This story was originally appeared in WIRED Italy Translated from Italian.
In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element has become a hot topic: hydrogen. “When you burn hydrogen, it only produces water and has no environmental impact,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, professor of biological, geological and environmental sciences at the University of Bologna in Italy. Hydrogen advocates believe it could be the solution to clean up everything from transportation to agriculture to heavy industry.
But if it can be produced without emitting carbon, it builds up its green credentials. And that’s why some people are so excited about geological or “gold” hydrogen. That’s the name given to the element when it forms naturally underground. It can be the result of a chemical reaction between water and iron-rich rocks, or radiolysis, where water molecules are broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by radiation.
“Compared to other types of hydrogen, it doesn’t require energy to produce,” says Vitale Brobarone. That’s why he predicts a golden hydrogen rush is coming. The problem is that we know very little about the element as it forms naturally underground. So the research community is racing against time to learn more before hasty, blind mass mining begins. “From an industry perspective, it simply has to be extracted,” says Vitale Brobarone. “Instead, we first need to understand how easy it can be done and what the consequences are.”
Vitale Brovarone and his colleagues believed that Greenland could help answer these questions, so as part of a five-year plan they organized a special mission to the Arctic region to gain more information. ERC CoG Deep Ship A program funded by the European Union.
Along with Vitale Brovarone were four scientists from the University of Bologna, one from the Institute of Earth Sciences and Georesources of the Italian National Research Center, and one from the University of Copenhagen. They spent six months preparing for the mission using maps and satellite data, then spent 10 days in this land of nearly 2 billion-year-old rocks. Despite their meticulous planning, they had to be adaptable. An “unexpected iceberg” forced the researchers to change locations, and at one point a bear was spotted nearby, forcing them to seek shelter at the school. But in the end, the trip was worth it, because the samples they obtained were rich in H.2 study.
Globally, gold hydrogen is popping up in unexpected places, raising questions about the dynamics of how this element accumulates in reservoirs and its role in underground ecosystems. There are already some concerns. If hydrogen reacts with the geological substrate or is processed by certain microorganisms, geological hydrogen can produce methane or hydrogen sulfide. Vitale Brobaron uses these two examples to explain why jumping headfirst into gold hydrogen extraction risks creating new problems instead of solving existing ones, and why more information is needed.
Because we don’t fully know what regulates the presence of H.2 If you have stored rocks for millions or billions of years, it would be better to wait before extracting the elements by breaking them up, says Vitale Brovarone. The same goes for storing artificially produced hydrogen. underground reservesThe idea that it could be done, he says, has already excited industry and forced the research community to work on timescales that are incompatible with what’s needed to understand how gases behave.
“We travel at different routes and at different speeds,” he says. “We need to understand how hydrogen behaves in nature, because many dynamics only emerge after years. Industry wants quick and decisive answers. Science takes time and money, and hydrogen is still lacking.” Unlike France, Australia and the United States, which have set their sights on harvesting gold hydrogen, Italy has not yet invested in collecting it, preferring instead to bet on hydrogen production. But thanks to the exploration of the University of Bologna, Italy is now one of the few countries in the world trying to understand more about hydrogen.
