The quest to unlock the secrets of gold hydrogen

This story was originally Cast WIRED Italy Translated from Italian.

In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element that has garnered a lot of attention is hydrogen. “When you burn hydrogen, there is no impact on the environment and only water is produced,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, a professor in the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna in Italy. Hydrogen proponents believe it could be a solution to clean up everything from transportation to agriculture to heavy industry.

But its environmental friendliness is only recognized if it can be produced without carbon emissions, which is why some are excited about geological or “golden” hydrogen, the name given to the element that occurs naturally in the earth, either through a chemical reaction between water and iron-rich rocks, or through radiolysis (when radiation breaks down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen).

“Compared to other types of hydrogen, hydrogen doesn’t require energy to produce,” says Vitale Brovarone, who predicts a hydrogen gold rush is just around the corner. The problem is, we know almost nothing about when hydrogen naturally forms underground, so the research world is in a race against time to learn more before hasty, blind mass mining begins. “From an industry point of view, hydrogen simply has to be extracted,” says Vitale Brovarone. “Instead, we first need to understand how easily it can be done and what results it will bring.”

Vitale Brovarone and his colleagues believed Greenland could answer these questions, and as part of a five-year plan to send a special expedition to the Arctic in search of more information. ERC CoG Deepsheep A program funded by the European Union.

Vitale Brovarone was accompanied by four scientists from the University of Bologna, one from the Italian National Research Center’s Institute of Geosciences and Georesources, and one from the University of Copenhagen. They spent six months preparing the mission using maps and satellite data, and spent ten days in the area, where rocks are nearly two billion years old. Despite their careful planning, they had to adapt: ​​an “unexpected iceberg” forced the researchers to change location, and at one point, they had to take shelter in a school after a bear was spotted nearby. But in the end, the journey was worth it: they got H-rich samples.₂ Study.

All over the world, gold-hydrogen is appearing in unexpected places, raising questions about the dynamics of this element’s accumulation in reservoirs and the role it plays in subsurface ecosystems. There are already some concerns: geological hydrogen can produce methane and hydrogen sulfide if it reacts with geological substrates or is processed by certain microorganisms. Vitale Brovarone uses these two examples to explain why tackling gold-hydrogen head-on risks creating new problems rather than solving existing ones, and why more information is needed.

Because we don’t fully understand what controls the presence of H,₂ Vitale Brovarone says that if hydrogen has been locked away in rocks for millions or even billions of years, it’s better to wait before extracting the element and destroying the rocks. The same goes for storing artificially produced hydrogen underground, he says. The idea that this might be possible is already exciting industry, and it’s setting the research community on a timeline that’s at odds with the one needed to understand the gas’s behavior.

“We are moving in different directions and at different paces,” he says. “We need to understand how hydrogen behaves in nature, because many dynamics only become clear after many years. Industry wants quick and definitive answers. Science needs time. And in the case of hydrogen, funding is still scarce.” Unlike France, Australia and the US, which are eyeing hydrogen harvesting for gold, Italy has not yet invested in hydrogen harvesting, betting instead on hydrogen production. But thanks in part to the University of Bologna’s expeditions, Italy is one of the few countries in the world trying to understand more about hydrogen.