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9| The Hunt for Hydrogen — Rūta Karolytė
107 Plays1 year ago
Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules, typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our understanding may be ripe for change.
Rūta Karolytė is at the vanguard of prospectors looking for large, naturally occurring reservoirs of hydrogen. She’s a researcher from Oxford specializing in the geochemistry of the Earth and she enlightens us to the mechanisms that are likely to be producing hydrogen in the crust: radiolysis and serpentinization.
In reviewing the evidence for naturally occurring hydrogen Ruta leads us through exotic terrain: a Soviet-era theory of hydrocarbon production, fairy rings, hydrothermal vents, and chemosynthetic life.
If Rūta and her colleagues are correct, the tapping of natural hydrogen could have transformative consequences for the Hydrogen economy such as cutting out the substantial fossil fuel emissions associated with deriving fertilizers from methane or creating a cheap basis for building synthetic fuels.
In the first half of the show, we also delve into carbon sequestration — another cool climate topic. But I’ve got so excited writing up the first half, that I’ll leave it here.
Notes:
- Rūta's Twitter: @rkarolyte
- Show notes at multiverses.xyz
Outline:
(00:00) Introduction
(3:00) Geological carbon sequestration
(50:40) Natural hydrogen
Recommended
Transcript
The Promise and Challenges of Carbon Storage
00:00:00
Speaker
Over the past several centuries we, humankind, have been very good at getting hydrocarbons out of the Earth's crust. We've become insanely good at finding them, whether they're beneath the middle of the ocean or the middle of a desert, and then using big drills and pipes and all sorts to extract them. So we have a really impressive set of tools and technologies for doing this. But, as we all know, this has had some pretty bad consequences.
00:00:28
Speaker
However, what if we could take these technologies and either use them to put carbon back underground or perhaps search for a guilt-free source of energy within the Earth?
Introducing Carbon Capture Expert: Ruta Cariolite
00:00:40
Speaker
These are the two topics that we discussed today with our guest, Ruta Cariolite. Ruta is a researcher at the University of Oxford, and she first takes us through carbon capture and storage. So this is, I think, something that will be familiar to many, but Ruta really goes into the details of how this carbon sequestration works, how we can take carbon directly from the air or from chimney flues and then bury it safely deep underground.
00:01:08
Speaker
The second thing that we discuss I think is a bit fresher. So this is just starting to appear on the radar now, it's June 2023, and it's the idea of hydrogen. Okay, so hydrogen is not new, but for a long time very few people thought that hydrogen occurred naturally within nature.
00:01:28
Speaker
They thought that you either had to create it from water by electrolysis or maybe by steam reformation of methane, but it just didn't occur on its own as H2. Now, Ruder takes us through some, frankly, fascinating evidence that it does exist naturally and possibly in very large quantities within the Earth.
The Mystery and Potential of Natural Hydrogen
00:01:50
Speaker
And this is exciting because this could be a, you know, cheap and copious energy source.
00:01:57
Speaker
And it's not completely academic. Rooster is actually also a prospector. She is part of a small company that is going out and looking for hydrogen within the earth. So this is a really optimistic and enlightening story. In fact, along the way, I learned things like
00:02:18
Speaker
that there's a completely other form of life that I wasn't aware of on the earth. So look out for that. Without further ado, I'm James Robinson. This is Multiverses. So this is a very optimistic and enlightening conversation. I learned a lot of things. I learned about an entirely new form of life that I'd never heard of. So hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I'm James Robinson. This is Multiverses.
Geology's Role in Climate Mitigation
00:03:03
Speaker
Hi, Ruta Karalite, thanks for joining us. Hi James, very nice to be here. So geology is not what first comes to mind, let me put it like that, when people are thinking about
00:03:19
Speaker
kind of skills that we need to combat climate change. Although many people think a little bit harder and think, actually, there's something here with carbon sequestration, which I've heard about. And I want to talk about that first. And then maybe after that, we'll talk about something that I don't think many people will know about.
00:03:38
Speaker
which we'll kind of maybe unpack later as a kind of, we'll leave that thought hanging. But yeah, let's first talk about carbon sequestration. What is the role of geologists like yourself in putting carbon back into the ground? I guess there's a clue there. Yeah, no, I think that's a really interesting question. And in terms of thinking about geology, what it can do, and I think I quite like the sort of
00:04:06
Speaker
thought that I guess a lot of people have that it's sort of hard to hard to say like where geology comes into the picture. And when I was sort of choosing to study geology, and I was at school as a teenager, I was sort of like very anxiety ridden about the environment and you know, like climate change and ecosystem collapse as I think, even more people these days that are younger feel that way now. And yeah, I really wanted to do something about it. Like I really wanted to do something environmental.
00:04:35
Speaker
I had no idea what it would be. And so I thought, like, if I study the Earth and how it works, probably, you know, I might be able to figure out what to do. So it appeared to me that, you know, like, go in and study in geology and how the Earth works would be like an obvious first step. And yes, I went into it without really knowing kind of what I was going to do, but for like, I'll just learn, you know, how things work naturally, and then we can maybe think about how to help it.
Understanding CO2 Sequestration
00:05:04
Speaker
But yeah, in terms of kind of its role, like I guess, in terms of climate change, like geology also does have like a lot to answer for, because essentially for you know, through our sort of exploration of the resources, we have caused climate change, or we have caused all kinds of habitat and environmental destruction.
00:05:27
Speaker
But at the same time, the geology and the raw materials that we have on the planet is essentially all we have to work with. And very understandably, as a society of old, we have used those things for building materials, metals and all kinds of things to build technology and everything that we have out of it.
00:05:49
Speaker
And that has caused a lot of problems as well as actually prosperity. And so, yeah, I think there's kind of like two kind of main roles of it in the future. Like I think it will have to obviously continue playing a role because we will continue needing all the raw materials for all the different technology and whatever we might decide to do. And maybe like until we start mining asteroids or something, but we'll have to continue kind of working with
00:06:19
Speaker
with what we have in the subsurface a lot of the time. So, yeah, one of the rules is like finding ways of using these resources in a kind of smarter and better and more effective ways and more sustainable ways. And in a second big part, which is, you know, the carbon question is perhaps undoing some of the stuff that we have done without thinking too hard about it. And so the fact that we have so much CO2 in the atmosphere
00:06:45
Speaker
is primarily because we have just taken it out from the subsurface and put it up in the atmosphere. And so I think in terms of the mass balance, it does make a lot of sense to think that to deal with this problem, we may as well consider putting it back in the subsurface, you know, where it came from. And so, yeah, there are sort of many different kind of ways of thinking of CO2 sequestration, but geological CO2 sequestration is something that I work on.
00:07:15
Speaker
And yeah, the simple idea of that is that we often have industrial processes that produce CO2 as a byproduct. And so we will, and now as is, we will say burn fossil fuels to produce energy, or we will have all kinds of different manufacturing processes that produce CO2. And the CO2 is just vented to the atmosphere. So the idea is to, instead of doing that, to capture the CO2 at the point source,
00:07:45
Speaker
and process it, sort of clean it, and then inject it back in the subsurface underground for a geological storage. So essentially go through this process of taking a fluid out, which is some kind of hydrocarbon fluid, taking it from it what we need, and then putting CO2 back underground. So yeah, so that's the geological city storage. Yeah, and I think it's worth pointing out here that that
00:08:14
Speaker
The way you phrase it, it doesn't necessarily sound like, you know, one might think, oh, well, how's that going to take carbon out of the kind of out of circulation in the atmosphere, I guess. But depending on how you play it, you could be and you could be growing a lot of biomass. So growing things that you then burn basically. And obviously in the growing process, those plants are taking carbon
00:08:41
Speaker
out of the atmosphere and building it into their hydrocarbon structures, their leaves, their stalks, etc. You burn that and then you capture as much of the CO2 from the flue gases as you can and put that underground. And that creates a negative movement of carbon from the air into the crust.
Economic Realities of Carbon Capture
00:09:08
Speaker
almost a little bit counterintuitively because you're burning something. But, you know, when you think about the whole loop, it's taking stuff out of circulation. I guess that's called BEX, if I'm getting my acronyms right here. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about this. I mean, how effective, I mean, maybe let's start before you
00:09:33
Speaker
sort of literally dive into the ground. If we start on the kind of flue gases, like how good are we at extracting carbon from or CO2, I guess, from those flue gases? Like how much escapes and how much we managed to take out? Yes, I think the efficiency of extracting the CO2 from the flue gas is pretty high and sort of the kind of the
00:10:03
Speaker
the field of development of research is really at like bringing down the cost, because obviously this process, well, in terms of enabling CO2 storage, really, what's happening is that, you know, we have industries that operate the way they operate now, and then adding on this addition off, then you also have to like capture the CO2, extract it, and it just is an added cost.
00:10:27
Speaker
and there's no associated financial gain to it, other than the potential incentives for carbon tax or things like that, so legislative incentives.
00:10:41
Speaker
of removing carbon. And so yeah, the big kind of challenge is to make it as efficient and cheap for capturing and extracting the CO2 from the flue gases. But still, essentially, it is always an added cost, you know, it is, I guess, like, as something as an industry,
00:11:03
Speaker
it is not really like a product that you're producing that somebody wants to buy necessarily, it is actually like a kind of waste management program that we have just never implemented. And now we have to bear the cost of implementing it. And sort of no one wants to really do that because you know, very happily we've been venting into the atmosphere. But it is kind of sort of somewhat similar to you know, just like
00:11:26
Speaker
I don't know, like pouring out sewage into the street and medieval wonder. Eventually somebody has to put in the infrastructure of dealing with it. Yeah, this is the classic tragedy of the Commons, right? There's no cost to just doing that unless we create some kind of carbon and there are plans already. I thought different sorts of prices on carbon, whether it's taxes or credits or whatever,
00:11:55
Speaker
But I guess, yeah, as you say, there's very little incentive for doing this outside of that, right? This is like an outside cost. I suppose the other thing worth mentioning apart from those carbon credits is a lot of companies sort of are actually looking to do these sort of things, even if it hurts the bottom line, which is surprising, but it does seem to be that people are investing in this.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, there's an interesting point that it's not so much the efficiency. I think the efficiency, I looked this up recently, so it's somewhere around 90%, which that sounds pretty good. And then you could make it higher, but it's going to cost a lot more. And in some ways, what you really need is just to make it as cheap as possible. So it's kind of like a no brainer to add this on. But yeah, maybe then take a sort of, yeah, once
00:12:55
Speaker
I guess the other expensive thing that we're going to talk about is what you do with that carbon once you've kind of concentrated. So you take it out of the flue gases. What happens next? Do you have a lot of gas? You have a lot of gas, I guess, right? Or is it in a normal form? What do we do with that? Before I go on the storage part, I guess I want to make a comment of
00:13:21
Speaker
because it's this expensive thing that we're going to add on to some sort of industry. I think the question has really been of where exactly does it make sense to do this? And that has just been changing with time. And so when this all started, this idea of, say, green fossil fuels has been quite popular, where you could just continue using fossil fuels to generate energy and then capture the CO2 and store it on the ground and then ask
00:13:50
Speaker
I mean, that's been criticized widely and it's sort of widely accepted in the CO2 sort of sequestration community that probably that's not the best kind of way to move forward because essentially you're just enabling like fossil fuels to continue but with like way like larger cost while we have like way better renewables for, you know, like technologies like renewables for generating electricity. So something like that, you know, could work technically, but is it the most optimal solution? Probably not.
