It is widely believed that essentially the most abundant element within the universe, hydrogen, exists primarily alongside other elements – for instance, with oxygen in water and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are defying that notion—and drawing attention as a potentially limitless source of carbon-free energy.
One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities and personal corporations to develop technologies that may lead to low cost, clean fuel from underground .
So-called geological hydrogen is created when water reacts with iron-rich rocks and the iron oxidizes. One of the grant recipients, MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate's research group, will use its $1.3 million grant to discover the perfect conditions for producing hydrogen underground – bearing in mind aspects similar to catalysts to trigger the chemical response , temperature, pressure and pH values. The aim is to enhance the efficiency of large-scale production and meet global energy needs at competitive costs.
The US Geological Survey estimates that billions of tons of geological hydrogen could also be buried within the Earth's crust. Accumulations have been discovered around the globe and diverse start-ups are searching for mineable deposits. Abate goals to spice up the natural hydrogen production process by implementing “proactive” approaches that include stimulating production and recovering the gas.
“Our goal is to optimize the response parameters to speed up the response and produce hydrogen in an economically viable way,” says Abate, Chipman Development Professor within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). Abate's research focuses on developing materials and technologies for the transition to renewable energy, including next-generation batteries and novel chemical methods for energy storage.
Impulse for innovation
Interest in geological hydrogen is growing at a time when governments around the globe are searching for carbon-free energy alternatives to grease and gas. In December, French President Emmanuel Macron said his government would achieve this Provide financing to research natural hydrogen. And in February, the federal government and personal sector testified informed US lawmakers about ways to extract hydrogen from the earth.
Today, industrial hydrogen is produced for $2 per kilogram, primarily for fertilizer, chemical and steel production. However, most methods burn fossil fuels, releasing carbon that warms the Earth. “Green hydrogen“Made with renewable energy” is promising, but expensive at $7 per kilogram.
“If you’ll be able to get hydrogen for a dollar a kilo, it's competitive with natural gas on an energy price basis,” says Douglas Wicks, program director on the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the Department of Energy's lead agency for the geological hydrogen funding program.
recipient of the ARPA-E Grants These include the Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, in addition to private corporations similar to Koloma, a hydrogen production startup funded by Amazon and Bill Gates. The projects themselves are diverse, starting from applying industrial oil and gas methods to hydrogen production and extraction to developing models to know hydrogen formation in rocks. The purpose: to reply questions in what Wicks calls “total blank space.”
“With geological hydrogen, we don't know easy methods to speed up its production since it's a chemical response, and we don't really know easy methods to design the subsurface in order that we are able to extract it safely,” says Wicks. “We attempt to bring the most effective skills of every group to the work, assuming that the ensemble may give us good answers in a comparatively short time.”
Geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, considered one of the leading experts in the sphere of natural hydrogen, agrees that the list of unknowns is so long as the trail to the primary industrial projects. But he says efforts to stimulate hydrogen production – harnessing the natural response between water and rock – represent “tremendous potential.”
“The idea is to search out ways in which we are able to speed up and control this response in order that we are able to produce hydrogen on demand in certain places,” says Zgonnik, CEO and founding father of Natural Hydrogen Energy, a Denver-based startup, about Mineral leases for exploratory drilling exist within the United States. “If we are able to achieve this goal, it means we are able to potentially replace fossil fuels with stimulated hydrogen.”
“A full circle moment”
For Abate, the connection to the project is personal. As a toddler, there have been frequent power outages in his hometown in Ethiopia – the lights went out three, possibly 4 days per week. Flickering candles or pollutant-emitting kerosene lamps were often the one source of sunshine for homework at night.
“And across the house, we had to make use of wood and charcoal for tasks like cooking,” says Abate. “That was my story through the top of highschool and before I got here to the United States for faculty.”
In 1987, well diggers were drilling for water in Mali, West Africa a natural hydrogen deposit was discovered, which resulted in an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the source and used an engine to burn hydrogen and generate electricity within the nearby village.
Diallo gave up oil and gas and founded Hydroma, the world's first hydrogen exploration company. The company is drilling wells near the unique site which have produced high concentrations of the gas.
“The continent once often called an energy-poor continent now inspires hope for the long run of the world,” says Abate. “When I discovered about it, things got here full circle for me. Of course the issue is global; The solution is global. But then the connection to my personal journey and the answer that comes from my home continent connects me personally to the issue and the answer.”
Large scale experiments
Abate and researchers in his lab are formulating a recipe for a liquid that triggers the chemical response that triggers hydrogen production in rocks. The important ingredient is water, and the team is testing “easy” materials for catalysts that speed up the response and in turn increase the quantity of hydrogen produced, says postdoctoral researcher Yifan Gao.
“Some catalysts are very expensive and difficult to provide, requiring complex production or preparation,” says Gao. “A low-cost and abundant catalyst allows us to extend the production rate – this fashion we produce it at an economically viable rate, but in addition at an economically viable yield.”
The iron-rich rocks by which the chemical response occurs are found throughout the United States and around the globe. To optimize the response across a big selection of geological compositions and environments, Abate and Gao are developing a so-called high-throughput system consisting of artificial intelligence software and robotics to check different catalyst mixtures and simulate what would occur in the event that they were applied to rocks ​from Different regions with different external conditions similar to temperature and pressure.
“And from this we measure how much hydrogen we produce for every possible combination,” says Abate. “Then the AI ​​will learn from the experiments and suggest to us, 'Based on what I've learned and based on the literature, I suggest you test this catalyst material composition for this rock.'”
The team is writing a paper about their project and would really like to publish their ends in the approaching months.
After developing the catalyst recipe, the following milestone of the project is the event of a dual-purpose reactor. Firstly, equipped with technologies similar to Raman spectroscopy, it should allow researchers to discover and optimize the chemical conditions that result in improved rates and yields of hydrogen production. The lab-scale device may also inform the design of a real-world reactor that may speed up on-site hydrogen production.
“This could be a plant-scale reactor implanted underground,” says Abate.
The interdisciplinary project also leverages the expertise of Yang Shao-Horn from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering and DMSE for computational evaluation of the catalyst, in addition to Esteban Gazel, a Cornell University scientist, who will provide his expertise in geology and geochemistry. He will give attention to understanding the iron-rich ultramafic rock formations within the United States and around the globe and the way they react with water.
For ARPA-E's Wicks, the questions Abate and the opposite grant recipients are asking are only the primary, crucial steps into uncharted energy territory.
“Understanding how we are able to stimulate these rocks to provide hydrogen and produce it up safely will really unleash the potential energy source,” he says. Then the emerging industry will use oil and gas as a source of drilling, pipeline and gas production know-how. “As I prefer to say, this can be a technology that provides us the flexibility to say, in a really short time frame, 'Is there really something there?'”
