It’s commonly thought that essentially the most abundant element within the universe, hydrogen, exists mainly alongside other elements — with oxygen in water, for instance, and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are punching holes in that notion — and generating attention as a potentially unlimited source of carbon-free power.
One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities, and personal firms to develop technologies that may result in low cost, clean fuel from the subsurface.
Geologic hydrogen, because it’s known, is produced when water reacts with iron-rich rocks, causing the iron to oxidize. One among the grant recipients, MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate’s research group, will use its $1.3 million grant to find out the perfect conditions for producing hydrogen underground — considering aspects akin to catalysts to initiate the chemical response, temperature, pressure, and pH levels. The goal is to enhance efficiency for large-scale production, meeting global energy needs at a competitive cost.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are potentially billions of tons of geologic hydrogen buried within the Earth’s crust. Accumulations have been discovered worldwide, and a slew of startups are looking for extractable deposits. Abate is trying to jump-start the natural hydrogen production process, implementing “proactive” approaches that involve stimulating production and harvesting the gas.
“We aim to optimize the response parameters to make the response faster and produce hydrogen in an economically feasible manner,” says Abate, the Chipman Development Professor within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). Abate’s research centers on designing materials and technologies for the renewable energy transition, including next-generation batteries and novel chemical methods for energy storage.
Sparking innovation
Interest in geologic hydrogen is growing at a time when governments worldwide are in search of carbon-free energy alternatives to grease and gas. In December, French President Emmanuel Macron said his government would provide funding to explore natural hydrogen. And in February, government and personal sector witnesses briefed U.S. lawmakers on opportunities to extract hydrogen from the bottom.
Today industrial hydrogen is manufactured at $2 a kilogram, mostly for fertilizer and chemical and steel production, but most methods involve burning fossil fuels, which release Earth-heating carbon. “Green hydrogen,” produced with renewable energy, is promising, but at $7 per kilogram, it’s expensive.
“When you get hydrogen at a dollar a kilo, it’s competitive with natural gas on an energy-price basis,” says Douglas Wicks, a program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the Department of Energy organization leading the geologic hydrogen grant program.
Recipients of the ARPA-E grants include Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, plus private firms including Koloma, a hydrogen production startup that has received funding from Amazon and Bill Gates. The projects themselves are diverse, starting from applying industrial oil and gas methods for hydrogen production and extraction to developing models to grasp hydrogen formation in rocks. The aim: to handle questions in what Wicks calls a “total white space.”
“In geologic hydrogen, we don’t understand how we are able to speed up the production of it, since it’s a chemical response, nor do we actually understand how one can engineer the subsurface in order that we are able to safely extract it,” Wicks says. “We’re trying to usher in the very best skills of every of the several groups to work on this under the concept that the ensemble should find a way to provide us good answers in a reasonably rapid timeframe.”
Geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, certainly one of the foremost experts within the natural hydrogen field, agrees that the list of unknowns is long, as is the road to the primary industrial projects. But he says efforts to stimulate hydrogen production — to harness the natural response between water and rock — present “tremendous potential.”
“The concept is to seek out ways we are able to speed up that response and control it so we are able to produce hydrogen on demand in specific places,” says Zgonnik, CEO and founding father of Natural Hydrogen Energy, a Denver-based startup that has mineral leases for exploratory drilling in america. “If we are able to achieve that goal, it implies that we are able to potentially replace fossil fuels with stimulated hydrogen.”
“A full-circle moment”
For Abate, the connection to the project is personal. As a baby in his hometown in Ethiopia, power outages were a usual occurrence — the lights can be out three, perhaps 4 days per week. Flickering candles or pollutant-emitting kerosene lamps were often the one source of sunshine for doing homework at night.
“And for the household, we had to make use of wood and charcoal for chores akin to cooking,” says Abate. “That was my story all the best way until the tip of highschool and before I got here to the U.S. for faculty.”
In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Many years later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity within the nearby village.
Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The corporate is drilling wells near the unique site which have yielded high concentrations of the gas.
“So, what was once generally known as an energy-poor continent now’s generating hope for the longer term of the world,” Abate says. “Learning about that was a full-circle moment for me. In fact, the issue is global; the answer is global. But then the reference to my personal journey, plus the answer coming from my home continent, makes me personally connected to the issue and to the answer.”
Experiments that scale
Abate and researchers in his lab are formulating a recipe for a fluid that can induce the chemical response that triggers hydrogen production in rocks. The essential ingredient is water, and the team is testing “easy” materials for catalysts that can speed up the response and in turn increase the quantity of hydrogen produced, says postdoc Yifan Gao.
“Some catalysts are very costly and hard to provide, requiring complex production or preparation,” Gao says. “A catalyst that’s inexpensive and abundant will allow us to reinforce the production rate — that way, we produce it at an economically feasible rate, but additionally with an economically feasible yield.”
The iron-rich rocks through which the chemical response happens might be found across america and the world. To optimize the response across a diversity of geological compositions and environments, Abate and Gao are developing what they call a high-throughput system, consisting of artificial intelligence software and robotics, to check different catalyst mixtures and simulate what would occur when applied to rocks from various regions, with different external conditions like temperature and pressure.
“And from that we measure how much hydrogen we’re producing for every possible combination,” Abate says. “Then the AI will learn from the experiments and suggest to us, ‘Based on what I’ve learned and based on the literature, I suggest you test this composition of catalyst material for this rock.’”
The team is writing a paper on its project and goals to publish its findings in the approaching months.
The following milestones for the project, after developing the catalyst recipe, is designing a reactor that can serve two purposes. First, fitted with technologies akin to Raman spectroscopy, it’s going to allow researchers to discover and optimize the chemical conditions that result in improved rates and yield of hydrogen production. The lab-scale device can even inform the design of a real-world reactor that may speed up hydrogen production in the sector.
“That may be a plant-scale reactor that might be implanted into the subsurface,” Abate says.
The cross-disciplinary project can be tapping the expertise of Yang Shao-Horn, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and DMSE, for computational evaluation of the catalyst, and Esteban Gazel, a Cornell University scientist who will lend his expertise in geology and geochemistry. He’ll deal with understanding the iron-rich ultramafic rock formations across america and the globe and the way they react with water.
For Wicks at ARPA-E, the questions Abate and the opposite grant recipients are asking are only the primary, critical steps in uncharted energy territory.
“If we are able to understand how one can stimulate these rocks into generating hydrogen, safely getting it up, it really unleashes the potential energy source,” he says. Then the emerging industry will look to grease and gas for the drilling, piping, and gas extraction know-how. “As I wish to say, that is enabling technology that we hope to, in a really short term, enable us to say, ‘Is there really something there?’”