00:14:17
Speaker
And so then the question is like, where does it actually fit? Where is it really needed?
Industry-Specific Carbon Capture Solutions
00:14:22
Speaker
So I think some things that kind of really stand out is processes where we don't have like an alternative, like a viable alternative with renewable energies or things like various industrial sort of applications, for instance, and making cement. So making cement involves taking limestone that has carbon in it and heating it and the byproduct of that is CO2 and sort of cement is just like this super useful.
00:14:45
Speaker
material that we just can't stop using. And there's a lot of, you know, industrializing to do in various countries still. So we will just continue and it accounts to something like 8% of total, like global emissions, a really huge part. So they like really targeting these big industrial kind of processes and say capturing CO2 in a cement plant, I think makes a lot of sense. And so that's mitigating the emissions that we kind of
00:15:14
Speaker
We will have to have them. We don't have a better idea about it right now, other than say, refusing to build new houses for people, which is not really going to go well. Then another part is what you mentioned, things like BEX, where it actually offers a sort of opportunity of negative emissions, where again, various other applications we can think about,
00:15:40
Speaker
and reducing the emissions or perhaps reaching zero emissions, having something like that as net zero, but in terms of negative emissions, it's then like quite hard. And because we have so much CO2 already in the atmosphere and we will kind of continue, there will continue being applications, say as aviation and things like that will be like hard to phase out entirely.
00:16:04
Speaker
we will continue like having some kind of emissions. And so like to counteract them and have actually negative emissions, whereas you say, you know, we can grow biomass, we can burn it and we can store the CO2 underground is a sort of, I mean, in terms of strategies that various countries have of reaching net zero, VEX has been like such a huge part of the commitment safer in IPCC and, you know, the Paris agreement in the United Nations.
00:16:33
Speaker
Like very many countries put so much weight on VIX just because it's very hard to balance your sheet otherwise. And to some degree, like I think there has been an over commitment.
00:16:46
Speaker
to BEX, and it's like, okay, well, you know, we're gonna, and then we're gonna get rid of 50% of our missions by BEX at some point. And, and, you know, we'll think about how to do that later, and probably not invest in research for a long time. And it does have that, like, really great potential, but sort of the exactly the scale of it, I think, and sort of, you know, remains to be to be kind of seen in the work is in on sort of on paper, like, of course, you could grow a lot of forest, technically,
00:17:15
Speaker
and then burn the biomass and then sort of store the carbon, but how it plays out in sort of real world and kind of where you're going to have these, you know, managed forests and how it's going to be legislated and managed and is it actually going to interfere with natural habitat and are we going to end up in these sort of situations where kind of we create like this legislative framework that encourages
00:17:39
Speaker
say just replacing natural woodland with some kind of managed forest and then sort of saying that that's good for the environment. There are a lot of, I think, things to kind of do more work on and research of how exactly this can be something that doesn't end up having negative consequences to kind of the scale, I guess, that it's proposed.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of have the same reservations about Bex and I think back to the very first podcast I recorded with Casey Hanmer, who is
00:18:18
Speaker
in some ways trying to do something similar, you know, they're trying to create hydrocarbons, but in a carbon neutral way, possibly carbon negative, because they could sort of store some of the hydrocarbons that they create, probably not geologically, but as materials. But yeah, so he's kind of one of the things that stood out for me from that conversation was that photosynthesis is not super efficient, compared to
00:18:48
Speaker
PV. And we know photovoltaics are about 20% to 30% efficient. We might be able to push them a bit higher, but I think probably the focus should be just on bringing down costs, although there's lots of promise in paragraph guides and things like this that that will probably increase the efficiency.
00:19:08
Speaker
But in any case, yeah, like 30%, you know, 20 to 30% efficient is pretty good for something that's so simple and cheap to produce. Now, yeah, his point was, yeah, PV is about 1000 times more efficient at converting sunlight into energy than plants.
00:19:32
Speaker
Now, plants obviously convert sunlight very directly into hydrocarbons, which is pretty cool. And you need to do more work with PV. And Casey's idea was, or is, that we'll basically strip out carbon dioxide from the air. We'll also get moisture from the air so that we get
00:20:00
Speaker
Water will electrolyse that water, again, all using PV.
Comparing Carbon Removal Technologies
00:20:05
Speaker
And we'll use this also to make methane. And there's other people with similar plants. And yeah, it involves a lot more work, but it should be orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of land area for the amount of hydrocarbons that we can create compared to BEX. So yeah, that just makes me think, well,
00:20:31
Speaker
clearly BEX is important and it's kind of an easy thing to get running. And we can use it like with a lot of existing kind of power stations and things like that as well. We can just grow this stuff, put I guess the correct carbon
00:20:46
Speaker
like correct technology in the flu to extract the carbon. And so I think it, you know, merits certainly investment, but maybe air to fuel is a little bit under invested. And one final thought, like, that just struck me the other day is like, you know, plants, if plants were more efficient, they would be darker, they would be black, right? And yeah,
00:21:11
Speaker
They just done a wonderful job, but it's not just optimizing for them to convert energy into sunlight, into hydrocarbons. It's balanced a lot of things. Whereas PVs, we've designed that to do just that. So I don't know, a bit of my kind of musings on this, but I don't know if you have kind of similar thoughts or disagree with any of that. Well, yeah, I mean, I would certainly agree that, you know,
00:21:39
Speaker
producing energy from PV and then just using the electricity and be way more efficient than growing plants and then using that for energy somehow. But I guess like the fundamental difference there is the kind of, I guess like because the sort of choice of biomass here is not because it's extremely efficient at providing you energy, but because there is that aspect of it where you can take the carbon, capture the CO2 and then store it somewhere.
00:22:05
Speaker
And so if we just use a PV for energy, that's great because it's just renewables. But if we're also producing some kind of hydrocarbon from it, from say air and that energy, I guess the question I have is how does that help with removing the carbon?
Direct Air Capture: A Future Prospect
00:22:22
Speaker
I guess if we just started using electricity, I think the thinking here is that at some point where we have such abundant electricity that we just don't know what else to do with it,
00:22:34
Speaker
And we can also make sort of hydrocarbons, but like, I guess like, sort of, I don't feel like there's any shortage of hydrocarbons right now that we need to like, right now make them in more expensive or more strange ways like that. And, and essentially, like, it went when you make biofuels, you know, you're kind of taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere, you may be putting into fuel, and then, again, you're emitting it. So it's a sort of like, it's a single loop, and then it's back out again, rather than you remove it from the system.
00:23:03
Speaker
And so yeah, I guess like I don't see it so much as like a sequestration technology more and more. Just I'm trying to wise and making feels. Yeah, I think I think that's right is it's carbon neutral if you use PV as part of an air to fuel process, but it's not necessarily it's not necessarily sequestering. But you could, I guess, do that. But it probably would work quite differently to how it works with the
00:23:32
Speaker
kind of flue stack stuff. Or maybe not actually. I guess it's kind of similar. Like you could imagine doing an air to fuel thing that kind of combines direct air capture. So you take some of your carbon and you combine that with hydrogen from electrolysis to create methane. That's something you burn again. That part's carbon neutral. But you take some of your carbon and you just, you know, you compress it. You do the things we're going to talk about in a bit and you put that back into the earth.
00:23:59
Speaker
So I think it could like, it seems like it could, it seems like it could work. And the big kind of advantage is just like, it should be a lot more efficient than just growing plants. And then you get around the problems that you mentioned of, oh, are we just going to end up with lots of like monolithic, um, monoculture patches, which doesn't sound so great. Whereas, you know, the alternative might be.
00:24:24
Speaker
let's rewild a lot of areas. And let's say of the every 100 acres that we would have had as kind of monoculture, we'll have like 99 acres rewilded and one acre with like a PV plant. And that might be producing the equivalent amount of energy. But I just mentioned something here that we've not really talked about, which is direct air capture.
00:24:51
Speaker
Which is kind of like, yeah, so tell us a little bit about that, because this is another place where carbon sequestration is kind of key.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah so I guess like yeah it is sort of serving the same purpose then you know as BEX but instead of using plants then we strip CO2 from the air and I guess yeah you know that'll be the same as like what are we going to do with this CO2 are we going to make fuels or are we going to just straight up store it somewhere and so yeah so that again that technology
00:25:21
Speaker
And there's a lot of research in it. And again, like it is effective. It is just very expensive in terms of the energy you need. I think it works best where you can have like essentially free energy like in geothermal kind of areas where you can have like energy from heat. So say
00:25:39
Speaker
in Iceland or places like that, the costs are significantly lower. But I think right now it is in this R&D stage where we are developing ways of doing it and trying to bring down the cost with essentially the same view in mind that in the future, the primary use of it really is for negative emissions. We will just deploy it for taking CO2 off the atmosphere and putting it underground.
00:26:08
Speaker
And I guess like, like in sort of my understanding of say BEX and direct air capture is that well, well say, direct air capture just really like then produce energy. It just, it just consumes it. BEX has, you know, some kind of purpose of, of producing energy. But in, in some ways it's almost like a by-product. Like, like both of those ideas are really primarily about, you know, capturing carbon with some kind of efficiency from the air.
00:26:37
Speaker
and then storing it. And so I think this kind of world where we have renewables and solar to such sort of degree that we have so much electricity that essentially just developing solar to that level solves so many of our problems already. And so there will be a way cheaper and better energy than the energy we get from burning this biomass.
00:27:06
Speaker
And so the role of burning the biomass will kind of like, you know, in terms of efficiency, that will no way compete with solar, but yeah, the purpose of it will be just so we keep taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere and, you know, the same way of direct air capture. And then both of those things kind of then really fit. And I guess like, hopefully, like if we have this kind of situation where solar is so cheap, then
00:27:31
Speaker
air capture something becomes something we can do and then we can do away with like trying to plant forests. Yeah, that would be pretty good. And so if it's like, and even like then, you know, using like air to fuel is essentially I think in the same world where, where energy is just from solar. And we don't have to worry about this anymore. And we're just thinking of new ways of putting CO2 underground or maybe utilizing it from in some kind of ways. Yeah.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. Both the air-to-fuel and the direct air capture, they kind of live and die by energy becoming so cheap that you can just throw it away. And there is really good reason to think that we're on that path with renewables.
