DOE Backs Research to Help Nature Make Natural Hydrogen

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Written by Paul Wiseman for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Hydrogen is gaining traction as an energy transition solution, especially in the transportation sector, due to its greater portability when compared with lithium batteries. But sourcing hydrogen from water or natural gas, the most common feedstocks, just kicks the can down the road. The separation process requires large amounts of energy and, in the case of natural gas, releases its own stream of carbon into the atmosphere. That carbon can be captured and stored, but that creates yet another expense.

Alternatively, naturally occurring hydrogen is seen by many as a better alternative, if it can be located and produced in quantity and with economic viability. For more information, see March 15, 2023, article - Some See Natural Hydrogen as Ultimate Clean Fuel.

To further promote natural hydrogen, the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has agreed to give $1.4 million for two research projects to Eden (Somerville, Massachusetts), an environmental energy company. One involves using mechanical and thermal stimulation to increase geologic hydrogen reaction rates in an ophiolite formation in Oman, while the other will investigate an engineered, geologic hydrogen battery for long-term energy storage.

Among the ten companies awarded DOE money this week was Koloma (Denver, Colorado), a firm backed by billionaire Bill Gates. ARPA-E gave $900,000 to the company to examine a process for artificially stimulating natural hydrogen deposits in the U.S. Midwest. In addition to the DOE funding, Koloma has raised about $245 million in Series B funding from Amazon.com Incorporated's (NASDAQ:AMZN) (Seattle, Washington) climate fund and others.

Is There Enough Natural Hydrogen to Make This Worthwhile?
A November 2023 report by the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Geoffrey S. Ellis says there's plenty down there: "Model predictions based on the known behavior of hydrogen in the subsurface and geologic analogues indicate a global resource potential in the millions of megatons (Mt), a fraction of which could meet projected demand for hydrogen for hundreds of years." Ellis adds that while the USGS understands how natural hydrogen is formed, its quest is to find out how to get that hydrogen to accumulate in quantities whereby it can be mined.

Can It Be Economical?
Eden's statement says the challenges involve "lack of permeability within geological formations, which can hinder efficient hydrogen production and extraction." For the first project the company will collaborate with a research group at the University of Colorado to see how peridotite rocks respond to electrical stimulation and to increased temperature to produce hydrogen from water.

They chose Oman because the nation's Samail ophiolite is the largest onshore outcropping of its type in the world.

DOE's grant announcement for Koloma said the company is combining geochemistry and microbes to study the formation of hydrogen in mineral deposits. Once that is accomplished, the hydrogen can be extracted in an economically viable way.

The second Eden project, involving battery storage, is an outlier for the natural hydrogen community. They plan to investigate ways to turn iron-rich geologic formations into batteries by using the reversible chemical reactions of the iron. Rechargeable batteries rely on these reversible reactions. They plan to utilize "excess grid energy to reduce spent iron into usable iron" for repeatable charge and discharge cycles. Iron-rich rocks are also the primary activator in one of the six naturally occurring mechanisms for creating natural hydrogen from water, although the press release does not specifically indicate how hydrogen comes into play for this project.

The DOE Goal
The DOE's website notes, "the [winners] will work toward improvements in subsurface transport methods and engineered containment, reservoir monitoring and/or modelling during production and extraction, as well as assessing the risk of hydrogen reservoir development."

Research continues for natural hydrogen, because in its purest form it requires no anthropogenic electricity or water. Surface processing mostly involves removing impurities, which takes much less energy and leaves less waste than current methods involving water or natural gas. Systems based on the DOE research grants do apply some electricity and other human intervention, so it remains to be seen if this still qualifies as "white," or if another color may need to be assigned to its terminology.

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