French Drillers May Have Stumbled Upon a Mammoth Hydrogen Deposit (theverge.com) 121
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On the outskirts of the small town of Folschviller in eastern France stand three nondescript sheds. One of these temporary structures has recently become a hive of activity due to a continuous stream of visitors, including scientists, journalists, and the public. The shed sits above a borehole first drilled in 2006 and houses a gas measurement system called SysMoG, which was originally developed to determine the underground methane concentration. While the device did detect almost pure methane (99 percent) at a depth of 650 meters, probing further down, the borehole resulted in an unexpected and surprising discovery: hydrogen in high concentration. "At 1,100 meters, the concentration of dissolved hydrogen is 14 percent. At 3,000 meters, the estimated concentration could be as high as 90 percent," Jacques Pironon, director of research at GeoRessources lab at the University de Lorraine, said. Based on the estimates of methane resources and the concentration of hydrogen detected so far, scientists have conjectured that the Lorraine region in eastern France, of which Folschviller is a part, could contain 46 million tons of white -- or naturally produced -- hydrogen. That would make it one of the world's largest known hydrogen deposits.
This remarkable discovery was not the objective of the project, called Regalor. Instead, it aimed to determine the feasibility of methane production in the Lorraine region and to record the presence of traces of other gases. "Our original research was related to the study of carboniferous sediments in northeast France. This was important as Lorraine was one of France's largest coal-producing regions," Pironon said. [...] Soon, the researchers will start taking measurements in three other boreholes at similar depths to understand if the hydrogen concentration remains high as you move laterally from the site of the original borehole. "If the concentration is similar, the next step, which is being discussed with the authorities, would be to drill a hole 3,000 meters deep to validate the evolution of the hydrogen concentration with depth," he said. The deeper borehole could also throw up another surprise. "Besides knowing the level of hydrogen concentration, we will also know if hydrogen is present in dissolved form or in gaseous state at these depths," Pironon said.
This study could also shed light on the source of this hydrogen. According to Pironon, there are two hypotheses, one of which is related to the presence of the mineral siderite. "Hydrogen could be produced by the reaction between water and siderite, which is made of iron carbonates. We consider that the siderite could be oxidized by water molecules to produce hydrogen. The oxygen then combines with iron to produce iron oxide." According to Pironon, the other hypothesis relates its presence to the chemical processes that form coal, which, along with the release of methane, can also produce hydrogen.
This remarkable discovery was not the objective of the project, called Regalor. Instead, it aimed to determine the feasibility of methane production in the Lorraine region and to record the presence of traces of other gases. "Our original research was related to the study of carboniferous sediments in northeast France. This was important as Lorraine was one of France's largest coal-producing regions," Pironon said. [...] Soon, the researchers will start taking measurements in three other boreholes at similar depths to understand if the hydrogen concentration remains high as you move laterally from the site of the original borehole. "If the concentration is similar, the next step, which is being discussed with the authorities, would be to drill a hole 3,000 meters deep to validate the evolution of the hydrogen concentration with depth," he said. The deeper borehole could also throw up another surprise. "Besides knowing the level of hydrogen concentration, we will also know if hydrogen is present in dissolved form or in gaseous state at these depths," Pironon said.
This study could also shed light on the source of this hydrogen. According to Pironon, there are two hypotheses, one of which is related to the presence of the mineral siderite. "Hydrogen could be produced by the reaction between water and siderite, which is made of iron carbonates. We consider that the siderite could be oxidized by water molecules to produce hydrogen. The oxygen then combines with iron to produce iron oxide." According to Pironon, the other hypothesis relates its presence to the chemical processes that form coal, which, along with the release of methane, can also produce hydrogen.
Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's cheap and easy for them to get pure hydrogen from the ground then let them have at it. Use all that solar power on something else.
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And what about the methane?
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Use it instead of buying it from god knows which horrible dictatorship
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I see what you are saying, but if it means kicking the can down the road on continuing to use methane then it's probably not a good thing.
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And what about the methane?
Perhaps we can also recover both hydrogen and elemental carbon from the methane: https://www.pnnl.gov/news-medi... [pnnl.gov]
The 'hard' problem that concerns me is leaking of the methane, given that it's a much more potent greenhouse gas tha CO2. Still, the possibility that we might have access to that much hydrogen, with such a small dirty-energy input relative to the clean-energy output, is damned attractive, so there's incentive to solve the methane leakage problem.