00:28:17
Speaker
I'm hoping to talk with Rupert Way, who was an author. He's at the Oxford Modern School, so he's based not too far from you, where they kind of look at the economics of all these things. And they looked at just how much the price of renewable energy had come down.
00:28:36
Speaker
over the last few decades and it had exceeded every prediction and they were like well why is this and it's just that the learning rate with renewables has been so great and I think partly that's because renewables are these you know solar in particular are these kind of small units that you produce in the millions and millions of quantities and every time you build a factory and you're building many many factories and you're you know also iterating those factories that gives you like a process of you know an ability to improve things and
00:29:04
Speaker
that creates this learning rate for that for something like every doubling of your installed solar capacity that costs for by, I think, maybe 15% or more, which just means that, you know, we're on a kind of a massive downward trends. And that might make things or if it does continue, it will make things like direct air capture and air to fuel
00:29:28
Speaker
not just economically feasible, but really cheap in terms of air to fuel. I think it could be cheaper to do that than to create your fuels in the current ways at least. I think worth mentioning though that the reason why it makes sense to start with adding
00:29:52
Speaker
carbon sequestration to BEX plants, and as you said, existing concrete production facilities, is that, and this is an obvious point, the CO2 there isn't super high concentrations, whereas in the air, we're in the 400 parts per million. So you have to go through, you just have to churn through a lot of air if you're using direct air capture. And that's just, you think about those fans turning, right?
00:30:21
Speaker
the kind of, yeah, pulling off these just few molecules in every thousand or something then. But yeah, yeah, like I think all of the stack unit has its place kind of in that sort of timeline of how we go into carbonizing and when it should be applied. And certainly, yeah, you know, we're say with cement, I think it's like just super obvious, we have these plants and we need really concrete, you know, we can continue needing it, we will be producing it.
00:30:49
Speaker
And right now it's 100% of it is just being transported to the atmosphere. And so like, it just makes a lot of sense to just not do that, you know, to capture the CO2 and store it. And it's something that we can do immediately. It's just, you know, like we can do it right now and make things way better immediately. And then
00:31:07
Speaker
I think it's super important to work on all technologies like direct air capture, because eventually, when we decarbonize all the easy things, and it's always like the biggest ones are the easiest ones to say, like in the UK decarbonization, we just shut down all the coal plants. That was quite easy.
00:31:24
Speaker
Also, they were like really old and kind of like reaching the end stage of their life and that sort of decreased the emissions quickly, like by a lot. So you can meet your targets like that. But also, you know, they were just out. They're going out anyway. And so you keep kind of doing that and will like, you know, continue like with things that are like a bit more obvious and say like capturing CO2 from cement plants.
00:31:47
Speaker
And eventually you'll get to a place where we still have a lot of CO2 that we already admitted. We still have emissions that are really hard to kind of prevent aviation, for example.
00:32:00
Speaker
And then then you will like really need your direct air capture. And so hopefully you have been doing research and R&D into this for like last 30 years. So then we have these pretty efficient machines by the time we really need to deploy them. So yeah, so that's kind of like how, where I think say direct air capture comes in and, you know, maybe. Yeah. Air to fuel technology while say some of the kind of geological CO2 storage.
00:32:25
Speaker
And the stuff I've been kind of working on, like I feel this is just like, we can do it right now. Like there's these things we can do right now and it'll be better right now. You know, it doesn't depend on us developing anything. Okay. That's cool. I think that's a good like lead in, cause we spent a lot of time sort of above the ground, but sort of, yeah. So yeah. How do we get this? We've, we've taken the flu. We've extracted carbon dioxide from flue gases. Like how do we get it underground? What is that process?
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So again, the idea of this is, is kind of quite simple. You just, you have CO2, you pressurize it, and then you use these wells. It's kind of, it's kind of very similar process, you know, exploring for hydrocarbons, but kind of reverse. You have wells drilled into the subsurface, and you can inject fluids in there and
00:33:15
Speaker
and they will be within the four spaces of rocks.
The Science Behind Underground CO2 Storage
00:33:19
Speaker
I think a good way to think about where is it that we're proposing to put this gas in, it doesn't sound super intuitive. Often it sounds to people that you do, you're just going to create these pressurized chambers underground and it's a really unstable, crazy situation. Why do you want to pump things underground? But a good way to think about that is to think about what
00:33:45
Speaker
about what already is underground, what is it that we're actually dealing with in the subsurface. So we have kilometers of rocks in the subsurface that all of them have a lot of pore spaces. So these little holes and fractures in them that are interconnected. And so everything below the surface, all the rocks have actually a lot of volume in them. That's not just rock, but there's open space.
00:34:15
Speaker
And all of that space is filled with water. So like everything is water saturated. And there's kind of like a surprising amount of water underground. Like, I mean, it's more, I think people associate mostly it was sort of, so we know about groundwater and aquifers that we use for drinking. And sort of that tends to be a kind of more shallow water. But yeah, this kind of shallow freshwater is like only like a fraction of water that we have in a subsurface. And so most of it,
00:34:44
Speaker
is actually quite saline, because when you keep going deeper, the water is still there, but it sort of moves slower. And because it moves so slow, it has more time to sort of dissolve various minerals from the rocks. It's like salty and briny, and not really good for any sort of applications like drinking. So yeah, so the whole surface is just this kind of hydrological system, that saturate of water, and there's a lot of space in it.
00:35:14
Speaker
And yeah, like in some of the areas where which is suitable for say injection, and so the like 30% of total volume of the subsurface is just like these spaces with water. And so, like, yeah, like the whole of the surface is already like this kind of pressurized hydrological system.
00:35:34
Speaker
which is mostly water, but also it contains all kinds of other things in it. So there's already a lot of gases dissolved in this water. There's naturally nitrogen dissolved. There's CO2. That's naturally already also dissolved there. There's methane. And in some parts, this is also where we have hydrocarbons and oil and gas. It is essentially just more water, but with a little bit then of organic matter.
00:35:59
Speaker
And then there's hydrocarbons within this water that, you know, that will kind of drill into and extract. And so, yeah, like the subsurface naturally is just like this kind of multi-phase fluid system. There's, you know, like oil and gas and some of the gases dissolved and some of the gases in the gas phase and the other. And so the idea is that we can inject CO2 into this water and it will dissolve in it. You know, it will dissolve in it. We can kind of predict how much you can put in a subsurface.
00:36:29
Speaker
And some of that will dissolve, some of it will be stored in a gas phase. And yeah, we're targeting sort of these really porous rocks, sandstones that have a lot of space sort of water. And also in particular, like the areas are suitable. They would have sealed rocks. So some kind of really impermeable rocks like shells on top. So then the gas that is there in a gas phase primarily kind of migrates laterally and doesn't sort of come up back to the surface.
00:36:58
Speaker
And there is just a lot of this volume in general and also like a surprising amount of volume available where you have both the good rock for kind of the flow of CO2 and also a seal on top of it. There is just a lot of space.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so this is interesting, like we're, probably the picture for many people might be, let's just find like a big cave or something. What we're saying is we're actually gonna find, it's kind of like porous, so it's kind of like sponge-like, but it's rocky. So it's just rock with lots of holes kind of, and there's water in there. We're gonna inject this compressed CO2. So it's in quite interesting,
00:37:47
Speaker
phase when it's compressed so it's like super critical right so it's neither quite yeah it's beyond the point where the distinction between liquid and gas makes sense it behaves in some way like a liquid and in some ways like a gas we've compressed it that much and then it goes into yeah dissolves into the water that's kind of distributed through these rocks and then on top of that you're also looking for a place where there's like a nice impermeable layer so it's not going to kind of bubble up
00:38:18
Speaker
Cool. Okay. Yeah. Take us. Yeah. So you said that this is, I mean, standing back, you know, if we didn't have geologists and if we, if we didn't have an oil and gas industry, it would be probably quite hard to find those sort of places, right? That doesn't, but, but I'm guessing that because we've invested so much over the last, you know, century plus,
00:38:44
Speaker
in finding underground deposits of things. Do we have very good technologies for finding the appropriate places and getting to them? Yeah, I know exactly. It is just so similar in a way to exploration of oil and gas.
00:39:04
Speaker
is that I guess it is strange to me often that the idea seems so crazy to a lot of people because it is just literally the same, but instead of out, you're putting it in. Obviously, there's engineering challenges, there's a different phase, the methane has different buoyancy, there's different behavior, and so there's kind of like
00:39:24
Speaker
these engineering problems that people are addressing but like it's not like a crazy idea you know we're not like sending it to the moon but yeah we have explored the subsurface really well for oil gas and so there's you know seismic imaging of the subsurface we can like predict really well where there's good seals and for like for a lot of it also depleted gas bills where hydrocarbons have already been extracted you can use the same field to then inject the CO2 back in
00:39:52
Speaker
And so both the infrastructure, even the pipelines that we have, and also it's kind of under understanding where to put it, some of the wells can be like retrofitted as well. It's just very kind of useful for it. And also, like, there are differences again, and sort of how say methane behaves in the subsurface and CO2.
00:40:13
Speaker
But yeah, she says like CO2 acts as supercritical fluid at sort of subsurface temperatures and pressures. And that again, like works out really in kind of storage favor, because when it's supercritical fluid, it becomes denser than water. So and say like with natural gas, like the density is quite low. So we always have this kind of buoyant phase of say methane that sits above the water and sort of is trapped then by the seal.
00:40:41
Speaker
And yet, still, we do have a lot of natural gas in the subsurface that has been there for millions of years until we drilled these holes and taken it out. While the CO2, because it is denser, it starts kind of, it doesn't want to necessarily come up, it sort of starts, it's even like convective sort of system with water where it sinks down and kind of circulates in the aquifer.
00:41:07
Speaker
So yeah, it is, it is different, you know, from, from hydrocarbons, but not in sort of really unexpected ways that, uh, that, that is like a really sort of technical issue, I guess. Um, yeah. And I guess another kind of way, oh, this is, this is something I've focused and I've done my PhD on is like, as I said, you know, we, we have these natural analogues, like, like natural gas fields, but also we do have natural CO2 fields.
00:41:36
Speaker
So already feel like these subsurface fields in where CO2 is in the gas phase and is trapped there. And so normally like the source of it is some sort of like mantle activity. So it's some kind of like volcanic source of it, right? We have some sort of a volcanic intrusion in the subsurface or maybe there's a fault and where the mantle is then connected with our kind of more shallow subsurface. And so the CO2 gas is migrated
00:42:05
Speaker
from the depths and has been just trapped. And so there are these CO2 fields and people have discovered them because obviously they're like looking for oil and gas and then they drilled into CO2 well and unhappy discovery. And then we can go and study these and sort of try and understand what happened.
