Search For Carbon-Free Natural Hydrogen Intensifies

The discovery of 98% natural hydrogen seeping out a hole in Mali in 1987 confirmed what a group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas, Eric Hand reported for Science.

Photo Insert: Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable.

These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and accumulates in underground traps.

There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet global demand for thousands of years, a US Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) showed.

Since 2018, when Malian businessman Aliou Diallo and his colleagues described the Malian field in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, the number of papers on natural hydrogen has exploded.

“It’s absolutely incredible and really exponential,” says geologist Alain Prinzhofer, lead author on the Mali paper and scientific director of GEO4U, a Brazil-based oil and gas services firm doing more hydrogen work.

In Australia, startups are snatching up the rights to explore for hydrogen. Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) formed its first natural hydrogen committee, and USGS began to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the US.

“We’re in the very beginning, but it will go fast,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy. In 2019, the startup completed the first hydrogen borehole in the US, in Nebraska.

Natural hydrogen has also been found in Ukraine. All commercial hydrogen has to be manufactured, either in a polluting way, by using fossil fuels, or by using renewable electricity.

Natural hydrogen, if it forms sizable reserves, might be there for the taking, giving the experienced oil and gas drillers a new, environmentally friendly mission. “I believe that it has the potential to replace all fossil fuels,” Zgonnik says.

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.

“Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says. It is still the early days for natural hydrogen. Scientists don’t completely understand how it forms and migrates and—most important—whether it accumulates in a commercially exploitable way.

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