Sadly, there's also a 'soft' problem here, namely
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Some of us have this crazy expectation of having electricity 24/7/365. That is not possible with solar or wind with the current state of any nation’s electric grid. It probably isn’t possible at all without intercontinental HVDC connections. Those will require uncomfortable discussions about geopolitics. Putin tried to hold Europe hostage with gas exports. He’d do the same with solar/wind if he could. So would others. Saudi Arabia could be a solar powerhouse. I’d rather not c
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Capacitors man...capacitors.
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Capacitors man...capacitors.
So, not ball bearings?
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Low friction ball bearings are a must for efficient flywheel energy storage.
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First, my comment on ball bearings was meant to be a reference to the Fletch character played by Chevy Chase. I thought someone might get the joke, but now I just feel old even if I saw the move on TV well after it was done running in theaters.
Second, flywheel energy storage is not likely to use ball bearing as they have too much friction. They'd use magnetic bearings instead, and be spinning in a near vacuum to reduce friction losses further.
I used to think that flywheels would be the future of energy st
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The problem with molten salt thermal storage is that the salt is corrosive, and quite volatile - if it escapes you have an extremely hot liquid that catches fire in the air, and explodes if you put water on it. In fact the humidity in the air is enough to cause an explosion.
There are ways to mitigate some of the issues, like using static salt contained in modular, replaceable units, but it's not cheap or low maintenance.
Similarly, the problem with uranium fuel storage is the difficulty and cost of extractin
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If molten salt thermal energy storage doesn't work then tell that to the solar and wind power people.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/20... [pv-magazine.com]
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It works, but it's not ideal. Batteries are likely to be cheaper.
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The fact that somebody is trying it does not mean it works. Even if their press release is in a magazine about solar power.
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The problem with molten salt thermal storage is that the salt is corrosive, and quite volatile - if it escapes you have an extremely hot liquid that catches fire in the air, and explodes if you put water on it.
What salt would that be? The salt mixtures used for thermal storage are mixed nitrates of alkali metals (sodium, potassium, calcium) which definitely are not volatile, do not burn in air (they are oxidizers themselves) and dissolve in water very nicely, not explode. You seem to have confused salts with sodium metal... or something (since sodium metal is also not volatile).
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I used to think that flywheels would be the future of energy storage
Flywheels are a terrible choice for energy storage, even in fixed location systems, unless it’s only a couple of seconds to provide a stabilization inertia to the system. Beyond losing energy to various means like friction and being incredibly expensive on a kwh/$ basis, storing appreciable amounts of energy means you wind up loading the material with thousands to tens of thousands of g and if anything cracks or the bearing gives out you get a spectacular and catastrophic failure. Compare it with s
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At the risk of being off topic, what's up with your signature "We solved global warming, now stop scaring everyone's kids to death over it."? We most certainly have not solved global warming and frankly it's obvious that not enough people are concerned enough to modify their behavior. Today's children are right to be frightened - it is
Re:Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:5, Interesting)
It's perfectly possible to keep the lights on with renewables and a bit of storage, but even if we only get to say 90% renewable energy, that's still vastly better than what we have now.
Not just in terms of emissions, but in terms of cost and security. Less reliance on foreign fuel imports and international oil/gas markets. Much of the time we will have an abundance of cheap energy, which enables new industries and transforms old ones. Steel is a good example - by being able to adjust demand to follow availability a little, costs compared to coal powered forges can be dramatically reduced.
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You are right, but the solution can be easily deducted from what you say.
First, nuclear can ramp production up and down: as France has shown, they run their nuclear plants in load-following mode [world-nuclear.org]. They can ramp the power up and down between 100% and 30% in 30 minutes. Of course this is not enough to cover the need for immediate response (peaking), but it is enough to decrease the need for it so that you don't need "massive amount of storage". By the way, this is why France capacity factor for nuclear is lowe
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Maybe they can even reduce the 9% total for fossil fuels in general, though I'm not sure exactly what that looks like in practice.
I watched their "Energy Sovereignty" national assembly commission last year (dozens of interviews with experts about the state of their electricity mix, and how to improve it both in terms of CO2 emissions and actual diminishing dependance from foreign countries), and if I remember correctly they are currently investing in some new PHES stations [wikipedia.org]. As a way to reduce their dependance on gas.