00:42:22
Speaker
And we know that they have existed as a subsurface for millions of years, like associated with say, like volcanic activity that was active at the time. And so, yeah, we have like, like, I guess it's a really great sort of natural experiment on timescales that we can't really sort of replicate in the lab or there's field studies by injecting suturing and seeing what happens, where we can find evidence that the source of these gases
00:42:50
Speaker
you know, they have been sourced many, many years ago, and they still are on the subsurface. And so yeah, it sort of just really helps to build a lot of confidence. So this is something that we can do. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Because, you know, we know, hydrocarbons, like stay under the ground, generally, unless we kind of pull them up. But yeah, there must be
00:43:14
Speaker
must be the worry that putting CO2 underground, maybe despite all of our beliefs, could it just kind of bubble up? But you're saying, okay, well, no, there are lots of cases where CO2 is produced naturally underground and we come across it and we know that it must have been there for some time, I guess.
Reusing Oil Infrastructure for CO2 Storage
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's also super interesting so that we can basically kind of use some of the existing wells and things and just run them in reverse almost. Does that work for, is that a kind of special case or are there a lot of places where that could work? Well, more of the pipelines of the pipeline can be used essentially, depending on how you transport the CO2, whether it's liquid or gas phase,
00:44:05
Speaker
So it's like pressure differences. But yeah, like a lot of the oil and gas pipe infrastructure can be reused for CO2. And yeah, in terms of wells, often I guess like, I suppose like the easiest way to store CO2 would be into saline aquifers. Definitely I think it would be something that, just because where there isn't already hydrocarbons. So it would be great to drill new wells. But yeah, also like there,
00:44:35
Speaker
people have used existing oil and gas wells for injection and things like that. So yeah, a lot of it can be reused. The main, I think, in terms of infrastructure, and sort of financing all of this and making all of this happen, I think the main challenge is that again, we're like talking about some kind of infrastructure that's really large scale, and there's like a few different
00:45:01
Speaker
tech, expensive like tech that it needs to kind of all happen at the same time, and then be connected and then all be like economically viable for for a long time. So you need like some kind of capture plant where you're gonna you know, you're gonna commit, essentially, then sometimes the problem is like, are we gonna have enough co2? You know, if we have the pipeline, and we start injecting it, but like, where is the source that they're going to be? So is there going to be like enough plants that are capturing it?
00:45:28
Speaker
and sending it to the storage facility at a rate that sort of meet a sustainable rate for decades. So essentially, all of that needs to evolve at the same time, we need like all the capture plans, pipeline infrastructure for transport, and the whole storage and monitoring. And so I think that has proven like really difficult to develop everything at the same time, especially when it sort of relies on industry to do it and you know, have some kind of like financial incentives and security about their business models. Yeah.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think that it's a really good point. Again, it's sort of a point of divergence. One of the things I think that's just been, again, so that's made solar in particular, but you know, also wind just works so well is, you know, I can have a solar panel on my roof, but it also makes sense to put a solar panel on my, you know,
00:46:19
Speaker
an Amazon depot, it makes sense to build a thousand hectare solar farm. It just works on so many scales. So it's kind of easy to get going, as it were, whereas these big carbon sequestration projects are big. You're drilling hundreds of meters underground. You need lots of pipeline.
00:46:43
Speaker
that infrastructure can be reused at least, but, you know, these are a hundred million dollar plus projects to go, you know, for a single one to get going. So I think we've got something like, I don't know, of order 50 that are operational and they're pulling out of order, well, less than a, I think, is it like, I think less than a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide a year where we're putting in, you know,
00:47:10
Speaker
37 or so billion tons a year from other sources. So still relatively small. And there's more in the pipeline, but it's, yeah, like you said, I think it's just hard to, yeah, this is not something that's going to bubble up in terms of just like lots of people deciding they're going to do it and like small financing and things. Like it's something where there needs to be kind of top down mandates and really big incentives for big investments.
00:47:38
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Like, it needs some sort of, you know, like a regulatory framework. And essentially, yeah, it has to be like a government type of policy and project that you know, we're good, we're good at.
00:47:48
Speaker
somehow incentivize this. And this is also going to be sustainable in terms of, you know, whatever legislation for decades. So that, and so I think that part has been like very difficult to kind of coordinate and, you know, because even the opinion of various governments has just been very different whenever the government changes, of whether we want to support this technology or we don't. And as you say, it's like way easier to support something like renewables that is sort of like very
00:48:15
Speaker
Yeah, you can, you know, like the scale of it, it works on a small scale and a large scale. Well, this is something that's only going to work on a large scale. But yeah, there's like essentially right now there is this project called the Northern Lights Project in the North Sea that's kind of run in Norway.
00:48:32
Speaker
where it seems like it's starting to have that infrastructure where there's like different companies as well as like the state of while the government of Norway are creating the infrastructure and it's like a business model where different kind of different industries can sell their CO2 for storage and because there is like a carbon tax in Norway, it's sort of like it's creating now a system where it would work where you could have like enough CO2 because there's many users that might want to sell it and they're incentivized
00:49:03
Speaker
to sell it, and then it is kind of like a business model for, for the storage, you know, part of the chain to kind of earn money from it, I guess.
Natural Hydrogen: A New Frontier
00:49:12
Speaker
Yeah, something like that, I guess, is kind of how this would work and practice. Yeah. But yeah, I guess like the main point I have is, is that there is just like no shortage of space underground for storage, but like making it all work in terms of like economy and industry and like these chains, interconnected chains of industry.
00:49:31
Speaker
is like has been the difficult part for sure. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the key message, right? That we know how to do this, we're doing this, we can do it at even greater scale, you know, in terms of engineering requirements, but it's just getting the financing in place. So people shouldn't say, oh, carbon capture, that's like, that's a moonshot, right? It's, well, maybe it's an economic moonshot, but it's, it's like something we, you know, the technology is absolutely down.
00:49:59
Speaker
Yeah, but also, like, I mean, it is a good, I guess, like evolution of the concept, because again, like I said, in the early days, there's been this concept of like, okay, well, we're just gonna continue burning fossil fuels and build this whole huge industry to sequester the CO2. And, you know,
00:50:15
Speaker
It has been questioned whether this is the most efficient thing to do really and so if you keep developing what exactly is the model of this and what's the optimal way of doing it that does make sense, I think eventually you get to a point where it becomes something that makes sense in the whole society in the economy. I think it's moving that way.
00:50:38
Speaker
Cool. All right. I think let's talk about something else, which is also related to geology and climate, climate change, but probably less known. And so hydrogen, there's a lot of excitement or there's been a lot of excitement around hydrogen for many years and kind of talk about a hydrogen economy and
00:51:05
Speaker
We can talk about how that economy would work, but I think one thing that mostly people have agreed on is that the way that we'd run that is by the optimal way of doing that would be electrolyzing water, creating hydrogen, using abundant renewable energy, which is becoming cheaper and cheaper to make that model work.
00:51:30
Speaker
There's obviously other ways and people will be familiar with, you know, you can get hydrogen from methane. That's not really that great, but, you know, there's lots of other ways of creating hydrogen, but sort of the hopes, I guess, have been set on this kind of electrolysis model. But, you know, that requires a lot of energy, which you could be using to actually put in, you could be putting that into the electricity grid to do other things. It requires a lot of electrolyzers, which are, you know, expensive to build and
00:52:01
Speaker
you know, not completely efficient, maybe 70% efficient as well. But there is, there's another thing on the scene, which people won't know about, which is hydrogen from the ground. So firstly, you know, does this, you know, I was reading on the kind of National Renewable Energy Laboratory website,
00:52:26
Speaker
the US. It says hydrogen does not typically exist. It used to say, in fact, hydrogen does not freely exist in nature at all. Just a couple of months ago. So there is this long being a belief that hydrogen just doesn't exist as H2, as a molecule in its own, naturally. But I think you're going to say that that's not the case. So yeah, please kind of tell us, is there hydrogen out there? Is there hydrogen in the crust naturally?
00:52:57
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I think it is a really sort of exciting now field of research. Looking, as you say, for a natural hydrogen that occurs just like oil and gas or CO2 that we know we've naturally seen a subsurface in this molecular form as H2.
00:53:14
Speaker
And it's a fairly new idea and people haven't really thought about exploring for it before. And yeah, to some degree, yeah, I guess like there, you know, people didn't maybe think it exists at all. But for those parts, it, even people who thought that it exists, like didn't quite think that it would exist in kind of places and quantities where it'd make any sense for us to try and like use it, you know, as, as, as a resource. And we start really,
00:53:41
Speaker
finding a lot of evidence to think otherwise right now. So it has become this really interesting kind of research area and exploration area already of yes. So compared to other ways of making hydrogen, like I guess the majority of hydrogen that we use now, and there is a lot of demand for hydrogen, it is like a multi-billion dollar industry, even without sort of using hydrogen in various kind of
00:54:09
Speaker
ways that we see in the future and we can debate about, you know, how we might use it in the future, whether it's going to be used as, you know, for transport or not, you know, obviously. But like right now, we use it for various, again, just industrial processes and primarily like making fertilizers, so making ammonia for for fertilizing. And the other thing is like,
00:54:33
Speaker
I'm only I guess it's just like nitrogen mixed with hydrogen and we get the hydrogen in different ways. Yeah.
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, and so right now we get the nitrogen from air and we get the hydrogen from hydrocarbons. So yeah, we kind of removed the hydrogen from hydrocarbons for like steamy time forming. And again, CO2 is vented, the hydrogen we use for something that we need the hydrogen for. And again, that constitutes already like without any sort of like thinking about future hydrogen economies or something like that to about 2% of global emissions.
00:55:10
Speaker
So if we can do something about that and not use this hydrogen from hydrocarbons, that would be excellent. And it could be using green hydrogen. But as you said, this again, like producing hydrogen in mass scale, using electricity lives again in the same world as there's other technologies of where we have just really sort of vast amounts of cheap renewable energy.
00:55:34
Speaker
And yeah, but yeah, right, right now that is expensive. And so the cost of that is, you know, predicted to fall in the future. But if we could just get hydrogen from the ground, that is not associated with carbon at all. And the production of that would be way cheaper. And that, you know, would be excellent. That would be a great way to solve this kind of 2% of global emission problems to start with.
00:55:57
Speaker
And however the hydrogen economy would evolve in the future, we could see where that fits in the place. But yeah, so the idea of this geological hydrogen and where does it come from and why did we never know about this, I think is quite an interesting question.
00:56:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I can, I can talk about how, like how it is produced in the earth. And yeah, maybe I'll touch a little bit about kind of how we also like learned about it in kind of academia, because yeah, my focus and sort of work with it has been from this more academic perspective that didn't really have anything to do with resources. And
00:56:37
Speaker
And so, yeah, it's kind of been a new idea that we can maybe actually explore it for the society. But yeah, so there's like two main ways of how it's produced. And so one of the ways is water rock reactions. So it's a sort of reaction where water reacts with this kind of volcanic rock, a type of rock that is really iron rich, these sort of ultramatic rocks. And they'll produce this mineral called serpentine.
