SteamyTea

The gold hydrogen rush: Does Earth contain near-limitless clean fuel? Prospectors around the world are scrambling to find reserves of "gold hydrogen", a naturally occurring fuel that burns without producing carbon dioxide. But how much is really out there and how easy is it to tap into? By James Dinneen 31 January 2024 Gilles and Cecilie Studio AS WE drive out of Muscat, the white buildings of Oman’s capital give way to an expanse of open sand ahead of the foreboding Hajar mountains. It takes us 2 hours to reach our destination, a journey that includes our SUV nearly getting stuck in the narrow back alleys of a town. But, eventually, geophysicist Ammar Alali and I arrive at a peaceful spring in the desert, surrounded by golden grasses and date palms. Alali frowns disapprovingly at a stream of bubbles in a pool of water. “It’s energy going to waste,” he says. I have come here because Oman’s mountains are at the forefront of a global search for a new and potentially transformative fuel, sometimes called “gold hydrogen”. Colourless and odourless, this gas has good environmental credentials because it burns cleanly, producing nothing but water. Usually, however, we have to make it in an emissions-intensive process. But here in the mountains of Oman – and in places with similar geology across the world – it is naturally generated underground, potentially in vast quantities. Proponents of using this form of hydrogen say it could dramatically accelerate our transition to net zero, which explains why researchers and start-ups are prospecting for it far and wide. Many questions remain, though, not least how much of it there really is and whether it can be easily tapped. For his part, Alali, co-founder of geological resources firm Eden GeoPower, wants to test something even more ambitious: can we stimulate the ground to boost the amount of hydrogen it produces? Dreams of a hydrogen-powered economy have been around for decades. It would mean a world in which trucks, ships, planes and heavy industry run on the clean-burning gas instead of dirty fossil fuels. The trouble is, we currently have to make the hydrogen ourselves, which requires energy and produces pollution. Today, almost all of the 100 million tonnes the world uses annually is supplied by reacting natural gas with steam, a process that releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide. There are cleaner ways of making hydrogen (see “The hydrogen rainbow” below), including “green hydrogen”, which is made from water using renewable energy, but these methods are currently minor players in the industry. How much natural hydrogen does Earth hold? In all cases, synthetic hydrogen is best seen as an alternative way of storing energy. A natural supply might instead be a genuine source of energy. Yet despite hydrogen being the most abundant element in the universe, most researchers thought Earth’s stocks of it in its gaseous form were scarce. Drillers in search of fossil fuels sometimes found it in their wells and ocean explorers saw it trickling from sea-floor vents. But no one was actively looking for hydrogen and these discoveries were considered exceptions; hydrogen was thought too reactive to accumulate in large amounts. That assumption was challenged in 2012, when a water well close to the town of Bourakébougou in Mali was found to contain a large reserve of hydrogen. This gas occurred naturally, meaning the only energy input required in its production is that needed to collect it. This kind of hydrogen goes by several names – white hydrogen and natural hydrogen, as well as gold hydrogen – but it is most usefully called geologic hydrogen. Since that find, a flurry of prospecting has led to the discovery of what may be significant underground reservoirs in France, Spain and Australia. We have also found hints of such hydrogen across swathes of the globe (see map, below). A handful of companies are drilling exploratory wells in the US, including a tight-lipped start-up called Koloma, backed by nearly $100 million from Bill Gates’s venture capital firm. “There are a lot of people searching around the planet,” says Eric Gaucher, an independent consultant in France who left a large oil and gas firm to pursue natural hydrogen. “One of them will find something that is very big and economic. I am convinced.” In the past decade or so, excitement over geologic hydrogen was largely confined to a few true believers in industry. Then, in 2022, researchers at the US Geological Survey revised their estimates of how much such gas there could be in the ground based on the little that was understood about how it is formed. Their modelling suggested there could be trillions of tonnes available, far more than anyone had previously suspected. If just a fraction of that could be recovered, it would be enough to meet our projected hydrogen demand for centuries. These results generated widespread media coverage. “It’s gone from a fringe novelty to squarely getting everyone’s