Trillions of tons of hydrogen gas exist beneath the Earth’s surface, enough to fuel human activity for about 200 years and break our dependence on fossil fuels, new research shows. is suggested.
Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey say there could be 5.6 trillion tons of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs.
The study was published earlier this month in the journal scienceacknowledges that much of this hydrogen reservoir may be inaccessible and estimates that extracting just 2 percent could power humanity for about two centuries.
A growing body of research touts hydrogen as a clean energy source with the potential to replace fossil fuels in vehicles, industrial processes, and power generation.
Gas is predicted to account for nearly a third of future energy supplies in many sectors, and global demand for it is expected to increase fivefold.
Previous research has shown that hydrogen can be produced by using electricity to split water molecules, leaving behind oxygen and hydrogen.
Hydrogen is known to be released through natural chemical reactions in rocks, but until recently it was rarely thought that hydrogen could be produced in this way.
This situation changed when geologists discovered huge natural reservoirs of hydrogen gas in Albania and West Africa.
Researchers are now using models that account for the rate at which hydrogen is produced underground by natural processes to estimate how much gas could be trapped underground.
The model predicts the characteristics of hydrogen deposits based on where the gas is found, the amount, and the rate of hydrogen production by known natural processes.
Geologists estimate that between 1 billion and 10 trillion tons of hydrogen may be trapped underground. They say the energy released by this much hydrogen would be nearly twice as much as all known natural gas reserves on Earth.
“Recovery of just 2% of the most likely local resources could meet the entire projected global hydrogen demand for about 200 years,” the new study says.
Although this resource is not renewable, it has the potential to make a “significant contribution” to the decarbonization of the planet. “Immediate supplies of low-carbon hydrogen can only make a meaningful contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions targets if they can be developed over years or decades rather than centuries,” the study notes. has been done.