Much larger improvements could be made much more easily in countries that haven't already done as much (the elephant in the room being China).
True. But about China, and after having followed their development in the last decade, they have actually been building
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Your rant is a bit obscure, and there is no clear point to answer to. If you want to have a civil discussion, feel free to explain your points plainly, and don't try to appear to be funny (and failing at it).
But I am glad you had fun writing it.
Okay. Very first thing. Do you believe I'm being uncivil - you would seem to allude to it. I mean someone marked me as a troll, and another claims I hae no idea of what I'm talking about. Perhaps they are correct, and my knowledge of the electrical grid and power generation systems is nil.
So allow me to simplify what I wrote a bit. I'll go over it all.
Not that it is not possible to make this extremely simple, but I believe you consider yourself very knowledgeable in all matters related to power gener
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So, your sources are... 3 wikipedia articles about "electrical grid", "baseload" and "peaking".
I live in an area that is now largely powered by renewables.
You talk about South Carolina in your post, and the Allegheny escarpment. In 2021 the electrical mix of that state was: 54% nuclear, 23% gas, 15% coal, 4% hydroelectric, 3% solar, and few other anecdotical % here and here. So I guess this is not where you live.
Other states that would match your assertion would be Iowa or Kansas, which had 40-45% of electricity generation from wind in 2021 (using EIA numbers). And
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So, your sources are... 3 wikipedia articles about "electrical grid", "baseload" and "peaking".
Umm, is something wrong with those citations? Explain. Because they are correct AFAIK
I live in an area that is now largely powered by renewables.
You talk about South Carolina in your post, and the Allegheny escarpment. In 2021 the electrical mix of that state was: 54% nuclear, 23% gas, 15% coal, 4% hydroelectric, 3% solar, and few other anecdotical % here and here. So I guess this is not where you live.
Okay, you apparently read to react, not to actually have this so called civil conversation you said you wanted. That is not civil, and if you paid the last bit of att
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Umm, is something wrong with those citations? Explain. Because they are correct AFAIK
Nothing wrong with wikipedia, and they are indeed correct. I just don't really see what they bring (I kinda expect you and I to know what an electricity grid is, what baseload is, and what peaking is) to the discussion. I also found it a bit convenient that all your other assertions, which were more technical and actually much more interesting, didn't have citations or sources.
I very specifically wrote that I lived in Pennsylvania.
I overlooked that, my mistake. My only excuse is that I didn't re-read your first post when replying, and I honestly forgot you said
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Meh, I messed up my comment, here is the actual continuation to the last sentence. Sorry.
Whereas there are decarbonized grids (less than 50g CO2eq/kWh) in the world (France, Sweden, Norway, Costa Rica), using either hydro, nuclear, or a combination of both along with solar/wind/gas to support it. Reducing the part of gas is the last thing that needs to be figured out, but even without that if all countries had/were to do the same, that would be a huge improvement.
Anyhow. you do you homie, and your messy comprehension issues just make it impossible to have that conversation.
Allright. That must be the reason.
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You are spreading misinformation as usual. Germany had to burn coal for a while when the Russian NG supplies were cut. The country is on track to get 50% electricity from renewables this year. Solar panels are made in many places, and imports from China are sanctioned in the US. Wind turbines get some materials from China because they are cheap, but there are other sources.
Steel production in the US is turning to electric furnaces that mainly reprocess scrap metal. They definitely can be ramped up and down.
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You are spreading misinformation as usual
Spreading actual information you don't like, and giving sources for it. There, fixed it for you.
Germany had to burn coal for a while when the Russian NG supplies were cut. The country is on track to get 50% electricity from renewables this year.
Germany has been burning coal for the past 50 years. They just had to burn more because Russian NG supplies were cut. Now they are just buying more CO2 emitting LNG from the US (hint: transforming from gas to liquid, having a tanker cross the ocean, and then transforming it back from liquid to gas, makes it less efficient, which means more CO2 for the same volume of NG).
Also, Germany got 48% of its electricity fr
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"giving sources for it. There, fixed it for you."
You provided one lonely cite for your tiresome barrage of claims. Next you'll be saying everything should go nuclear just like France, which is actually turning to renewables. The European Climate law calls for 55% net greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Ambitious but possible, and it will happen with wind, solar, and storage. Little to no additional nuclear.