00:57:02
Speaker
And hydrogen is a byproduct of that. And so we have known about these reactions for a long time. So they will happen in various places where these kind of mantle rocks can be sort of interactive waters to potentially like mid-ocean spreading ridges where you have kind of like deep mantle rocks and water sort of circulating or subduction zones and things like that.
00:57:26
Speaker
It's supposed to be oxidation, right? It's like rusting of the rocks. Yes, essentially. The oxygen gets stripped off the hydrogen and makes the rocks kind of rusty. Although you'd think that would make them red, but I guess it makes them green. It creates this serpent and I think. But anyway, it's kind of rusting, I suppose, to sort of make it more prosaic.
Exploring Subsurface Hydrogen Ecosystems
00:57:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:57:54
Speaker
So yes, and kind of the importance of the production of hydrogen in this process has first been discovered in the 1970s, where people have predicted that there should be these sort of things at the bottom of the ocean, these kind of vents, where we have the kind of hydrothermal fluids coming out of the seabed. And then in the 70s, with the first time on Succata cruise, they're absurdities, and they are these really interesting features
00:58:20
Speaker
And generally, because I kind of act, if we're thinking about like the ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean, like the deeper you go, the kind of the less life there is, it's more energy constrained. So we have these sort of really energy constrained environments where there's not a lot of biodiversity and things like very slowly.
00:58:37
Speaker
And yeah, these hydroform events that I think many people will have seen in various documentaries or photos of are these sort of black chimneys out of these smoked smoking chimneys at the bottom of the sea that are associated with fluids coming from depths that are rich in various metals and all kinds of bioavailable molecules. And they are these really fascinating ecosystems.
00:59:02
Speaker
And because what happens is essentially what you need is some kind of source of heat, which will in the case of all these vents is to do with kind of the heat from the mantle and the spreading of the ocean floor. And so you have this heat that kind of creates this kind of circulating system and the fluids and the rocks again, as I said, all the rocks are at the bottom of the sea and below the sea are saturated with water. And so you start circulating this really hot fluid
00:59:30
Speaker
and it starts in leaching like minerals and elements out of the rocks and there's all kinds of reactions happening and it's a sort of like hot pot of creating things. And so around these then like events you have these really kind of interesting diverse ecosystems where like in this kind of sort of desert type of almost environment but you know submarine suddenly have these like live hotspots. And so people have started studying them and found this kind of really fascinating thing that there are
00:59:59
Speaker
microbial, microbial organisms that use hydrogen as their primary energy source. So, and essentially, it has been like this discovery of this kind of second type of life, if you will. Because, like our understanding of life has always been, you know, we have the primary production of energy from photosynthesis,
01:00:21
Speaker
And this is, you know, the plants and algae. And that's kind of the very base of kind of the, you know, the chain of the food chain. Sorry, obviously that uses oxygen, right? Like, yeah.
01:00:37
Speaker
and not hydrogen. So it's kind of surprising to find that we've got these microbes. And was this like just a discovery back then that there were these other kinds of microbes that were using hydrogen? Yeah, it has been just a huge discovery because we're like, okay, well, you know, there's like the energy from the sun.
01:00:55
Speaker
And, you know, and it's combined with CO2 and you can make these like organic hydrocarbons. And then actually, we have, and so the further you are from the sun, the more difficult it is for life to have energy. And then suddenly, like it's kind of this, you know, alternative to the sun, we have hydrogen, you can combine it with say sulfate, you can essentially like remove that electron from hydrogen and use it as energy to kind of produce food, if you will, for microbes.
01:01:21
Speaker
So yeah, there are then all these microbial and it's called chemosynthetic life, rather than photosynthetic life, because it uses this chemical energy from the earth. And you know, that was like fascinating, because it's sort of like, you know, we had this understanding of how life exists and kind of the ecosystem changes, like, oh, okay, there's like a different ecosystem now that has different energy source, and kind of opened a lot of questions of
01:01:44
Speaker
Well, what do we think about then? What's the impact on origin of life? Could life have originated in any sort of places? Or also, how does it work? If we think about other planets, could we have systems like that? We're in, say, in Mars. Well, not so much the vents, but generally, if you're thinking about the subsurface, if we can't have life on the surface, maybe deep in the Earth, you can have hydrogen-dependent life.
01:02:10
Speaker
So yeah, and so the hydrogen question that become really important because if that is a fuel for life, that is sort of like, well, it's interesting to then quantify it and understand like what are the production rates of all of this.
01:02:25
Speaker
And so the vents, I guess, like, you know, have been cool. And then I think only like something like 2013, people also in the kind of in the community of sort of in psych oceanography and stuff have discovered that actually it's not only around the vents, but if you go on a subsurface.
01:02:41
Speaker
there's all of these microbial communities living in the pore spaces there and rocks still eating hydrogen and, you know, like how their whole ecosystem going on. And so that kind of really, again, like expanded our understanding of what's like inhabited, I guess, on the planet. So it turns out then there's a lot of the subsurface also is a biosphere and it's powered by hydrogen.
01:03:02
Speaker
So this water rock reaction hydrogen has been kind of like studied a lot in the kind of communities mostly to deal with trying to understand biology, trying to understand the kind of significance of origin of life and like astrobiology, like in particular, like really trying to understand like whether these kind of systems could exist on other planets and what we could expect in there.
01:03:27
Speaker
And so yes, like, I mean, a lot of people have known about it, you know, since the 70s. But again, we're talking about producing hydrogen in some kind of sea event or, you know, like in poor spaces, it doesn't necessarily sound like this is something that we could like tap into and use. All right. And yeah, and so that's, yeah.
01:03:52
Speaker
So I was just going to say it is like, yeah, I know it's like, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent, but it is, it is so interesting that there is this kind of other. Yeah. Other energy source for life. Cause I think everything on the surface, right? We all got their food from the sun one way or another, right? It's all.
01:04:10
Speaker
whether you're a lion, right? You can trace that food chain back, it gets down to plants and they're getting their energy from the sun. But yeah, so I feel like there's like a great sci-fi novel to be written here about, you know, beings who are living underneath here, I've never seen the sun, but getting all their energy from chemosynthesis. Yeah, that's just so interesting. But yeah, as you say, yeah, it doesn't, so far like, okay, so I guess we know from these ocean, we know from, that there's microbes that are,
01:04:40
Speaker
living off hydrogen, we can see this hydrogen, we know it's present from these vents, but, you know, kind of, yeah, doesn't necessarily seem to solve our problems of using hydrogen in industry and fertilizer creation and so on, because not easy, not easy to get pathways bent.
01:04:59
Speaker
need to steal it, you know, from the microbes because, you know, these ecosystems thrive a bit because the hydrogen variable is definitely a lot of spare, but you know, going around is consumed in this energy consuming environment. It's not eating this, right? Yeah. Yeah. But so yeah, at sort of around the same time, also, so this is kind of like talking about the oceans. And then at the same time, there's, you know, research going on in the subsurface of the continents and kind of what's going on in
01:05:30
Speaker
I've been talking about this water that is in the subsurface. And the question also has been just how far the water goes and how like, because as you keep going down with depth, I guess these pore spaces and fractures and rocks, they keep getting, because of pressure, they keep getting smaller. And like, can you have water in there? And is it actually circulating if you have it? And so we've had these observations. And it's also like subsurface is such a kind of
01:05:58
Speaker
readily like under explored I guess territory because it's just so hard to get samples from very deep, right? Like it's very hard to access directly.
01:06:08
Speaker
But like some of these really interesting observations have come from really deep mines. So for instance, in South Africa and Canada, like some of the deepest mines in the world are up to like down to four, four kilometers at death. And so, and then in these places when people, you know, mine often they'll hit some kind of fracture and that fracture will flow water. And there's like, turns out there's like a lot of water in these fractures. You can, you can hit one and you kind of just tap this like underground
01:06:36
Speaker
and hydrological system and it will keep flowing for like a decade and it's kind of an issue. It's an issue but also like a really interesting thing is like what is this water and where you know like where does it come from. So people have collected you know samples of these waters in the deep mines and have found again surprisingly that it like is full of this chemosynthetic life that is you know also again like
01:07:00
Speaker
getting hydrogen from something. And yeah, I think especially puzzling, these observations have been in places where we don't have these kind of igneous rocks, like these iron-rich rocks where you can produce hydrogen by reacting with water. And so the question is like, how is that now living here, you know, these depths?
01:07:24
Speaker
And so the second way then, you know, like that brings me to that kind of second source of hydrogen and geological hydrogen is a really lytic hydrogen. So it is produced essentially by radioactive decay of radio elements. And so there are radio elements such as uranium, thorium, potassium, that are kind of in trace amounts in rocks kind of everywhere. And it's quite like homogeneously distributed. So it sort of
01:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, we have like a similar amount of uranium just about everywhere, except maybe some places where it's enriched. And so these three elements decay kind of very slowly. And as they decay, they sort of emit this ionizing radiation. And if there's like a water molecule in the vicinity that can split the water molecule, it can produce all kinds of compounds, like including hydrogen.
01:08:18
Speaker
So again, this is like the kind of the production of hydrogen through radialysis wasn't like, you know, in terms of physics, everything was kind of a new concept. But then the idea that you could, you know, just with trace amounts of these radialimates, you could produce it at some kind of rate where it can sustain an ecosystem, especially an ecosystem in the subsurface that is entirely separated again from photosynthesis and somehow lives there for millions of years.
01:08:46
Speaker
has been really new. People haven't quite considered how much hydrogen can we actually produce. Where is this water? How much of it there is? Is it close to these radio elements? After discovering these life forms, you have to explain how do they live there. People didn't have done an assessment of
01:09:09
Speaker
there will be hydrogen and turns out again that there's actually like a lot of it has been produced. We have a lot of water in the subsurface and it has been produced slowly but at a rate that is good enough essentially for these microbial ecosystems to kind of live entirely dependent life to you know photosynthetic life and again the subsurface is full of this chemosynthetic life and
01:09:34
Speaker
So, so, yeah, so there are the two sources. So we have it all under the sea and we have it in a subsurface and the continents. And yeah, it's primarily just been studied and like I have studied it in this kind of context where I just find it fascinating that, you know, life somehow lives on this and the question is how and especially in the continents, the production is very slow. And so some of these forms of life are really fascinating.
