Filenews 3 August 2023 - by David Fielding
A village in the arid savannah of West Africa seems unlikely to be the cradle of an "energy revolution".
However, if the proponents of the new breakthrough in clean energy are right, we may all be reminiscing about the name Burakugu in the years to come.
This is because this village, 55 km away. northwest of Mali's capital, Bamako, was the first place on earth to be fuelled with natural hydrogen – a clean gas extracted from the ground, such as crude oil or methane.
The phenomenon is so unusual that, until recently, very few geologists had been involved.
In 2011, Montreal-based Hydroma Inc. drilled a water well near Buracebugu that had been sealed off in 1987 after air emitted from it caused an explosion.
The air released turned out to consist of 98% hydrogen, which was later used as fuel to supply electricity to the village .
This sequence of events seems to defy conventional geochemistry.
Hydrogen is one of the most reactive elements – and this is one of the main reasons why it combines so well with coal to produce fossil fuels. As a result, pure hydrogen is considered to be particularly rare in nature.
Its role is so overlooked that gas chromatography – the process used by chemists to detect the composition of gas mixtures – usually uses hydrogen as a carrier material, making it impossible to detect it in samples from underground reservoirs.
But a growing wave of similar discoveries is now calling into question this conventional wisdom, such as water-produced hydrogen and renewables that look set to threaten the role of fossil fuels in many industrial sectors.
Beyond Burakugu, mining companies have discovered natural hydrogen leaks in Oman, New Caledonia, Canada, Russia, Australia, Japan, Germany and New Zealand.
Reserves in France could bring the country 3 million metric tons of production per year, according to a recent report – about 1/3 of the green hydrogen the European Union wants to produce by 2030.
Australian company Hyterra Ltd., which conducts geological research for hydrogen in the US, believes it can produce natural hydrogen for $1 a kilogram – a price that could rival that of natural gas.
A 2020 study estimates that total global natural hydrogen outflows can reach 23 million metric tons per year or more.
The transition to natural hydrogen can be an ideal outlet for the oil industry in its decarbonisation effort – turning to other geological skills and replacing underground liquid resources with a green fuel of the future.
However, this promising vision has two black spots.
The first is that we know almost nothing about natural hydrogen. The extraction of crude oil dates back to ancient times, while geologists in the 18th century hypothesized that the fuel came from the decomposition of organic matter.
Mining companies realized that he was trapped in underground rock formations long before John D. Rockefeller turn crude into lucrative business. This scientific observation – and the wealth of knowledge accumulated since then – greatly reduces the cost of exploring hydrocarbon deposits.
When it comes to natural hydrogen, we are in the dark. Scientists are divided on how it was created, with most theories suggesting that it emerges much deeper than the earth's crust, that it came from bacterial activity or chemical processes. Natural hydrogen outflows often appear to be linked to unusual circular cavities in the ground, also known as "fairy circles," but it's not entirely understood exactly how they form.
Until these kinds of questions are answered and underground reserves mapped, it will be difficult for hydrogen startups to compete with energy giants. Hyterra's potential production in Kansas and Nebraska may be an attractive option as a feedstock for fertilizer consumed in the Great Plains – but any facility aiming to exploit this natural resource will need to know whether its production will last 20 years or 2 months. And this is not yet clear.
The second issue relates to the first. The estimate of 23 million metric tons per year sounds significant — but in energy terms, it's insignificant.
The European Union alone hopes to consume 20 million tonnes of green hydrogen produced annually by 2030, but even that is barely enough to reduce the planet's hunger for fossil fuels.
In energy terms, 23 million metric tons of hydrogen equates to about 2.76 hexajoules – equivalent to the amount of natural gas we consume per week.
However, natural hydrogen is still in its infancy, so there is no reason to disappoint.
After all, no one has really searched for this natural element so far, and estimates about the availability of mineral resources are almost always inferior to the real ones. (In 1919, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that the country would begin to run out of oil after a period of two to five years.)
Natural hydrogen reserves could become what the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, Siberia and Texas were in the 21st century.
But, as with nuclear fusion, it would be bold to bet on the "natural hydrogen revolution" before 2050.
