Corwin

<a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/story.asp?id=%7B1F54AEED-A34B-411B-B95F-972AB119DD85%7D" target="_blank">New source of hydrogen.</a>

Now if we can just make it easy to extract.

[Edited because posting the link itself was just fugly. ]

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Corwin ]</p>

Bunda

Fairly obviously, this could help in the potential switch to cleaner fuels if this pans out.

The problem is we still need to convince companies to invest in this before we run out of conventional fuel. It will not be easy, especially since when the fossil fuel supplies dwindle, it will be worth even more.

Coragyps

From Corwin's link:
This caused a little stir maybe 15 years ago in the oil business - they were drilling a well (looking for natural gas) in northeast Kansas, on the trace of the Midcontinent Rift. This rift was last active several hundred million years ago, but provides an avenue down to olivine. The well hit what they thought was natural gas, and they had to flare it - but it burned colorless instead of with a nice yellow flame, and damn near melted some of their equipment. Nobody had a clue what was going on for a day or two, until they got a lab analysis and found that the gas was, in fact, 97% or so hydrogen. There was a bunch of theorizing and handwaving for a few weeks as to where it could have come from, with the conclusion being that it was probably olivine + water, apparently as the NASA folks are finding.

A second career for me - no more of that stinky-assed crude oil - it's HYDROGEN NOW!

Edited to add: Bunda, I just caught your post. The technology might be a whole lot like current natural gas extraction - it's pretty strange for us oilys to think about drilling 30,000-foot wells in Iowa, though.

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

Corwin

Well it's pretty obvious from the description where the hydrogen is coming from. Water forced down into the crust gets exposed to huge amounts of pressure and heat. That's basically what hydrogen reformers do.

I'm still wondering how granite can store this. I mean I know that Platinum family metals, (Palladium, Platinum, Titanium and Nickel) are all highly porous to hydrogen.... but I can't find any references to any of these elements in either granite or olivine.

Coragyps

Iron, in the +2 state, is the reducing agent that "cracks" the water in this case. I can't remember the exact details. The storage in the Kansas well was in fractures in sedimentary rock near olivine, IIRC. The tough part of exploiting hydrogen would likely be finding enough porosity or fractures near the H2 source to ever accumulate enough to produce.

Corwin

But it would seem to me that if the rock is porous enough to hydrogen, then all we'd have to do is drill a hole down about 2 miles, and let the pressure do the work for us. Let it seep through the rock itself. If it's porous enough to hydrogen to store it, shouldn't it also be porous enough to let it out?

Coragyps

The answer is an unqualified "well, yes and no." Natural gas is in pore spaces, too, and often in rock that lets it flow much more stingily than the concrete sidewalk in front of your house would. There are ways to make it flow quicker, but it's an expensive proposition to drill a well even two miles down, and the stimulation treatments add even more cost. Since there are only a couple of instances (that I have heard of- there could be others) of hydrogen being found while looking for natural gas, often at four to five miles down, I'd think that hydrogen is usually deeper still. And as you get deeper, cost goes up dramatically and permeability of rock generally goes down.
I'm all for looking for hydrogen - but it won't displace fossil fuels until it's 1) cheaper or 2) we start truly choking ourselves to death on all the carbon dioxide we make from fossils. Of course option 2) might be sooner than we think.

Corwin

But let's remember.... methane is a much more complex molecule than free hydrogen is. Part of the reason we have so much trouble storing hydrogen is that it seeps between the molecules of whatever container it's in.