Limitless ‘white’ hydrogen could soon shatter all energy assumptions
Every few years a disruptive technology comes out of left field and entirely changes the future of the global energy system, smashing into our consciousness like a thunderclap.
It happened with shale fracking around 2009-2011, confounding OPEC, Russia, and an opinion establishment still hooked on the great red herring of peak oil.
Fortescue Metals Group founder Andrew Forrest has long championed green hydrogen. Bloomberg
America went from an alarming energy deficit to become the top exporter of oil and gas within a decade. The dollar came roaring back. So did American power.
Today’s exuberant rush for “white” hydrogen has the same feel.
We are suddenly waking up to the very real possibility that vast reserves of natural hydrogen lie under our feet and can plausibly be extracted at costs that blow away the competition, ultimately undercutting methane on pure price.
Scientists have long argued that pockets of exploitable geological hydrogen are more abundant than hitherto supposed.
The perpetual burning gas at Chimaera in Turkey – believed to be the source of the Olympic flame – has a hydrogen content reaching 11.3 per cent. There is another such marvel at Los Fuegos Eternos in the Philippines.
It has been known since 2012 that hydrogen beneath the village of Bourakebougou in Mali has 98 per cent purity. The site was discovered in the 1980s when it blew up in the face of a local man smoking a cigarette while drilling for water.
Professor Alain Prinzhofer from the Institute of Physics in Paris found that the gas flow remained constant over time – the pressure even rose – confirming a hypothesis that hydrogen can keep renewing itself by a chemical reaction underground.
What is new is that the world now needs that hydrogen
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