01:10:01
Speaker
And in that they have these really slow metabolisms, they sort of like divide a cell like once in a thousand years, and they have these lifestamps that are like really long. And you know, there's a kind of like, it's still an open question of like, how, how long do they live? And some people seem to think that, you know, they can like, live on kind of geological timescales, whereas somehow part of their
01:10:25
Speaker
evolution strategy is to kind of move with plates and go through different environments. So yeah, I mean, that's the tangent. But anyway, that is kind of like, I guess, where the research has been. And so like, how, I guess, what brings us to then thinking about this asset resource is that in some of these places, and where we have samples, you know, from the depths of surface, we also have found where
01:10:54
Speaker
there is just hydrogen in the molecular form. We do have fractures somewhere in various places where hydrogen exists and none of this life that is so energy constrained has managed to consume it. That's interesting. That's interesting in terms of finding places where something else is essentially inhibiting the microbes and maybe they can't consume it.
01:11:22
Speaker
Essentially, like the hydrogen that's produced on Earth, I think for the most part, it is, you know, part of this ecosystem, it's produced, it's consumed at the same rate, there's an ecosystem around it. And then there are special cases, like in the same way as with everything, you know, like with oil and gas or anything, you know, oil and gas is like most of, you know, you'll produce
01:11:45
Speaker
and gas from these organic compounds, and it will just diffuse through water and escape somewhere. But if you have a seal, then you might capture it and you know, a special case where you can drill. And so the same the same is true for hydrogen, like for the most part, it's consumed by microbes. And in some places, it isn't. And yeah, like,
01:12:05
Speaker
I guess when all of us, you know, we've kind of learned more and more about hydrogen, people have kind of looked back at the literature record of observations and turns out that we have like very many observations actually of hydrogen in molecular form like occurring and say again by accident found in gas fields where it's kind of mixed with hydrocarbons and you know, people just don't think much of it or there are hydrogen seeps on the surface, for instance in Turkey, you can like find hydrogen seeps
01:12:35
Speaker
And so there are actually very many observations around the world. And for the most part, people didn't really think much about it or attributed the source to something like kind of way lower scale and something that doesn't quite imply that this could be a resource. And so there's been this kind of big reassessment of what we have observed around the world.
01:12:56
Speaker
And we have observed that in a lot of places it can actually be preserved and not consumed by microbes. And so that's kind of where we are now. We've learned a lot about how it's produced and how it's consumed. And we're really starting to find places where it isn't and doing research into finding places where it can be
01:13:18
Speaker
not just like not consumed, but also stored and sort of concentrated and stored in some kind of way where we could easily drill and sort of just explore it. Yeah.
Hydrogen Extraction and Geological Formations
01:13:30
Speaker
Yeah. Because as you say, if it just seeps out and it may not be consumed by microbes, but if it kind of just seeps out and really kind of low quantities and yeah, it's no good. But yeah, it is super interesting that
01:13:46
Speaker
Despite all these signs, as I mentioned, there's various sources which say either just flatly that hydrogen doesn't exist on its own in natural form, or that it's typically not
01:14:04
Speaker
on its own, which is like a very fair, that's probably true. I mean, there's a load of water on the planet, right? So just saying that the typical form of hydrogen is combined with oxygen, I think is a fairly safe but bland statement. But yeah, so it is fascinating that
01:14:22
Speaker
it wasn't observed more. I think one of the things that struck me was that just no one was looking for it. And in fact, they're kind of chromatography techniques that are used. So this way of determining what gases or chemicals are present in a substance used hydrogen as a medium, if I understand correctly. So it was like, which meant essentially that it was
01:14:47
Speaker
It's kind of like the substance that was used to kind of dissolve all the other gases in. So of course you'd expect to see hydrogen, right? But it's not, you kind of design those equipment searching for, you know, seeing what you had in a, in a, in terms of methane coming out of a vent or something. It was designed to look for everything else apart from hydrogen. Well, yeah, yeah. And, and yeah, no one was really
01:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, I guess no one was interested in looking for it. There is a story, you must know this, about Mendeleev, who reported that he'd found hydrogen or in a kind of mine in Ukraine or something. So yeah, originator of the periodic table knew about this. It's like, it shouldn't be moved. Yeah.
01:15:38
Speaker
Well, so there's way more kind of observations of natural occurrence of it. So yeah, as you say, like, it's kind of like our kind of understanding, especially of some surface, because it's so hard, it's so hard to mass observe things, you know, like, say, various things at the surface, now we can use satellites, and we can, you know, you can like collect a lot of data. And then we can think about later what we want to get from this data, and you know, potentially, we can find things
01:16:03
Speaker
way in the future about what we've already collected, but with the subsurface, it's always so intentional. You're going to go look for something and you're going to measure something relevant to what you're looking for. For the most part, it's been oil and gas. People are trying to find hydrocarbons. It really hasn't been collecting data on hydrogen. Even in terms of
01:16:24
Speaker
the measurements that exist, like often from the oil industry. And yeah, the kind of data sets can, you know, are quite unreliable. Like, also, you know, it's not really incentivized that you need to have like really great precision on some of these measurements. It's just, if you found some methane that's great, you can run these other measurements. It doesn't matter if they're wrong. And so like a lot was reported as kind of like, you know, questionable quality. But there are like way more observations of hydrogen in a kind of the sort of
01:16:53
Speaker
I guess geographical area of the former USSR, because there was a theory there of Russian scientists, but they had this theory that hydrocarbons are produced inorganically somehow, and there's like hydrogen involved in this, and it's produced by reaction of hydrogen and CO2. So it's way more documented there, because they've been looking for it. And so now that we have like a hydrogen kind of
01:17:23
Speaker
where we have these maps of where hydrogen has been observed, it seems like, oh, it's just been like in Europe somewhere. And it just seems like where people have been looking for it. Yeah, so, and yeah, it's kind of interesting observation bias. And, and the same is true for like finding an innocent surface. So
01:17:40
Speaker
There have been accidental discoveries with oil and gas, or like an interesting example, which is actually our first and only so far commercial hydrogen field in Mali in Africa, where there is like an active, you know, there is like 99% hydrogen discovered in subsurface at the depth of 100 meters, which is quite different, you know, for where you would look
01:18:05
Speaker
or something. And yeah, people have just drilled a borehole looking for groundwater, groundwater borehole.
01:18:11
Speaker
and have like striped hydrogen unexpectedly. And also, yeah, I think the account of it is sort of, you know, we drilled a borehole and there was wind coming out of it. And it was confusing. And then somebody, like unfortunately, like a cigarette and had suffered a serious injury from it. And then I think they shut in the borehole and only like some years after and the company came and started developing it. So
01:18:39
Speaker
Where it does occur, it tends to be different places to where oil and gas occurs. So therefore, even though we drilled so many wells for oil and gas, only in some instances we found hydrogen, because for the most part, from what we know that has produced, we expect it to be somewhere else. So yeah, so that's, again, another reason. We're not measuring for it, and also we're kind of looking for things where it probably isn't, is why we haven't seen very much of it.
01:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like odorless, colorless, very, very low density. So it's kind of hard to see, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about just before we get on to sort of like the nuts and bolts of how much we could extract and where we might look for it, one other really curious thing I came across was as kind of evidence that there's hydrogen is
01:19:34
Speaker
these kind of fairy rings, which go by different names. They also get called Carolina Bays in the States and I mean, fairy circles and so forth. So maybe just tell us about those, because this was like another is this, I mean, there's so many likes, tiny like tidbits, like, you know, mini mind blowing nuggets, hydrogen, and this was one of them. So yeah, I was about fairings.
01:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, fairings are these kind of circular depressions on the surface.
01:20:05
Speaker
And you can see them from satellites, essentially. And I think the kind of, you know, the really big incentive to like really focus on fair rings was because the MALI discovery was associated with fair ring, there's a fair ring there, and there's hydrogen seeping at the surface. So there's observation of this formation. And essentially, what it is, and it's something like a form where you have deep fluids that, you know, through some kind of fault and fracture system are coming
01:20:34
Speaker
to the surface. And so they will form this kind of circular depression and emanate from the surface. And yeah, so the MALI discovery, you know, is associated with theory and that is associated with actual hydrogen observations at the surface. And so then people start looking for them, you know, as indicators for hydrogen. And I guess like the usefulness of that is I think still, you know, to really kind of be proven because
01:21:03
Speaker
Really, quite a lot of them exist around the world. It's not something that you expect only if hydrogen is part of the fluid that migrates. It's actually something that you can't expect forming at the surface if some kind of deep saline brine is migrating through the fracture network. We are expecting to see hydrogen in these deep saline brines. We're associating with these deep saline brines and subsurface and
01:21:31
Speaker
if they are mobilized to the surface. But also you can just have a migration of this brine without the hydrogen and still form a theory ring. So it is not necessarily kind of an indicator.
01:21:43
Speaker
Okay, so the fairings are probably more associated with or caused by these kind of saline rhines, which I guess kind of dissolve some of the minerals below them. And that's why you get this depression. I think there's also like a kind of like change in the vegetation as well, which presumably is like associated with the salinity. But yeah, I guess fairings are sort of like, you know, a sign that there might be hydrogen, but it might just be saline, like brine on its own.
01:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so also, you know, then, you know, people have detected hydrogen at the sort of the soil gas in Mali. And so there have been a lot of efforts of measuring hydrogen and there's other fairings. And yeah,
01:22:26
Speaker
For the most, like, I guess, yeah, if you're going to go around and measure all of it, I think it can provide a lot of clarity. But often, you know, people do measure trace amounts of hydrogen, which can actually come from these like very shallow kind of biogenic sources, like again, just sort of microbial surface processes.
01:22:41
Speaker
So you can have a fair ring and then measure also some hydrogen. And then again, that will not indicate that it necessarily is coming from depth. That might indicate something quite shallow. So yeah, the evidence for kind of necessarily using fair rings for exploration is like a little bit mixed. But yeah, it is a feature that can be, but isn't. Yeah.
01:23:10
Speaker
So yeah, so how do we, so where do you go looking, right? What are the promising cases?
01:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, so the places are, again, these kind of places where we can expect these water rock reactions or really lithic production of hydrogen. And so there are really very many places in the world where some of these ingredients are there. And the question is to find a place with all of the ingredients with the production and with a trap and seal and some kind of system where also the microbes have been prevented from having
01:23:48
Speaker
having their lunch. So one of the type of places is looking at cratons. So cratons are these kind of on continental crust or these areas where essentially it's some of the oldest rocks on Earth where we have these rocks that have been part of continental crust for billions of years and they have been technically fairly stable. And so these are sort of examples
01:24:14
Speaker
that are similar to these observations that we had of both hydrogen and fractures and also microbial life in, say, South Africa or Canada. And they're like really, there's a lot of, you know, different cradles on sort of on every continent. And so what's what would be very good for production of radialtic hydrogen is having this kind of tiptonic environment where you have deep fluids in these rocks.