attention,” says Avon McIntyre at HyTerra, an Australian company focused on geologic hydrogen. The interest may be justified. Gaucher says meeting even 20 or 30 per cent of our growing hydrogen needs with such sources would free up huge amounts of clean energy that would otherwise be used to make green hydrogen. It may even be a renewable resource if it is continually generated below the surface. But, on the other hand, there are reasons to be cautious about what has been called “gold hydrogen fever”. The true amount of hydrogen the planet contains, as well as how much might be feasible to extract, remains uncertain. It is also unclear precisely how geologic hydrogen is made. Researchers think at least some is gradually seeping into the crust from the mantle below, where it built up during Earth’s formation. Some may be generated by radioactive rocks splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then there is the process of serpentinisation, in which groundwater reacts with iron-rich minerals in rock, such as olivine, to create iron oxide and hydrogen gas. Most geologic hydrogen hunters have this serpentinisation process in their crosshairs. The thinking is that places with a lot of iron-rich rock may also generate lots of hydrogen, says Viacheslav Zgonnik, whose company, Natural Hydrogen Energy, drilled a well in search of the gas in Nebraska last year. The canniest prospectors look for an area of iron-rich rock capped with an impermeable layer, so the precious fuel might be sealed in and build up underground. Other companies looking for hydrogen in the US Midwest, including Koloma and HyTerra, are following this rationale. Similarly, Gaucher says newly identified deposits in the Pyrenees mountains straddling France and Spain that could contain tens of millions of tonnes of hydrogen may occur due to a bulge of iron-rich mantle rock sitting unusually close to the surface. Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why Unexpectedly, the eastern Pacific Ocean is cooling. If this “cold tongue” continues, it could reduce greenhouse gas warming by 30 per cent – but also bring megadrought to the US In Oman, this iron-rich geology is even more accessible thanks to the region’s unique tectonic past. Just under 100 million years ago, the tectonic plate beneath the Arabian Sea collided with another under the land. Such events usually result in the crust being forced down into the mantle, but here it was thrust upwards, a process known as obduction. The Hajar mountains are the result. They are the largest exposure of mantle rock on the planet, mostly made up of iron-rich peridotite that you can’t help but walk upon. During my visit, in a valley strewn with boulders of this green and white-streaked material, we took off our shoes to cross a stream flowing over rocks that were once on the boundary between Earth’s mantle and crust. How to find natural hydrogen There may be another way to identify areas ripe for hydrogen extraction. A session at the American Geophysical Union conference last December featured research on using machine learning to identify rings of bare soil – sometimes called fairy circles – in satellite images. Joachim Moortgat at Ohio State University, who contributed to that work, says hydrogen has been measured in soil at more than 50 such circles, although the relationship between the gas and these mysterious formations remains unclear. Despite the excitement, however, geologic hydrogen would have shortcomings as a fuel, especially when it comes to being transported long distances. For starters, the gas is explosive. And because it occupies large volumes, it needs to be compressed or converted into other chemicals, such as liquid ammonia, before it can be easily moved. We might need to build new pipelines to carry it from remote locations to ports or cities. A hydrogen fuel revolution is coming – here's why we might not want it Hydrogen is widely touted as a green fuel for everything from cars and planes to heating homes. But all too often it has a dirty secret It would help if we could avoid relying on happenstance accumulations of hydrogen and instead stimulate the ground to reliably produce the gas in more convenient areas. That is what a number of researchers and companies are now working on. The US Department of Energy (DoE) is involved too, putting up $20 million for such efforts. The idea is to explore ways of speeding up the serpentinisation process and so conjure hydrogen from the ground. “We can greatly expand the regions from which this resource will be available,” says Doug Wicks, who directs the DoE programme. With their well-understood geology, iron-rich peridotite rock and clear evidence that hydrogen is bubbling from the ground, the Hajar mountains are an ideal place to test the idea. Following a workshop involving the DoE and the Omani government in November 2023, there are now plans to drill the world’s first stimulated hydrogen well here later this year. Alali, who has played