Could White Hydrogen Succeed Where Green Hydrogen Stumbled?
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As the green hydrogen revolution has stalled due to economic and technical barriers, white hydrogen extracted from natural geological deposits emerges as a promising alternative that could unlock vast untapped resources beneath the Earth's crust. Multiple startups worldwide are racing to commercialize this nascent technology, which could decarbonize some of the world's most challenging industrial sectors.
The green hydrogen hype has all but stalled out – but could white hydrogen take its place as the next big thing in decarbonization? Geologic hydrogen, so-called ‘white’ hydrogen, could potentially bypass the most critical barriers to scaling hydrogen use without significantly expanding the sector’s carbon footprint. While the technology is still nascent, it could one day decarbonize some of the world’s hardest-to-abate industrial sectors.
This form of hydrogen involves sourcing naturally occurring hydrogen found in rocks and other deposits in the Earth’s crust. “The potential is massive,” Pierre Levin, chief executive of Canadian geologic hydrogen startup Vema, told the New York Times earlier this year. “You can find rocks like this all over the world, enough to produce billions of tons of hydrogen.”
Hydrogen is extremely useful in traditionally emissions-intensive sectors like steelmaking and transportation because, like thermal or coking coal and heavy fuel oil, hydrogen can be combusted at high heat for use in industrial processes. But unlike those notoriously dirty fuel sources, hydrogen leaves behind nothing but water vapor when combusted. The problem is that most hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels, thereby negating its efficacy as a decarbonization tool.
In answer to this problem, ‘green’ hydrogen, which is made using only clean and renewable energy resources, has been promoted as a potential decarbonization game-changer for years now. Yet, as of 2023, less than one tenth of planned green hydrogen projects were actually realized. More specifically, “only 7% of global capacity announcements finished on schedule,” according to a paper called “The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap”, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Energy last year.
There are a few reasons for this – first and foremost, the numbers just aren’t adding up. Green hydrogen has remained expensive and unable to compete with other fuels. Second, it often isn’t even the best option for decarbonization pathways. Frequently, the clean energy required for green hydrogen production would be more efficiently consumed directly.
This is where so-called ‘white’ hydrogen could come in handy. Existing underground resources of natural hydrogen are vast and totally untapped. Recent research from scientists at the University of Oxford, Durham University and the University of Toronto estimates that hydrogen generated in the Earth’s continental crust over geological time contains energy equivalent to roughly 170,000 years of present-day global oil consumption, though it remains unclear how much has accumulated in recoverable deposits.
“Combining the ingredients to find accumulated hydrogen in any of these settings can be likened to cooking a soufflé – get any one of the ingredients, amounts, timing, or temperature wrong and you will be disappointed,” says Oxford study lead author Chris Ballentine. “One successful exploration recipe that is repeatable will unlock a commercially competitive, low-carbon hydrogen source that would significantly contribute to the energy transition – we have the right experience to combine these ingredients and find that recipe.”
Indeed, extracting and purifying the hydrogen found in the Earth’s crust in a way that is both environmentally friendly and economically efficient requires a complex web of factors. Geologists are seeking to discover a whole system to extract hydrogen, “featuring a production source, migration pathways, reservoir formation, and potentially geological traps capable of accumulating large quantities of H2 over the long term,” as explained by a brand new report from Futura. “It’s only once we fully understand how this system works, which has similarities to but also fundamental differences from oil systems, that large-scale industrial exploitation can be considered.”
But an increasing number of startups are trying to perfect this recipe faster than all the others to unlock this vast resource in a commercially viable manner. From Europe to the Philippines, it's only a matter of time before the world’s first geologic hydrogen hotspot breaks through.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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This form of hydrogen involves sourcing naturally occurring hydrogen found in rocks and other deposits in the Earth’s crust. “The potential is massive,” Pierre Levin, chief executive of Canadian geologic hydrogen startup Vema, told the New York Times earlier this year. “You can find rocks like this all over the world, enough to produce billions of tons of hydrogen.”
Hydrogen is extremely useful in traditionally emissions-intensive sectors like steelmaking and transportation because, like thermal or coking coal and heavy fuel oil, hydrogen can be combusted at high heat for use in industrial processes. But unlike those notoriously dirty fuel sources, hydrogen leaves behind nothing but water vapor when combusted. The problem is that most hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels, thereby negating its efficacy as a decarbonization tool.
In answer to this problem, ‘green’ hydrogen, which is made using only clean and renewable energy resources, has been promoted as a potential decarbonization game-changer for years now. Yet, as of 2023, less than one tenth of planned green hydrogen projects were actually realized. More specifically, “only 7% of global capacity announcements finished on schedule,” according to a paper called “The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap”, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Energy last year.
There are a few reasons for this – first and foremost, the numbers just aren’t adding up. Green hydrogen has remained expensive and unable to compete with other fuels. Second, it often isn’t even the best option for decarbonization pathways. Frequently, the clean energy required for green hydrogen production would be more efficiently consumed directly.
This is where so-called ‘white’ hydrogen could come in handy. Existing underground resources of natural hydrogen are vast and totally untapped. Recent research from scientists at the University of Oxford, Durham University and the University of Toronto estimates that hydrogen generated in the Earth’s continental crust over geological time contains energy equivalent to roughly 170,000 years of present-day global oil consumption, though it remains unclear how much has accumulated in recoverable deposits.
“Combining the ingredients to find accumulated hydrogen in any of these settings can be likened to cooking a soufflé – get any one of the ingredients, amounts, timing, or temperature wrong and you will be disappointed,” says Oxford study lead author Chris Ballentine. “One successful exploration recipe that is repeatable will unlock a commercially competitive, low-carbon hydrogen source that would significantly contribute to the energy transition – we have the right experience to combine these ingredients and find that recipe.”
Indeed, extracting and purifying the hydrogen found in the Earth’s crust in a way that is both environmentally friendly and economically efficient requires a complex web of factors. Geologists are seeking to discover a whole system to extract hydrogen, “featuring a production source, migration pathways, reservoir formation, and potentially geological traps capable of accumulating large quantities of H2 over the long term,” as explained by a brand new report from Futura. “It’s only once we fully understand how this system works, which has similarities to but also fundamental differences from oil systems, that large-scale industrial exploitation can be considered.”
But an increasing number of startups are trying to perfect this recipe faster than all the others to unlock this vast resource in a commercially viable manner. From Europe to the Philippines, it's only a matter of time before the world’s first geologic hydrogen hotspot breaks through.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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