So far, one has been found in Africa and another is being sought. All it takes is one more discovery somewhere in Europe or the USA and it will change the world, says geologist Jon Gluyas. Giant deposits of fuel may be hidden underground, the combustion of which does not produce CO₂ emissions.

In 1987, near the village of Bourakébougou in Mali, a strange thing happened – instead of water, an unknown gas began to flow from a 108-meter-deep well bore. When a worker who was smoking a cigarette looked into the hole, the gas exploded and burned him. A blue fire by day and a yellow fire by night spewed from the hole for several more weeks before workers were able to extinguish it and seal the well. Since then, the people of the village have preferred to avoid the place, believing it to be cursed. This lasted until 2007, when Malian businessman Aliou Diallo heard about it. He bought the rights to explore the area and decided to “turn a cursed place into a blessed one”.

Five years later, Diallo discovered that the gas that had started leaking from the well years earlier was 98% hydrogen. This was very surprising because hydrogen was thought to be unable to occur in large quantities trapped underground in this way.

This story, described in a recent article in the journal Science, started the hunt to answer an exciting question: Are there large deposits of carbon-neutral and renewable fuel underground that have been overlooked until now? No one knows a clear answer yet. Chances are the answer is yes, but at least it’s not unrealistic.

What is hydrogen for?

Hydrogen has long been talked about as a possible fuel of the future or a green alternative to fossil fuels, at least for areas where electrification is not suitable. However, it is assumed that it must be produced. This can be done in many ways – taking into account the carbon footprint, we talk about, for example, green, white, brown and other hydrogen.

Hydrogen extracted straight from the surface would be a new category – so-called golden hydrogen. The same term is used in connection with projects that, for example, explore the possibility of having bacteria create hydrogen in extracted oil deposits. But natural hydrogen could be even more attractive.

So why hasn’t the hydrogen gold rush started yet and the media is not full of the topic of natural hydrogen reserves?

Because too little is known so far and the hope that quanta of golden hydrogen are trapped underground may be futile. According to Science, it currently looks like the big energy companies are waiting and observing the development from afar, while the risk of investments with an uncertain outcome is taken on by smaller projects.

“One More Discovery and the World Will Change”

There are already many projects around the world. For example, one start-up commenced drilling in Nebraska in 2019, and many are starting to operate in Australia as well. The first European subsurface hydrogen will be extracted by the Helios Aragon project, which is looking for it in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees.

According to British scientist Jon Gluyas, who acts as an expert advisor on this project, a potential boom in the industry requires finding a single deposit similar in size to the one in Mali. But it must appear in a part of the world where there will be a commercially available market for hydrogen. “One more such discovery somewhere in the US or Europe is enough and the world will change in an instant,” said Gluyas in an interview with Seznam Zpravy.

According to Science, the hydrogen from an underground reservoir near the Malian village of Bourakébougou served mainly the locals. A generator was connected to the source, which supplied the village with electricity. However, the entrepreneur’s attempt to fully commercialize the hydrogen field are progressing slowly, and only a few more exploratory wells have been drilled in the vicinity.

Nevertheless, the story had a great response in the world. In 2018, an article was published in an international scientific journal about the case, and then, according to Science, a bag was torn open with other studies raising hopes that golden hydrogen might be available on a large scale.

According to Gluyas, another milestone that draws attention to the topic was last year’s publication of USGS modelling. In it, the respected agency states that trillions of tons of hydrogen could potentially be trapped in mineable sites, enough to meet global demand for “thousands of years” even if hydrogen consumption will increase rapidly due to the transition to green energy. “There are more estimates that are independent of each other and come to the same conclusion,” says Gluyas, adding that, for example, his colleagues made similar resource estimates almost ten years ago.

These estimates are uncertain simply because scientists do not yet fully understand all the processes of underground hydrogen formation and its movements. Therefore, they cannot estimate accurately how likely it is that hydrogen is present in such quantities and in such places that it makes commercial sense to extract it.

The advantage of natural hydrogen is that, unlike, for example, oil or natural gas, it was not created millions of years ago, but is created practically continuously when underground water reacts with iron minerals at high temperature and pressure.

At the same time, however, hydrogen can react underground with other elements, or it can also be “eaten” by bacteria. In addition, it is a very small molecule and is light, which increases the chance that it will escape to the surface instead of accumulating in the subsurface.

Gluyas, and not only him, nevertheless believes in the existence of large deposits. “For the last 10 years or so, I have worked mainly in the helium field. I came to hydrogen because hydrogen is produced during one of the processes of helium formation,” the geologist points out, adding that his hope for the existence of large and available natural hydrogen reserves is fueled by a fairly simple hypothesis. It is estimated that there is simply such a huge amount of hydrogen produced in the continental crust that even if only a small percentage is retained, it can still be enough.

The opinion that hydrogen could be produced on a large scale with a profit is, however, still rather a minority opinion, despite promising studies from recent years.

“Nobody’s Looked for It Yet“

According to Science, the best hope for commercially available hydrogen is where iron-rich minerals – such as olivine – are deep enough for the environment to be above 200°C, but not too deep to be inaccessible to the water seeping from the surface.

Gluyas and his colleagues are looking for natural hydrogen in the vicinity of forgotten wells from the 1960s, from which, according to old records, hydrogen was flowing, among other signs.

When asked how it is possible that these data were ignored for decades, Gluyas answers as follows: “It’s very simple. Hydrocarbons are easy to produce. You have CO₂ as a by-product with most production methods, but that didn’t matter in the past. Now that we know how damaging CO₂ is and we are trying to reduce its amount in the atmosphere, we don’t want to use these methods, and if we do, we try to capture it, which makes the whole process more expensive. With that, the demand for natural hydrogen increased, which wasn’t here before.“

After all, the USGS also draws attention to this. The chances that the hydrogen deposits could simply have been overlooked are increased by the fact that this gas does not usually occur where oil occurs. Additionally, when well drillers have measured what is contained in past wells, they rarely “bothered to measure for the presence of hydrogen,” according to the USGS. “The bottom line is that we haven’t really looked at all so far. We didn’t try to find it in the right places or with the right tools,” said a USGS geochemist.

Gluyas admits that although he personally believes in the future of golden hydrogen, objectively it is impossible to say whether we are at the beginning of a revolutionary change. “If I was right or wrong, only time will tell. However, the currently known facts are, in my opinion, sufficient for enthusiasm,” says the scientist. He adds that if he were an investor with funds, he would not wait for anything.

Other challenges

Even if large and accessible deposits are discovered, the hydrogen industry will still have to overcome a long series of obstacles.

One of them is, for example, storage. According to Science, one kilogram of hydrogen can release the same amount of energy equal to less than four liters of gasoline, but if it is not compressed, it takes up more space than the drum of a large mobile concrete mixer. There are ways to improve this ratio, but they introduce other problems. For example, liquefied hydrogen must be cooled to a temperature of -253 °C.

Because of this and the lack of a distribution network, start-ups often limit plans to use hydrogen locally.

The head of the Helios Aragon project, Ian Munro, estimates, based on measurements to date, that in the most promising location, about 1.1 million tons of hydrogen could be obtained over 20 to 30 years, with the start of production in 2028. According to him, one production field should be enough to satisfy the consumption of new local industry, accounting for roughly a tenth of the current hydrogen consumption of the whole of Spain.

The progress of the project is currently prevented by legislation. But Munro believes it will soon be resolved. He also revealed to Seznam Zpravy that he is already planning another project in Poland