The gushing Telegraph article is mainly riffing off of earlier work and the recent April 2023 USGS featured story.<p><i>Hydrogen found in Earth's crust is 'limitless fuel supply'</i><p><pre><code> ( we just need to drill nearly twice as deep as we've ever drilled before )
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Telegraph 2002: <a href="https://archive.li/RbQwv" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.li/RbQwv</a><p><i>The Potential for Geologic Hydrogen for Next-Generation Energy</i><p><pre><code> “Using a conservative range of input values, the model predicts a mean volume of hydrogen that could supply the projected global hydrogen demand for thousands of years,” Ellis said.
However, he quickly cautions,
“We have to be very careful in interpreting this number, though. Based on what we know about the distribution of petroleum and other gases in the subsurface, most of this hydrogen is probably inaccessible."
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USGS April 2023: <a href="https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-hydrogen-next-generation-energy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-...</a><p>The context for the sudden resurgence in interest can likely be traced back to an Australian energy kite looking to raise capital with no solid technical reports <i>yet</i>:<p><a href="https://www.goldhydrogen.com.au/updates/natural-hydrogen-find-in-france/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.goldhydrogen.com.au/updates/natural-hydrogen-fin...</a><p><a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/excitement-grows-about-natural-hydrogen-as-huge-reserves-found-in-france/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/exc...</a><p><a href="https://www.goldhydrogen.com.au/updates/gold-hydrogen-may-shatter-all-energy-assumptions/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.goldhydrogen.com.au/updates/gold-hydrogen-may-sh...</a>
Can we stop color-coding this colorless gas and instead use words that at least hint at what they mean? I know people like to talk about "white hydrogen" and "blue hydrogen", because the secret of the arbitrary assignment of colors to meanings feels like knowledge, but it <i>isn't</i> knowledge, so can we all just stop playing the stupid game? Who started this nonsense? It smells like it started at Davos.<p>To save anyone the trouble, "white hydrogen" here means "geological hydrogen", i.e., hydrogen that for some reason can be found deep within the Earth, and that can be extracted by means of drilling and fracking.<p>"Geological" is a totally reasonable adjective by which the noun "hydrogen" can be modified.
Plants can at least convert CO2 combustion products back into carbon compounds and molecular oxygen, but what chemical pathway exists to free up the oxygen consumed by burning subsurface hydrogen in our atmosphere? Wouldn't this deplete the atmosphere of oxygen relatively quickly, and in a way that's not easy to reverse?
The telegraph shattered my spam-paywall-popup-ads everywhere-ragequit limit to a point where I genuinely wonder if they actually manage to convert traffic with such agressive tactics?