Post by account_disabled on Feb 25, 2024 4:39:34 GMT
Natural hydrogen deposits
IN THE SHADOW of a mango tree, Mamadou Ngulo Konaré recounted the legendary event of his childhood. In , well diggers came to his village of Bourakébougou, Mali, to drill for water, but gave up on a dry well at a depth of metres. “Meanwhile, the wind was coming out of the hole,” Konaré told Denis Brière, a petrophysicist and vice president of Chapman Petroleum Engineering, in When a driller peered into the hole while smoking a cigarette, the wind exploded in his face.
“He didn't die, but he was burned,” Konaré continued. “And now we had a big fire. The color of the fire during the day was like blue sparkling water and had no black smoke pollution. The color of the fire at night was like bright gold, and in all the fields we could see each other in the light. … We were very afraid that our town would be destroyed.”
It took the crew weeks to put out the fire and cover the well. And there it remained, rejected by the villagers, until That's when Aliou Diallo, a wealthy businessman, politician and president of Petroma, a Malian oil and gas company, acquired prospecting rights in the region surrounding Bourakébougou. “We have a saying that human beings are made of earth, but the devil is made of fire,” Diallo says. “It was a cu C Level Executive List rsed place. I said, 'Well, cursed places, I like to turn them into places of blessing.'"
In , he enlisted Chapman Petroleum to determine what was coming out of the well. Protected from the °C heat in a mobile laboratory, Brière and his technicians discovered that the gas was % natural hydrogen . That was extraordinary: Hydrogen almost never appears in oil operations, and it wasn't thought to exist much inside the Earth. “We had celebrations with big mangoes that day,” says Brière.
Within a few months, Brière's team installed a Ford engine tuned to burn hydrogen. Its exhaust was water. The engine was connected to a -kilowatt generator that gave Bourakébougou its first electrical benefits: freezers for making ice, lights for evening prayers at the mosque, and a flat-screen television so the village chief could watch the games. soccer.
The children's test scores also improved. “They had the lighting to learn their lessons before going to class in the morning,” Diallo says. He soon gave up on oil, renamed his company Hydroma, and began drilling new wells to determine the size of the underground supply.
The Mali discovery was vivid proof of what a small group of scientists, studying signs of leaks, mines and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large reserves of natural hydrogen may exist throughout the world. world, like oil and gas, but not in the same places.
These researchers say that water-rock reactions deep in the Earth continually generate hydrogen, which seeps through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There could be enough natural hydrogen to meet growing global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model presented in October at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
“When I first heard it, I thought it was crazy,” says Emily Yedinak, a materials scientist who dedicated a fellowship at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to sparking interest in natural hydrogen. “The more I read, the more I started to realize, wow, the science behind how hydrogen is produced is solid… I was like, 'Why is no one talking about this?'”
However, since , when Diallo and his colleagues described the Mali countryside in the
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
, the number of articles on natural hydrogen has skyrocketed. “It's absolutely incredible and really exponential,” says geologist Alain Prinzhofer, lead author of the Mali paper and scientific director of GEOU, a Brazil-based oil and gas services company that is increasingly doing work with hydrogen.
Dozens of startups, many in Australia, are snatching up the rights to explore for hydrogen. Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed its first natural hydrogen committee and the USGS began its first effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the United States. “We are at the beginning, but it will go quickly,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy. In , the startup completed the first hydrogen well in the United States, in Nebraska.
The enthusiasm for natural hydrogen comes as interest in hydrogen as a clean, carbon-free fuel increases. Governments are pushing it as a way to combat global warming, efforts that were boosted when Russia invaded Ukraine last year and triggered a rushed search, especially in Europe, for alternatives to Russian natural gas.
At the moment, all commercial hydrogen has to be manufactured, either pollutingly, using fossil fuels, or expensively, using renewable electricity. Natural hydrogen, if it forms considerable reserves, could be there for the taking, giving experienced drillers in the oil and gas industry a new environmentally friendly mission. “I think it has the potential to replace all fossil fuels,” Zgonnik says. "That's a big statement, I know."
Critically, natural hydrogen can be not only clean, but also renewable. Buried and compressed organic deposits take millions of years to convert to oil and gas. In contrast, natural hydrogen is always produced anew, when groundwater reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since wells began extracting hydrogen in Mali, flows have not slowed, says Prinzhofer, who advised on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable, non-fossil energy source,” he says.
It is still early days for natural hydrogen. Scientists do not fully understand how it forms and migrates and, more importantly, whether it accumulates in a commercially exploitable way. “Interest is growing rapidly, but scientific data is still lacking,” says Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geophysicist at the University of Grenoble Alpes. Big Oil is hanging back, watching as wildcatters take on the risky exploration work. Commercialization of the Mali field has had problems, and only a few exploratory wells have been drilled elsewhere. Donzé, who has sworn not to take money from the industry, worries about the hype.
However, some scientists have become true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University of Bern, left his career at French oil giant Total because he wasn't moving fast enough with hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery could end up in the history books along with one that occurred years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
At the time, the world knew about oil leaks in places like Iraq and California, but was blind to the vast deposits that lay underground. Then, on August , , a nearly bankrupt prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine and cast iron drill pipes, found black gold at a depth of feet and began collecting it in a bathtub. Before long, American companies were harvesting millions of tubs of oil every day.