a central role in coordinating this work, showed me one of four possible sites for the well. We drove through the alleys of a small town called Hailain – this was where our vehicle almost got stuck – and out into a valley. Several of the pools bubbling with hydrogen were covered by what resembled a layer of ice (pictured, below). This was actually a powdery mineral film formed from reactions between calcium leached from the peridotite and carbon dioxide in the air. Mineral films coat pools of water in the Hajar mountains in Oman James Dinneen Alali told me the pilot stimulation project will involve drilling at least one borehole to a depth of between 400 and 600 metres. The rate of geologic hydrogen production will be measured and the team will then try different methods of stimulating the hydrogen-generating reaction, including injecting water and heating the rock. Adding chemical catalysts is another option, though not one the researchers plan to test yet. “There really are a lot of knobs to turn,” says Alexis Templeton at the University of Colorado Boulder, who is the lead researcher on the project. She says the goal is to increase the rate of hydrogen production by 10,000, the point at which it would be commercially viable. Can we stimulate natural hydrogen production? To help get there, the team will try a novel strategy for breaking up rocks deep underground to increase the surface area exposed to the injected water. The method, developed by Eden GeoPower, is akin to fracking for natural gas, but with electricity instead of water. Sending a high-voltage current between electrodes lowered into the ground should heat microscopic pores in the rock, causing them to expand in “a spiderweb of lightning fractal patterns underground”, says Paul Cole, Eden GeoPower’s head of subsurface engineering. There are several reasons the project may not work as well as hoped. The pores in the rock could get clogged, trapping the hydrogen. The required energy input could end up being unfeasibly high. Plus, Templeton says there are communities of bacteria living in Oman’s rocks that feed on hydrogen. No one knows how they will react when the amount of hydrogen increases. It is possible their numbers will swell, creating a mob of microbes that gobble up much of the fuel before it can be collected. This may not be an issue for projects drilling in hotter, deeper wells, but in Oman “the rocks are alive”, says Templeton. Outside researchers say the goal of upping the rate of hydrogen production in such wells by 10,000 is feasible, but there is no guarantee of success. “It will take some clever chemistry to make it work,” says Toti Larson at the University of Texas at Austin, who isn’t involved in the project. There are also some environmental risks. For instance, it is unclear how much water the project will require. Using substantial amounts in an arid place like Oman could raise eyebrows, although Alali says the plan is to use non-potable wastewater or groundwater for the tests. We also must be alive to the risk of small earthquakes from injecting water, says Mengli Zhang at the Colorado School of Mines, who also isn’t a part of the work. If all goes well, Oman, a nation known for its oil and gas, could find itself leading the field of geologic hydrogen. The impacts might even spread far beyond its borders and give our efforts to power the planet without fossil fuels a serious boost. “There are a lot of really smart people working on this now,” says Wicks. “I’m expecting some audacious and potentially earth-shattering ideas about how to get hydrogen out of the ground.” The hydrogen rainbow Hydrogen may be a colourless gas, but those in the industry think of it as coming in a number of shades depending on its environmental credentials. Black This hydrogen is produced by degassing coal. The process produces a lot of carbon dioxide and is no longer common. Grey This method starts with natural gas and generates hydrogen and carbon dioxide, making it a significant producer of greenhouse gas. It is by far the most common way to make hydrogen because it is cheap. Blue Just like grey hydrogen, except the carbon dioxide is captured and stored underground, meaning it contributes less to global warming. Turquoise A relatively new innovation, this approach breaks down natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon, meaning no carbon dioxide is emitted. It is potentially cheaper than green hydrogen (below), but the technology needs development. Green The most environmentally friendly way to make hydrogen. This method uses electricity generated from renewable sources to electrolyse water into oxygen and hydrogen. Gold Sometimes called white hydrogen (or natural or geologic hydrogen), this is when the gas occurs naturally deep underground and could be harvested through drilling, with no need to expend energy on synthesis. This potentially makes it a highly promising clean fuel, if enough of it can be found and collected (see main story).

