Is natural hydrogen the fuel of the future? | Explained

Discover the untapped potential of natural hydrogen reserves worldwide, including in India, as a clean and abundant energy source.

The story so far:

Hydrogen is seen as the fuel of the future — one that would decarbonise world economy and stop global warming. If harvested in a sustainable manner, natural hydrogen may provide a clean and potentially low-cost fuel to satisfy the world’s increasing energy needs with a considerable reduction in carbon emissions as well. And it’s most likely abundant in India, too.

Right now, hydrogen is manufactured mostly from natural gas through an energy-intensive and polluting process. Green hydrogen made with renewable electricity, on the other hand, is still prohibitively expensive and would require vast amounts of wind and solar power to work out at scale.

Natural hydrogen occurs as a free gas in geology, produced by processes such as serpentinisation (the interaction of water and iron-containing rocks), radiolysis of water by radioactive rocks, and from organic matter at depth.

In the summer of 1987, drillers arrived at Mamadou’s village of Bourakébougou, Mali, to bore for water. After drilling 108m at one site, with no water to be found, one of the crew lit a cigarette — and a jet of flame shot into his face. The flame turned into a huge fire that shone crystal blue during the daytime with no sign of smoke around it. At night, it shone a glowing gold that lit its surroundings. It took weeks for the crew to extinguish the blaze and cap the well.

This unexpected event led the villagers to avoid the site until 2007 when Aliou Diallo, a successful Malian businessperson, politician, and chairperson of Petroma, an oil and gas firm, purchased the rights to prospect in the area around Bourakébougou. In 2012, he hired Chapman Petroleum to figure out what was emanating from the borehole. Protected from the 50°C sun in a mobile laboratory, a team of engineers found that the gas was 98% hydrogen. Hydrogen is rarely recovered in oil operations and was not thought to exist in large reserves within the earth’s crust, until then.

While the presence of naturally occurring hydrogen has been known for decades, with the discovery of its presence in gas seeps, volcanic outgassing, and even mine workings being well documented decades ago, for many years, it was viewed as a geological curiosity. Majority of the scientific opinion at the time proposed that hydrogen’s small size and extreme reactivity would hinder the formation of substantial underground deposits.