01:24:40
Speaker
that are sort of stable for a very long time. And also because the radiolysis is a slow process, that you would be able to accumulate this hydrogen for a very long time and then kind of not lose it by sort of tachonic activity and fracturing and things like that. So yeah, like one type of place is looking for really old kind of ancient, very stable continental crust, where we had time to accumulate it for long periods of time.
01:25:08
Speaker
And then perhaps ideally combined with maybe like some tectonic activity, not too much, some amount of tectonic activity at some point, perhaps not too long ago, where it would mobilize in these fluids, kind of to some formation above it.
01:25:30
Speaker
Yeah, but there are very, very different kind of ways of thinking about also like the reservoir rock for hydrogen, because we can think about it in a more kind of similar way to oil and gas where, you know, these crayons are our source rocks, and then we need to mobilize into some kind of, you know, porous sandstone with like a seal on top. But at the same time, it is also possible to think about the fractured kind of basement rock as the reservoir.
01:25:59
Speaker
Um, so yeah, so it's a one, one kind of exploration strategy is looking for a really like old stable tectonic crust. And then, you know, secondly, is the, is the water rock reactions. So finding areas where you have these ultra mafic, mafic rocks and water. And so then the advantage of these systems is that their reactions can be way faster. So you potentially don't have to wait 2 billion years for generating your hydrogen.
01:26:25
Speaker
And also, like, what's what's kind of in your favor is then if you are producing it this quickly, then potentially, you know, there's too much of it, you know, the kind of ecosystems are going to then be limited by something else than hydrogen, you know, it might be too much hydrogen, but you're limited by say CO2 or something. And so then the microbes can't like keep up with the consumption. And yeah, and so like, the both both the kind of, they tend to be in quite different, you know, places in a world where you have these
01:26:53
Speaker
these type of kind of igneous rocks and the old cratonic crust. But in terms of the reaction rates of the water rock reactions, we know that it's faster. It's faster than buretuses, but also the range of how fast these reactions can happen is not very well understood. It can range from very slow to very fast.
01:27:21
Speaker
And we just, yeah, we don't quite have enough research of sort of really quantifying it and especially quantifying the important factors of like what makes it very fast and what makes it very slow. So yeah, again, this is like a sort of a field of research that is really happening. But I mean, it is what, yeah, so it is really,
01:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, unusual to think that this could be kind of almost like a renewable, like if, so the radiolysis is one thing that's super slow, that's in the cradons, but the kind of sapitonization route for creating hydrogen where you've got the water reacting with kind of iron and minerals
01:28:09
Speaker
that keeps on going. So you could have a mine. And as you say, we don't know how fast it is and what makes it fast or what makes it slow quite yet, but you could have a mine which just kind of keeps on refilling itself in principle, as long as the water keeps coming along and there's still enough minerals there. There's kind of no reason to think that just can keep producing hydrogen, I guess.
01:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think, well, that's been a proposed theory for the Malley discovery, because they have been producing it now for like, about a decade and have not observed any pressure drop. So it seems like, you know, they keep extracting hydrogen and more of it is coming up. So yeah, one of the one of the proposals is that it's because it's actually like renewing and kind of real time. And I think I'm not quite in favor of that. Like, there's definitely like a lot of uncertainty in terms of, you know, the reaction rates, but
01:29:02
Speaker
I think there's maybe like not not quite the evidence to suggest that are going to be that fast, you know, like it's sort of human timescales. And because like, I suppose, like the main kind of, you know, limitation in terms of kinetics is like the reaction can happen quickly. Yeah, if you have these sort of iron rich rocks, and you expose it to water, it will probably happen very quickly. But but then it will like react out and it will stop and kind of what
01:29:29
Speaker
what makes the reaction happen again. And so usually, I think it is something to do with creating new surface area, you know, like fracturing that rock a bit more. So you have water like percolating a bit deeper, so it can continue reacting. And so I don't think this necessarily happens at human time scales.
01:29:50
Speaker
But I think potentially what might be happening is that, you know, there is like a reservoir of this gas that it is actually filling these other more shallow reservoirs. And so the more you extract from more shallow reservoir, like more, more comes from the deeper reservoirs, something
Orange Hydrogen: Innovative Industrial Process
01:30:05
Speaker
like that. So the potentially just like what what they're tapping into is, is probably just way bigger maybe than than than is kind of
01:30:14
Speaker
fought right now. But yeah, look, I think, like, it's definitely really interesting in terms of summarisation that the reaction can happen fast. I think we're not quite at a place where, you know, it might just sort of keep going if we keep extracting it. But then there is also this kind of interesting proposal of and again, yet another colour of hydrogen called orange hydrogen, where where it would be like a like an industrial process where you would find
01:30:42
Speaker
these rocks that, you know, would produce serpentine and inject yourself, you know, like fluid, water with CO2 as well, actually. So it's like a combined, you produce hydrogen and sequester CO2 at the same time. And I guess the CO2 stopped your microbes from, probably the microbes don't like the CO2 too much. Is that one of the reasons to do that as well?
01:31:05
Speaker
It is just sort of because then, like if you just produce hydrogen, you produce a serpentine mineral. But also then if you add CO2, then the serpentine mineral can react to the CO2 and you can then form carbonate minerals. So yeah, the main kind of incentive for this is to combine both like, you know, sequestration or introduction of hydrogen.
01:31:26
Speaker
We're bringing it all together, this is great. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I do like our introduction. But yeah, in this case, where you know, like, if it is like some kind of more engineer process, and we are controlling, maybe like we keep fracturing this rock, right, and opening new spaces by injecting, it is I think something that can, you know, can then be renewable.
01:31:48
Speaker
and but yeah it is something to really be shown but yeah i think it is also really promising in this especially this kind of combined effect yeah maybe uh i mean fracking's got a bit of a bad reputation but is it a kind of similar process to fracking but you know instead of instead of taking carbon and putting it into the air you're actually putting it underground and instead of getting methane out you're getting
01:32:15
Speaker
getting hydrogen, which again, is not going to fit. Yeah, I mean, it would essentially be a similar process. Yeah, so it is it is induced kind of fracturing of the subsurface and the other risks and all kinds of things associated with it are, you know, similar that obviously you want to create some fractures, you don't want to create too many, you want to predict where that happens, you don't want to create any earthquakes.
01:32:37
Speaker
So yeah, the implementation of all of this. And yeah, like what kind of depths you're going to be operating in, because there is like a temperature window where these reactions happen. And yeah, like all of that is associated with the same kind of, you know, risks and having to mitigate them as fracking. Maybe the kind of better part of it is, you know, if
01:33:01
Speaker
because it is essentially like the kind of rock is quite different and so if you if you end up like having sort of unintended fracturing and fluid movement well at least it's like not methane that's coming up to your own drinking water yeah yeah yeah i think that's a that's an important point i mean there's kind of risks with many things it's just with fracking at the moment that doesn't seem to be much reward right you okay you get methane which is like you know you can you can sell that but
01:33:29
Speaker
certainly not great for the atmosphere. So yeah, I mean, it's just a way of extracting. Yeah, I mean, it's really bad. I think certainly there's like something that's really underestimated is, is because you create all these new structures, then you kind of really increase the rate of just diffuse leakage.
01:33:47
Speaker
Like, you don't necessarily have leaks where there's like a, you know, like gas is just bubbling up through a big fault, but you're really increasing diffuse leakage just everywhere, kind of to the surface to the point where it's not really monitored.
Building a Hydrogen Economy
01:34:00
Speaker
And I think it does really, again, just contribute to these kind of like, slow background emissions to the atmosphere, like a huge amount.
01:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think we'll probably need a new label for orange hydrogen production. It's called orange hydrogen production and move away from the fracking history as you say it's different rocks in any case. But yeah, we now have different places to look. There's kind of the crayons, there's the
01:34:35
Speaker
places where we think supplementation can be happening. We have at least one example of that in Mali. So, you know, this is like, this is not sci fi, right? There is hydrogen there. It's actually being used, as you say, this is a kind of commercial operation that's that's running there. And then we think we could
01:34:54
Speaker
I guess if we were to produce orange hydrogen, would that open up a lot the kinds of places that this could work? Or would it sort of be more where the serpentinization, you can speed that up? Yeah. How does that look? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And again, that's just, you know, targeting, like, yeah, that's just really targeting the type of geology, you know, and seeing where it could work. And like, I guess even
01:35:21
Speaker
like what I think could be an exciting avenue for this is say like if you're drilling and exploring for you're hoping that there's going to be this natural hydrogen produced by natural circularization and so you're kind of targeting these ultra mafic rocks and you drill and perhaps like you don't find hydrogen well maybe you can then just make it right so it can be like a combined thing well if you didn't find it but the right geology is there and that's why you drilled well perhaps you can then inject water and kind of make it yourself
01:35:50
Speaker
with CO2 perhaps, yeah. So yeah, I think these are kind of like an interesting combinations of both, like maybe in terms of exploration strategy, how you can kind of combine and reduce risk of what the operation is going to be and you know, how you're going to utilize the like resources. And are there a lot of, I mean, there are quite a lot of places where this could work. The sort of thing I'm thinking is one of the real
01:36:15
Speaker
a bit like this. So to sort of get hydrogen really off the ground, you need, there's like the cost of, you know, in the kind of electrolysis world of hydrogen production, you've got the energy cost of electrolyzing stuff, you've got the capital expenditure associated with creating all those electrolyzers and also fuel cells as well, but let's just think about the production.
01:36:40
Speaker
And I think that counts for, I was reading in the FT and you sent this article, so you're probably familiar with the figures. So the FT predicts that sort of about three quarters of the cost of kind of building a hydrogen economy, which they kind of estimate a hydrogen economy would sort of cover about 10% of our energy would come from hydrogen.
01:37:06
Speaker
a lot of that would be or some of that would be fertilizers and then there'd be other things. But I guess the point is, yeah, it's kind of three quarters or so of the the cost of building that is associated with just producing hydrogen. But then there's another quarter which is associated with all the infrastructure that you need to work with hydrogen because it doesn't go through our normal pipes without modification. Like you have to
01:37:31
Speaker
compress it, you have to figure out how to move it around, and so on. So that's still a really substantial chunk of money. And clearly the geological hydrogen has the potential to really reduce that three-quarters cost, so the cost of producing it.
01:37:52
Speaker
But I'm also wondering, if this is something that could run in many different locations, could you put it near a cement plant and then use it as your hydrogen source for that? Or could you put it near the fertilizer production sources again? Or will we still have to build a pretty substantial infrastructure for, say, moving hydrogen from Mali to Germany and things like that?