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Of course France is also developping solar/wind... They actually use more renewable than Germany for final energy consumption.
What part don't you understand in: we need to develop ALL low-carbon energy sources?
The European Climate law calls for 55% net greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Ambitious but possible, and it will happen with wind, solar, and storage. Little to no additional nuclear.
A reduction by 55% is nothing. Especially since most countries are getting there by losing their industries (see Germany for instance, which has industries leaving in drove there). Actually, Germany with a 55% reduction will still be 4-5 times worse than France with 0% reduction...
The real challenge i
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Empty claims with no basis in fact as usual.
"Not for 2030, but for 2040-2050", yeah it would take 20 years to build out the nuke plants. Not going to happen.
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I've explained this before, but once again... The National grid has some projections: https://www.nationalgrideso.co... [nationalgrideso.com]
Page 217. It's interactive if you mouse over the labels near the bottom.
They think that even if we limit what we do as much as possible, we will have at least 50GWh by 2050. That's assuming we miss net zero and keep using fossil fuels, simply because renewables+storage are so much cheaper that they will displace other forms of generation.
Best case would be a little shy of 200GWh. In all sce
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So build HVDC connections then. Sounds like a good way to get people employed and built critical infrastructure for the future. Infrastructure isn't going to build itself.
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Germany is on track to get 50% electricity from renewables this year and their grid is very stable.
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The first world is maybe 15% of the world's population. In the third world, they can't even supply electricity reliably 24/7 today. India for example has regularly scheduled daily blackouts because of this. South Africa, the most advance country in Africa can't even supply 24/7 electricity reliably. It's not just capacity, but distribution. We need green or white hydrogen and fuel cells to get rid of ICEs. If we can focus only on electric generation near hydrogen sources (i.e. water bodies) and not have to
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What makes you think a foreign country with no military to speak of would be allowed to set energy prices on a whim? Look how well attempting that worked for anyone in the Middle East that tried doing that with oil. You either play ball, or get violently replaced by someone who will.
One of the reasons it hasn't happened already is that the potential host countries aren't interested in surrendering the amount of domestic power that would come with giving powerful foreign governments that much vested intere
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What makes you think a foreign country with no military to speak of would be allowed to set energy prices on a whim? Look how well attempting that worked for anyone in the Middle East that tried doing that with oil. You either play ball, or get violently replaced by someone who will.
If only that was actually true. You’ve presumably paid attention to the games Saudi Arabia plays with oil production and prices? Lemme know when we overthrow that regime. Let this dude’s [wikipedia.org] family know too.
There’s a huge hole in my hometown that’s directly attributable to Saudi religious extremism and several of its citizens, so, you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to see the West remain dependent on them for energy as we go through the green revolution. It’s lament
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And places like Venezuela, which has the world's largest oil reserves. Saudi Arabia is second. Yes they do get to set prices. Mainly because they have many friends who don't like America and Europe much. You might have noticed that America had to leave Iraq, and couldn't wait to get out of Afghanistan. Winning a war is the easy part, and the West and America don't have the work ethic to win the peace anymore. And that is probably why there are so many tin pot dictatorships now.
Re:Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:4, Interesting)
Always amusing to see slashdotters pontificating on their fantasies of how international affairs and trade work. Not just criticizing you, but everyone on this sub-thread to which you are responding. Swinging the broad brush does little to help describe or understand the region.
Going up the posts in rough order:
No, OPEC nations do not set prices, either by themselves or collectively. They set production quotas, which may or may not be obeyed. The global oil market sets the prices. But driving up prices requires cutting production and this almost always results in less revenue, not more [bloomberg.com].
No, the various nations of the Near East are not all unstable hell holes of violent fanatics who hold sway, and oil pipelines [theodora.com] and other infrastructure run across the entire region that have operated without disruption for decades.
No, Western powers do not always swoop in and overthrow governments when it pleases them and dictate policies to the rest. It is not that intervention has never happened, but almost never in the scenarios proposed.
One of the principal sites currently developing solar power for sale to Europe is Tunisia [power-technology.com] which is stable and very closely tied to France, and has been since independence. So no reason to expect solar plants built there, with their HVDC lines running through Algeria also stable (and also building solar power), to be disrupted, or for prices to be manipulated by anything other than supply and demand.