Cause I got a different car and sneak past the prison unnoticed.

Not sure if that is better or worse than ours, where the builder decided what is important. (I was in Aylesbury last week)

Is this it? domestic-heating-design-guide.pdf

Is Romania except from the https://eurocodes.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

Probably. They seem to know what they are doing and understand the technology. Work out the weighted mean of the building regs each part is built to.

Not that, just seemed an odd thing to do. By quoting properly, everyone can see it, and who it was from/to and the original poster gets notified, so they get a chance to answer or clarify.

That will be kWh, which is the energy used, kW is the power. That is really your problem, you are loosing energy though your walls all the time. What is the rest of the wall buildup? Have you seen, or done your own, heat loss calculations? Also makes me wonder how much insulation is under for underfloor heating pipes. Can you get a PV diverter that can divert excess power that would have gone to the grid, diverted directly to a heating element in your 200 lt water cylinder. Maybe heat the cylinder up to a higher temperature. You could fit some old fashioned night storage heaters that are heated directly from excess PV, call them day storage heaters. Not a very large house, but it should not be taking anything like the energy it is by the sounds of it. Have you checked your PV production against PVGIS, just to make sure it is working as expected? You can also look at typical meteorological data there as well.

Strange that, my piss seems unlimited as well, every few hours there is more. Would leaving it against your kitchen door sort the problem?

Slate is a sedimentary stone, clay is a sediment. Sedimentary stone/rock is basically clays and silts that gas been compressed, then often heated to a low temperature, basically how they make clay tiles. So tell them it is the same thing.

Do you have problems quoting text? Noticed this in many of your posts when you reply to someone.

Call up National Grid (DNO) and ask to speak to the department that actually deals with PV installations, rather than just a general customer service department that will almost certainly say 'no'. When I was dealing with them (Western Power back then, they were extremely helpful as it saved them bother in the long term. Used to deal with a guy called Paul, at the main office in Redruth, next to the college.

I think part of the problem with most energy companies is that the genuine errors should not be happening in the first place i.e. incorrect meter reading, simple change of address not happening. My recent experience has been that there is an assumption that all errors are the customer's fault, and that the customer is trying to rob them. And then I here is the outright lies. You can sit Infront of your computer and see the daily files, while at the same time being told that the meter is not reporting the data. I never like to look for a conspiracy, when incompetence can explain it, but I am starting to wonder if some sharp business practice is going on. I recently changed car, so had to get a new insurance quote. My old insurer could not compete, so took out a new policy. Told my old insurer to make sure that auto renewal was switched off (I never auto renew anyway), told it had been, then had £600+ taken out of my account. What really bugs me though is that nearly all the companies I have dealt with recently have been 'updating' their systems. One of them have had the same message for at least 15 months, so I guess it is a Fujitsu system. The other is the message about being polite to the call handlers. If the companies feel the need to put that message up, they know they have a problem. They need to deal with the problem, not the symptoms of their incompetence.

It is when buying pans for an induction hob. There are many different grades of stainless steel, some even stain a brown colour.

Ask @craig he will probably know who makes them. And alternatives.

They could buy a zoo.

Me to. Back in the 1980s, we manufactured the body kits for the Colt Gallant. It was pointed out that the pattern work was pretty rough and it looked like the corner of the front bumper/spoiler had already hit a wall. Colt Cars refused to have it put right and told use to carry on manufacturing. Every single Gallant I saw my eye was drawn to the front nearside corner. At the boat show once, I was chatting to the Sunseeker salesman and pointed out that the moulds for their latest models must have been rushed as there was a waviness to them. I think it was my comment "at half a million quid I would expect better" that pissed him off. I bet he saw nothing else on every one of their boats after that though.

Should always be the starting point, make a problem smaller.

Well apart from we have already paid for it, it allows anyone, maybe with a bit of effort, to check. In today's parlance, we call it transparency. A simple example, that can make a large difference, is displaying numbers. You need to know if they are truncated, how many significant figures they are to, how many decimal places, if applicable, were they created from a mean or a median, or even a mode value, and what was the sampling rate and where those numbers rounded up or down, truncated etc. Makes a big difference in some circumstances.

Why the general public should be allowed to see the standards for free.

