Just a fraction of the hydrogen hidden beneath Earth's surface could power Earth for 200 years, scientists find

[Caribbeans]

Researchers didn't think hydrogen accumulates underground, but recent discoveries suggest otherwise. (Image: Terryfic3D/Getty Images)

Just a fraction of the hydrogen hidden beneath Earth's surface could power Earth for 200 years, scientists find

Trillions of tons of hydrogen gas are likely buried in rocks and reservoirs beneath Earth's surface, but researchers aren't sure where it is yet.

LiveScience.com | Sascha Pare | December 13, 2024

A mountain of hydrogen is lurking beneath Earth's surface — and scientists say that just a fraction of it could break our dependence on fossil fuels for 200 years.

New research suggests the planet holds around 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. That's roughly 26 times the amount of oil known to be left in the ground (1.6 trillion barrels, each weighing approximately 0.15 tons) — but where these hydrogen stocks are located remains unknown.

Most of the hydrogen is likely too deep or too far offshore to be accessed, and some of the reserves are probably too small to extract in a way that makes economical sense, the researchers suspect. However, the results indicate there's more than enough hydrogen to go around, even with those limitations, Geoffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and lead author of the new study, told Live Science.

Hydrogen is a source of clean energy that can fuel vehicles, power industrial processes and generate electricity. Just 2% of the hydrogen stocks found in the study, equivalent to 124 billion tons (112 billion metric tons) of gas, "would supply all the hydrogen we need to get to net-zero [carbon] for a couple hundred years," Ellis said.

The energy released by that amount of hydrogen is roughly twice the energy stored in all the known natural gas reserves on Earth, Ellis and his co-author Sarah Gelman, also a USGS geologist, noted in the study. The results were published Friday (Dec. 13) in the journal Science Advances...more
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/energy/just-a-fraction-of-the-hydrogen-hidden-beneath-earths-surface-could-power-earth-for-200-years-scientists-find

[NNadir]

1. We've been drilling holes in the Earth for a century without coming across huge hydrogen reserves. Wishful thinking...

...bullshit to hype and advertise hydrogen that will magically appear in drilling rigs, while hydrogen will continued to be produced by fossil fuels, just as it is now, is not going to do a fucking thing in any time scale that will matter, other than produce the result that all this hydrogen hype is all about: Greenwashing fossil fuels.

I note that with rising seas, the combustion product of hydrogen is water, not that there is a single fossil fuel greenwashing hydrogen hype pusher here who gives a flying fuck about the environment in general or rising seas in particular.

Like so called "green hydrogen" geological hydrogen is pure "bait and switch."

The extreme collapse of the planetary atmosphere is happening now, not in some fantasy never-never land where we "Drill, baby, Drill," for hydrogen, were it real and were it accessible.