Hydrogen under the Earth’s surface will be enough as a fuel for 200 years — it will eliminate dependence on oil

Scientists say there’s a ton of hydrogen in the Earth’s crust. Only a fraction of these reserves that are conditionally accessible could cover humanity’s fuel needs for 200 years.

A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, claims that our planet hides about 6.2 trillion tons of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. That’s roughly 26 times more than the amount of oil left in the ground (1.6 trillion barrels, each weighing about 0.15 tons). The only problem — these reserves are still unexplored.

Researchers believe that most of the hydrogen is located too deep or too far from the ocean shores to be accessible. Some natural hydrogen storages may be too small to make extraction economically feasible. However, the study results suggest that there would be enough hydrogen even with these limitations.

Hydrogen can be a source of electricity, fuel for transport, and power industrial processes. Just 2% of the hydrogen reserves discovered during the study (124 billion tons), “will cover all the hydrogen we need to achieve net zero [carbon emissions] for several hundred years,” says Jeffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the lead author of the study. The energy of such an amount of hydrogen is roughly twice the amount in all known natural gas reserves on Earth

To estimate the amount of hydrogen, researchers used a model that took into account the rate at which gas is produced underground, the amount likely to be trapped in reservoirs, and the amount lost due to leakage from rocks into the atmosphere and other natural processes.

Hydrogen is formed as a result of chemical reactions in rocks, the simplest of which is the reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. In reality, there are dozens of other natural processes capable of generating hydrogen, but most of them produce it in very small quantities. Until recently, scientists did not realize that hydrogen accumulates beneath the Earth’s surface.

But when scientists discovered a hydrogen deposit in West Africa, and then another one in an Albanian chrome mine, this paradigm shifted. Now it’s clear that hydrogen really accumulates in Earth’s reservoirs — the study says that some of these accumulations might be significant. The result surprised researchers who previously imagined a smaller amount. However, the result contains huge uncertainty. The model showed the presence of hydrogen ranging from 1 billion to 10 trillion tons. The aforementioned 6.2 trillion tons is the most likely amount.

Source: Space.com