The Independent -
https://archive.ph/Y5dky
Has solution to climate change been buried deep in Earth all along?
Burning hydrogen produces only heat and water, and is attracting billions of dollars in investment
What if the answer to the climate crisis has been tucked away, since time immemorial, beneath our feet?
That is the possibility posed by increasing discoveries of vast, underground deposits of white hydrogen around the world.
Burning hydrogen produces only heat and water, and it’s attracting billions of dollars in investment as countries race to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
But not all hydrogen is created equal, and the energy industry uses a colour-coded, sliding scale to indicate its sustainability. Most common is “gray hydrogen”, made using the fossil fuel, natural gas. “Blue hydrogen” is created the same way but captures the carbon emissions; “green hydrogen” is produced by using clean energy to split water. As the name suggests, green hydrogen is the “greenest” but expensive and produced in smaller quantities.
Then there’s white hydrogen – also known as natural, gold or geologic hydrogen – which doesn’t need to be freed from other elements like oxygen by using vast amounts of electricity.
Until recently, it went relatively unnoticed that white hydrogen was already in real-world operation. Bourakébougou, a remote village in the landlocked West African nation of Mali, has powered its electricity supply with white hydrogen for more than a decade. The discovery was made after a local businessman brought in a Canadian consulting firm to test a water well that had caught fire when a worker lit a cigarette near it.
That company, Hydroma, says the source contains 98 per cent hydrogen gas and is the world’s first electricity production from white hydrogen without any carbon emissions via direct combustion.
Inevitably, there’s a catch – and the hapless smoker in Bourakébougou provides the first clue.
Hydrogen is a lot more flammable than natural gas, and can cause fires and explosions if not handled properly. Because the gas is so light, no known odorants can be added to alert people to potential leaks, just as a sulfur-containing smell raises the alarm on natural gas and propane.
Another unknown quantity of hydrogen, in general, is what impact it has on heating our already overcooked planet.
Hydrogen’s floaty quality means it easily leaks, warned a recent study by the Environmental Defense Fund, so the gas’ warming impact is “both widely overlooked and underestimated”.
“Therefore, the effectiveness of hydrogen as a decarbonization strategy, especially over timescales of several decades, remains unclear,” the researchers noted.
These aren’t the only challenges to overcome. Next comes finding the stuff, as many of the large deposits discovered so far have been hit upon by accident.
The largest accumulation of white hydrogen to date was inadvertently found in France this summer by scientists who were studying methane at a mining basin.
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