01:38:20
Speaker
Yeah, no, like definitely in terms of, you know, like geology where it's possible, it is, yeah, like there are many like potential locations on a planet where it could work. So there's a lot of different combinations of what you could combine. So say, you know, like these kind of precangrian, like rocks, the rocks are older than say 500 million years that are often
01:38:43
Speaker
see the sort of good source ropes, they cover most of the continent, you know, something like 70% of the subsurface is sort of these sort of rocks. So there's, there's a lot, right. And as well as these, you know, iron rich ropes. And then, like, the first estimate is, you know, there's, there's a lot, and then you keep kind of, you know,
01:39:01
Speaker
sort of excluding places. So like, where is it going to be trapped? Where is it going to be not consumed? And then finally, like in terms of any exploration, like a really big factor, and especially starting any new kind of, you know, sort of project.
01:39:15
Speaker
is also finding a place where it would be close to some kind of like industry or some kind of infrastructure where as you say like is it close to where we produce fertilizers because we don't want to you know transport it like halfway through the world and then it's going to become just like very expensive and not really worth it. But yeah I think like the kind of variety of geological terrain that's suitable
01:39:38
Speaker
does definitely map out to like a lot of different options of what you can combine it with. And I guess another thing that I haven't sort of touched on is helium, which again is like super useful gas that we are exploring for. It is a noble gas in our gas that's used a lot in kind of in high tech kind of industry. And again, you know, the sources of it is in the surface and it has been
01:40:04
Speaker
mostly found by accident and kind of tracing hydrocarbons. But from what we know, how it is produced and how hydrogen is produced, like the places where we expect to find hydrogen, we also expect to find actually high concentrations of helium. So there is this kind of also incentive of combined, essentially,
01:40:25
Speaker
we're expecting to find both these gases, and if we can tap into markets where both of them can be shipped to somewhere close by, I think that really makes it a compelling economic model.
Commercializing Hydrogen Exploration
01:40:36
Speaker
Yeah. And of course, coming back to the beginning of the discussion is, these are going to be capex
01:40:45
Speaker
high projects, like we're going to have to invest a lot, but there, you know, there is a very clear incentive to do so. Right. Cause if you can get out hydrogen and even better also get, get some heating as well, that that's. I think the interesting thing about him is it's historically had a very low price cause we've just like over over mind it, but that price is probably going to go up as like our reserves have drawn down. So yeah, there's lots of reason for.
01:41:16
Speaker
the sorts of kind of deploy those expensive technologies, which I guess we can repurpose from the oil and gas industry, right? We know how to drill big holes. We know how to search for things on the ground. There's lots of reason to bring that to this quest. And actually, instead of taking out carbon from the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, we take out something which is no carbon at all, just hydrogen. But yeah, nonetheless,
01:41:46
Speaker
great source of fuel. So yeah, that's super promising. Well, I guess like one thing that I think is really exciting for me about hydrogen, natural hydrogen is actually like it is in such a different kind of boat to, you know, CO2 storage where like CO2 storage is, you know, this kind of thing we have to do and it's big and it's going to, you know, require a lot of investment and we're going to see payback because it makes sense. You know, we're going to have to do negative emissions at some point and it just, it makes sense, but it doesn't make sense in the kind of this very
01:42:16
Speaker
like fast economic kind of, you know, sort of way of thinking where like, when is it going to pay off, it's going to pay off, you know, when we don't die from the seals point. But in terms of natural hydrogen, and it is actually like cheap, you know, it is like not more expensive to explore for it than it is for natural gas. And the cost of then of energy, you know, energy
01:42:40
Speaker
from hydrogen, if it's natural, it is just like way lower than green hydrogen. And so kind of producing hydrogen from, you know, like exploring from methane essentially, or exploring just for hydrogen would be like a similar cost. But then if you also get your hydrogen by splitting the methane, that is actually additional cost. So just finding it straight up.
01:43:00
Speaker
And like, yeah, if I found you know, right now some hydrogen, it would be like a very profitable thing immediately. So it doesn't really rely on like subsidies, it doesn't really rely on like, the government having to sort of provide some kind of special infrastructure. So it is something that essentially like at the scale that we are
01:43:21
Speaker
we have now, it is like immediately profitable, because it can already compete with hydrogen from hydrocarbons. And then in terms of like, you know, if if it's hydrogen, if we're going to have some kind of level of hydrogen economy, if our demand is going to increase from where it is now, then you know, there can be all this thinking about exactly like how we're going to integrate it and how much is it going to cost.
01:43:44
Speaker
And how does it compare to the alternative, say like just, you know, electrifying things? Yeah. But yeah, I think like the cool thing about it is like for right now, like it just makes sense economically as it is. Yeah. We're running out of time and I need to let you get back to your day job, which is actually...
01:44:04
Speaker
Kind of this, right? Looking for hydrogen. Looking for hydrogen, exactly. And I don't know, because I know this is something that's, that you're working for a kind of newly incorporated company and it's kind of a little bit under wraps, but I think it's kind of important to get the message across that this is not just an academic discussion. Like there are people who are looking for this, you're one of them. I don't know how much you can say about what you're doing. Like, are you shipping out to different countries or are you kind of on your laptop trying to like look at, I don't know,
01:44:34
Speaker
Read through papers where hydrogen has been spotted like how does it work? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean it is really exciting. So I have been in academia. I've been a postdoc For like last four years and I've just started now working in this new startup that is
01:44:51
Speaker
you know, super new, and it is very exciting. And right now I am the only employee, other than, you know, the founders and the board, which is very exciting. We were just starting it. But yeah, essentially, the idea has been just, you know, as I've been talking about this academic research, there is like a lot of knowledge in the academic community of like how hydrogen is produced, where we could find it. And it just has always, like we have studied it,
01:45:20
Speaker
from like a really like different perspective with like really different questions in mind. And now that you know, like it just sort of happens so that it has attracted a lot of attention generally as a field. And yeah, like all sort of like senior academics have like just had a lot of interest from the industry for advice and consultancy and consulting and things like that of like, how can we find hydrogen? So the start of essentially as a product of that is to sort of
01:45:47
Speaker
And it's a spin-out company from research at Oxford University and other universities where we academics are like, well, I think we have a pretty good idea, actually probably better than there's other people where we can find hydrogen and we're going to just do it ourselves.
Hydrogen's Role in Decarbonization
01:46:06
Speaker
So yeah, the work that I'm doing right now, it is essentially like a data-driven approach that we are assessing
01:46:16
Speaker
all kinds of evidence in terms of data that's, you know, freely available or, you know, in literature or in various data sets that you can sort of find of essentially trying to build like both like a model, like conceptual model of like how we, you know, what is not only the generation, but kind of the preservation and trapping
01:46:37
Speaker
a conceptual model that is kind of like a little bit similar to what has been developed in the hydrocarbon industry for oil and gas. There's this kind of concept of where we need to look. So we're building that as well as kind of assessing the entire world for what we think would be a good idea to go look for it. And once we make those decisions, we're going to
01:47:00
Speaker
We're going to go and do it. Yeah, that's cool. So yeah, so yeah, you will be hopefully you'll end up going somewhere nice, sunny rather than. Yeah, but that's super exciting. Yeah, this has been really eye opening. I mean, this, yeah, I've always been a little bit
01:47:25
Speaker
Skeptical about the hydrogen economy, but I think you've made some really good points I mean one is just like there's a lot of stuff where we're using hydrogen already we can replace it and I think it is a game changer in the equation if we can You know create that hydrogen or obtain that hydrogen without having to Consume other electricity which could be you know energy that could be used to other things. So yeah, this is Yeah, really exciting completely
01:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, groundbreaking, literally. I don't know if you have any final thoughts.
01:48:03
Speaker
anything you'd like to share, maybe a call to action for more geologists now to kind of repair the damage that has been really motivating for me with all of this work, you know, they can see if there's storage or this exploration of hydrogen is that there are things that we can do, you know, in a kind of proactive way of trying to find solutions. And I know there's, you know, a lot of, a lot of people working on all kinds of solutions and I think it's just,
01:48:33
Speaker
really cool. And like, you know, none of them, like, I guess, like what I find a lot in all kinds of discussions and articles is where you have some kind of technology. And then it's been compared to a different technology and be like, Oh, this one can do it. That's the other one that will have to do it because it's kind of better. But I guess like I just have this like really agnostic kind of approach to it sort of really doesn't matter of you know, like what we end up using in decarbonizing the economy. And it's just like whatever turns out to be most optimal,
01:49:03
Speaker
And we need to work on all of those things and then find out which one is most optimal, you know, where and say with the hydrogen economy, like I think it is probably true that, you know, if we are thinking about replacing gas networks in, you know, natural gas and hydrogen, there are a lot of like, kind of,
01:49:22
Speaker
there are a lot of risks and especially like a lot of infrastructure kind of, you know, you do actually have to replace like a lot of a lot of the pipeline because, because it is indeed, it leads to like embrittlement of steel. And so, you know, it is like a good idea. And then you have to do some feasibility studies and then maybe conclude that actually, this is not the best way to use hydrogen. Let's use something else for this. And then like, let's find the best way to use hydrogen where it is most optimal.
01:49:49
Speaker
So yeah, I think in all of those things, like all of those things, you know, are part of the solution. Like, and it's just exactly like doing research and then finding what's the best way to do them. And then it's going to fall into place. Like what makes sense in actual application of how to deploy them, you know, because it is like such a huge task of decriminalizing entire economy. And it's going to just by default requires so many like different school applications in different areas. Yeah.
01:50:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. Like a kind of no holds barge approach. And I think one thing that I've learned from, you know, looking at the progress over the last decades is that it's not obvious ahead of time what's going to work. Like, again, like we've learned so much from deploying, like renewable energy has dropped beyond, you know, the cost of producing renewable energy has dropped beyond their expectations. And it's just because we've learned every time we've produced, like every time we've built a factory or, you know, produced more
01:50:45
Speaker
a batch of panels, like things have been learned. And, you know, that's happened. That's not just happened with soda panels. I always use that example, but it's been happening with battery technology. It's been happening with, with wind, you know, electrolysis. I think it will happen there and fuel cells. It will happen there as long as, you know, so we shouldn't close off any of these approaches.
01:51:05
Speaker
And yeah, so yeah, I'm excited to see, like this is a very nascent one. This is a completely new thing. It could lead anywhere, we'll see. Yeah, no, I think that's a really exciting thing for me because again, like, you know, we have like very good evidence to think there is hydrogen, but there's a lot of uncertainty about how much we can find, you know, maybe we can find something that's like locally significant and then, you know, we can like have some clean energy locally. Maybe we can find something that's hugely significant globally.
01:51:34
Speaker
And, and like, there's kind of no downside, because also, like, in the very worst case that we kind of find out that, oh, there isn't, you know, economically feasible, it's just that, you know, we invested some money to test out this concept, and we have an answer, and we can be about something else, right? It just makes sense to like, explore all avenues where you have evidence to think that it could be really significant.
01:51:58
Speaker
Indeed. And on that note, I think I need to let you get back to doing just that, exploring. But yeah, this has been so much fun. Thanks so much, Ruth. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been great to talk to you.
01:52:28
Speaker
So,