TL;DR I suspect that you don't have much insulation under your floors and the flow temperature though the UFH is set too high to compensate. Jersey has a very similar climate to where I am (Cornwall), so luckily you don't have a long heating season (mine is almost over), so better thermal management may pay dividends i.e. more selective timing of when the heating is on. The physics of heat loss is really quite simple, but often made to look difficult. Basically changing a heating system does not change how much energy the house uses, though a heat pump may, if designed correctly, reduce the amount you import/pay. The British have got too used to heating systems that blast out heat at a great rate, warm the house up, then let it cool down, then blast out heat again. While this may seem to be an effective method, what is actually happening is that there is a cycle of constant over heating and over cooling, it is like driving in Jersey, either accelerating or braking, never cruising. Now for some terminology clarification. kW, not Kw, or KW or kw, or even killer what, is the power of your system. kWh, not KWH, kWh, kw/h or killa wot our, is the energy. It is the power, multiplied by the time. Think of the power [kW] as how powerful your car engine is, and the energy [kWh] as how much fuel it uses]. Your 600 litre AVC is how large the fuel tank is. So your is really 100 kWh/day. 100 [kWh] / 24 [h] = 4.17 kW or at 0°C 5 kW Now as your house is 1800 square foot, which is really 167 m2, (keeping it all metric makes life easy) your heat load is 0.025 kW/m2, which is not dreadful, though on here we like to get below 0.010 kW/m2 [10 W/m2]. Mine is currently 0.011 W/m2, and apart from curing nearly all the bad air leaks, adding in some extra loft insulation and adding secondary glazing to my old timber frames double glazed units, makes my 1987 build pretty good. So what do to. Initially keep records i.e. internal and external temperatures, energy usage and behaviour patterns (if you are away or have extra people stay). See how much loft insulation you have and find out what is below your ground floor, insulation wise. Find and fix any leaky windows or doors, if there is a draught, cure it. Check how much heat is coming out of your water storage cylinders, this is easy to do with an infrared thermometer as you just check the cylinder external temperature and the the water temperature. You may find that the storage temperature is a lot higher than what is needed. Heat loss is not linear, but hopefully most of that energy goes into the house anyway this time of year. Sketch up your house, with dimensions, and work out where the greatest heat losses are i.e. though walls, windows, floor, air leaks etc as that will show the best place to spend your money. As an example, the few cheap changes I did means I now us almost a quarter of the energy I used to when I first moved in. A heat pump, of any sort, should reduce the amount of imported energy, but there are some caveats. They have to be sized correctly for the heat load of the building, the power delivery, as a multiplier of the power in, is very sensitive to temperature differences. The smaller the temperature differences between outside and inside temperature AND between the inside temperature and the heat emitter (UFH in your case) temperature. This is why they are designed to match the most likely range of temperatures during the heating system i.e. 21°C inside, 8°C outside, emitter temperature >30°C. An air to air heat pump (A2AHP) is a good choice initially and there are some cheap units that can be easily installed. May be worth fitting one in the main living area as an experiment (a few people on here have a lot more experience and have fitted their own). Also worth remembering that your new house has a much larger exposed wall area, and probably much larger window area, but again, this is not the whole story as volume to exposed area ratio makes a difference, smaller houses have a worse ratio than larger ones (generally), bungalows are worse still (lots of floor and ceiling). And never trust sales people and most plumbers, very few will have studied thermodynamics at university.

Does it take them that long to learn a few punctuation marks () : . ==! You can see why I can't get it to work.

Most of them won't have started yet. What Easter break is for.

I don't think they would work out cheaper in reality because I have an odd usage pattern that does not fit in with the temporary time discounts that Octopus are offering. Octopus seem to be like the discount store at the scummy end of the high street, you pick up a bargain, but the next time you go in, it is not there anymore.

Taken me a couple of hours on the phone and several emails to get halfway to paying what I owe. EDF have been absolutely terrible recently. They estimated my bills, even though I have a smart meter, then they somehow estimated it totally wrong by getting the night rate and day rates swapped around, and now have gone silent when I asked for a full audit since the smart meter was installed. They also claimed that they were unable to communicate with my smart meter, even though I could see, and download, the daily files. I shall get some more compensation cash out of them. It is a real shame as I have been with EDF since they took over SWEB and had only one problem in the past with them (oddly enough that same swapping over numbers problem). Over at the other place, I ran a thread that people put their weekly meter readings into and we could see who was getting the best value for their size and location of property.