Gusher of gas deep in mine stokes interest in natural hydrogen

Researchers have discovered a massive spring of hydrogen, bubbling out of a deep mine in Albania. Although it may not be economical to exploit, the surprisingly high flow of the gas is likely to raise interest in the emerging field of natural hydrogen, the overlooked idea that Earth itself could be a source of the clean-burning fuel. “These deposits have been ignored by the oil and gas industry for a very long time,” says Frieder Klein, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “This goes in the right direction.” One takeaway from the discovery, published today in Science , is that hydrogen seems to be more ubiquitous than once imagined, says Michael Webber, an energy systems researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you look for it, you’ll find it,” he says. “It could really disrupt geopolitics, and in many good ways, because the hydrogen will be where the oil and gas are not.” Governments are investing billions of dollars to make “green hydrogen” by using renewable energy to break down water. The aim is to replace fossil fuels in industries such as steelmaking and fertilizer production, and in heavy transportation. But extracting hydrogen from naturally occurring deposits underground might be cheaper–if enough trapped gas exists. For decades, experts were doubtful. They thought the gas, energy-rich and reactive, would either be gobbl...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news