A basic understanding of the geological controls of hydrogen generation by radiolytic and water–rock reaction pathways exists and enables exploration to find the most prospective regions.
- The mantle is not a source of hydrogen gas found in the crust or near surface, as mantle-derived hydrogen is most stable as water at pressures and temperatures shallower than ca. 90 km depth.
In a new report that just came out, a group of scientists say that the crust of our planet contains enough natural hydrogen to power our civilization for more than one hundred thousand years. Maybe hydrogen isn’t a dream, maybe it can actually work. Let’s have a look. Hydrogen burns cleanly with oxygen to water while creating energy. That makes it sound like the ideal fuel. It’s clean, efficient, and, best of all, doesn’t come with a dictator attached, which has made it appealing especially in Europe. The problem is just that we currently produce hydrogen almost exclusively from natural gas and coal. And that releases carbon dioxide. One can produce hydrogen by splitting water with renewable energies, like solar or wind. This has been called “green hydrogen.” In practice, however, the systems have proven too expensive, too inefficient, and too small in scale. Stocks of hydrogen companies have been tanking for a while now, and many companies have cancelled plans. The European Union didn’t get the message. Just in February, they poured almost a billion euro of tax money into more hydrogen projects. It’s true what they say, by the way, I pay about 50% tax. The one thing that really could change the game is “white hydrogen.” That’s molecular hydrogen that’s already in the ground, ready to use, but stuck in rocks. Unlike green hydrogen, which we need to produce with electricity, white hydrogen was formed by nature, from energy sources that exist underground, such as geothermal heat, stress, or radioactivity. You may remember the excitement around a big find of natural hydrogen in France in early twenty-twenty-three. Back then, a team of scientists reported wells under the Lorraine region that, they said, had gas with concentrations of up to twenty percent in hydrogen rising from deep boreholes. Their preliminary figures sounded promising but were very thinly documented, so many scientists treated the claims with cautious optimism but a lot of scepticism. Now, just in March, one of the researchers involved in the project, Jacques Pironon from CNRS, told some journalists that they’ve found a second reservoir in the Moselle region. At current energy values, the total hydrogen in both regions could be worth more than ninety billion US dollars. That’s staggering and the reason why the headlines say that this could redefine clean energy or that France could become a leader in the global clean energy revolution. I yet have to see any good evidence that these numbers are even remotely realistic. But yes, it does sound pretty good. And then, just a few weeks ago, this new paper appeared. Rather than focusing on one country or one rock type, the authors take a planetary perspective. They catalogue every known process that can generate hydrogen underground. That is iron-rich rocks reacting with water which frees hydrogen, or water split by radioactive decay, or the ground is so hot that it splits fossils which creates hydrogen along with methane and some other things like Carbon dioxide. Then they estimate how much each of these sources could contribute, and create the first global map for natural hydrogen occurrences. According to that map the largest countries, Russia, Canada, the USA, and Australia have the largest prospective hydrogen resources. Not so surprising, but that isn’t the whole story. Mali is the one case where they already have hydrogen extraction from the ground and in Oman it’s been reported before. But news is that the US West Coast and Cuba look promising. This is because, the researchers say, the ground there is an old ocean floor that has been pushed up but has built up hydrogen and stored it in rocks for a long time. They also have some practical advice which is to look for traces of Helium that gases out of the ground, which is fairly easy to detect and often, they say, is a good indicator that hydrogen might be to find deeper below. It remains to be seen how much of that hydrogen can actually be extracted but many companies are rushing to find it, like the company HyTerra in Kansas, or the Denver-based startup Koloma that is backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Besos. In the UK there is the company GeTech which is drilling in Scotland. In Spain there is Helios and the Japanese government is investing into it, too. I really want this to work, I like the purity of the idea. But I am still very skeptical. And so I say, keep on dusting the solar panels. I’ve been saying this so much, we now have T-shirts with that tagline in our store. Because let’s be realistic. Europeans won’t extract the hydrogen. We will write a 500-page regulation on how to think about it responsibly. How does that work? Why is that so? If those are questions you also like to ask, you should really have a look at Brilliant. I found it to be the perfect way to turn curiosity into understanding, one small step at a time. All courses on Brilliant have interactive visualizations and come with follow-up questions. What you see here is from their newly updated maths courses. No matter how abstract the topic seems, Brilliant courses have intuitive visualizations that really click into my brain. And Brilliant covers a large variety of topics in science, computer science, and maths. From general scientific thinking to dedicated courses. Just what I’m interested in. And they’re adding new courses each month. I even have my own course on Brilliant that’s an introduction to quantum mechanics. It’ll help you understand what a wave function is and what the difference is between superpositions and entanglement. It also covers interference, the uncertainty principle, and Bell’s theorem. 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