IN THE SHADOW of a mango tree, Mamadou Ngulo Konaré recounted the legendary event of his childhood. In , well diggers came to his village of Bourakébougou, Mali, to drill for water, but gave up on a dry well at a depth of metres. “Meanwhile, the wind was coming out of the hole,” Konaré told Denis Brière, a petrophysicist and vice president of Chapman Petroleum Engineering, in When a driller peered into the hole while smoking a cigarette, the wind exploded in his face.
“He didn't die, but he was burned,” Konaré continued. “And now we had a big fire. The color of the fire during the day was like blue sparkling water and had no black smoke pollution. The color of the fire at night was like bright gold, and in all the fields we could see each other in the light. … We were very afraid that our town would be destroyed.”
It took the crew weeks to put out the fire and cover the well. And there it remained, rejected by the villagers, until That's when Aliou Diallo, a wealthy businessman, politician and president of Petroma, a Malian oil and gas company, acquired prospecting rights in the region surrounding Bourakébougou. “We have a saying that human beings are made of earth, but the devil is made of fire,” Diallo says. “It was a cu C Level Executive List rsed place. I said, 'Well, cursed places, I like to turn them into places of blessing.'"
In , he enlisted Chapman Petroleum to determine what was coming out of the well. Protected from the °C heat in a mobile laboratory, Brière and his technicians discovered that the gas was % natural hydrogen . That was extraordinary: Hydrogen almost never appears in oil operations, and it wasn't thought to exist much inside the Earth. “We had celebrations with big mangoes that day,” says Brière.
Within a few months, Brière's team installed a Ford engine tuned to burn hydrogen. Its exhaust was water. The engine was connected to a -kilowatt generator that gave Bourakébougou its first electrical benefits: freezers for making ice, lights for evening prayers at the mosque, and a flat-screen television so the village chief could watch the games. soccer.
The children's test scores also improved. “They had the lighting to learn their lessons before going to class in the morning,” Diallo says. He soon gave up on oil, renamed his company Hydroma, and began drilling new wells to determine the size of the underground supply.
The Mali discovery was vivid proof of what a small group of scientists, studying signs of leaks, mines and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large reserves of natural hydrogen may exist throughout the world. world, like oil and gas, but not in the same places.
These researchers say that water-rock reactions deep in the Earth continually generate hydrogen, which seeps through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There could be enough natural hydrogen to meet growing global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model presented in October at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
“When I first heard it, I thought it was crazy,” says Emily Yedinak, a materials scientist who dedicated a fellowship at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to sparking interest in natural hydrogen. “The more I read, the more I started to realize, wow, the science behind how hydrogen is produced is solid… I was like, 'Why is no one talking about this?'”
However, since , when Diallo and his colleagues described the Mali countryside in the
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
, the number of articles on natural hydrogen has skyrocketed. “It's absolutely incredible and really exponential,” says geologist Alain Prinzhofer, lead author of the Mali paper and scientific director of GEOU, a Brazil-based oil and gas services company that is increasingly doing work with hydrogen.
Dozens of startups, many in Australia, are snatching up the rights to explore for hydrogen. Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed its first natural hydrogen committee and the USGS began its first effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the United States. “We are at the beginning, but it will go quickly,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy. In , the startup completed the first hydrogen well in the United States, in Nebraska.
The enthusiasm for natural hydrogen comes as interest in hydrogen as a clean, carbon-free fuel increases. Governments are pushing it as a way to combat global warming, efforts that were boosted when Russia invaded Ukraine last year and triggered a rushed search, especially in Europe, for alternatives to Russian natural gas.
At the moment, all commercial hydrogen has to be manufactured, either pollutingly, using fossil fuels, or expensively, using renewable electricity. Natural hydrogen, if it forms considerable reserves, could be there for the taking, giving experienced drillers in the oil and gas industry a new environmentally friendly mission. “I think it has the potential to replace all fossil fuels,” Zgonnik says. "That's a big statement, I know."
Critically, natural hydrogen can be not only clean, but also renewable. Buried and compressed organic deposits take millions of years to convert to oil and gas. In contrast, natural hydrogen is always produced anew, when groundwater reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since wells began extracting hydrogen in Mali, flows have not slowed, says Prinzhofer, who advised on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable, non-fossil energy source,” he says.
It is still early days for natural hydrogen. Scientists do not fully understand how it forms and migrates and, more importantly, whether it accumulates in a commercially exploitable way. “Interest is growing rapidly, but scientific data is still lacking,” says Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geophysicist at the University of Grenoble Alpes. Big Oil is hanging back, watching as wildcatters take on the risky exploration work. Commercialization of the Mali field has had problems, and only a few exploratory wells have been drilled elsewhere. Donzé, who has sworn not to take money from the industry, worries about the hype.
However, some scientists have become true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University of Bern, left his career at French oil giant Total because he wasn't moving fast enough with hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery could end up in the history books along with one that occurred years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
At the time, the world knew about oil leaks in places like Iraq and California, but was blind to the vast deposits that lay underground. Then, on August , , a nearly bankrupt prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine and cast iron drill pipes, found black gold at a depth of feet and began collecting it in a bathtub. Before long, American companies were harvesting millions of tubs of oil every day.