There are no cases in the historical record of crazed fanatics managing significant shut downs of major domestic export earning industries in the Middle East. There are cases of seeking to seize control and keeping it operating normally to collect the revenues (ISIS, most recently) but the energy keeps flowing.
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Those discussions have been around for a couple of decades in one form or another. The problem is that running the cables for that kind of power over those distances and underwater is expensive. China spent $6 billion building a 12 GW HVDC transmission system 3300 km long. Transmission to Europe would be shorter, but it could easily be more expensive as there will be a higher regulatory burden and the labor involved will probably be more expensive than China had to deal with, not to mention having to seal,
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The uranium fuel for US nuclear reactors comes from Russia.
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Extracting hydrogen would likely require flaring methane and impurities
I'd like to know where that thought came from. If there's a means to transport the hydrogen to someplace for utilization as fuel or industrial feed stock then there's a means to get the methane there as well for conversion to hydrogen. Most hydrogen is produced from methane now so if the purpose of drilling is to get cheap hydrogen then they aren't going to be flaring off methane.
One common impurity in natural gas is helium, and that is also quite valuable assuming a means to transport it off site. As an
Re:Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly is the point in converting methane to hydrogen?
Doing so releases just as much CO2 as burning it would, and discards a considerable amount of the energy as conversion losses.
Such "blue hydrogen" has always been a greenwashing scam. We're considerably better off just burning the methane for energy directly.
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What exactly is the point in converting methane to hydrogen?
To make fertilizers mostly. There's a number of industrial processes that use hydrogen and right now the cheapest way to get it is methane. To use hydrogen from methane as fuel is rather pointless unless there's a heavy lift rocket involved, and even then there's been some advances in using methane for that.
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Converting accomplishes two things. One, it builds the infrastructure around hydrogen, should a different source of production be found. For instance, the high temperatures in molten salt reactors could generate sufficient heat for solid oxide electrolyzer cells to operate effectively. Two, it's much easier to capture carbon dioxide from a single source.
Hydrogen has about one hundred times the mass-based energy density of batteries, and about triple that of gasoline. Using hydrogen as a fuel makes sense whe
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Hydrogen has about one hundred times the mass-based energy density of batteries, and about triple that of gasoline. Using hydrogen as a fuel makes sense where weight matters.
Please compare the weight of a Tesla Model 3 with the smaller Toyota Mirai.
The problem with hydrogen isn't its mass-based energy density, it's the tanks, fuel cells and infrastructure that is required to deal with the very high pressures.
I actual practice, using hydrogen instead of batteries does not save weight.
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Yes, for small vehicles, with low energy requirements like cars, the weight of hydrogen containment outweighs any density benefits. Battery cars already work well in most situations.
But for large vehicles, the containment weight is less of a percentage of the weight of the stored hydrogen.
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So, we should spend billions (trillions) of dollars on developing infrastructure which may never actually contribute to reducing CO2 emissions?
I wonder if these hydrogen powered vehicles (with the hydrogen coming from steam reformaion of natural gas) actually result in MORE CO2 emissions than fossil fuels?
I haven't seen any claims that it's better than simply burning fossil fuels, so I suspect that this opposite is true.
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As long as the hydrogen comes from natural gas, and the resulting carbon dioxide isn't sequestered in some way, you are correct, it doesn't reduce carbon dioxide emissions at all.
Right now hydrogen as a fuel is still the learning and experimenting stage, so the source of the hydrogen doesn't matter much.
I'm not a huge proponent of hydrogen and it was only recently that I began to understand why there is interest in it at all.
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And why exactly do we want hydrogen infrastructure rather than some other closed-cycle synthetic fuel that's easier to work with? Be it ethanol, biodiesel, etc.
Some of those options can can even be made compatible with existing infrastructure, radically improving how quickly and cheaply we could change over. And those are the most important qualities for a stop-gap technology. The biggest problem with biodiesel is that it's difficult to make it cost-competitive with fossil diesel. But make the commitmen
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I'm not a fan of any fuel that takes cropland to burn in engines. That includes corn or sugar beets grown purely to make ethanol. It makes more sense to use that land to grow food.
Hydrogen generation has the advantage of needing little space, next to ocean water. The world is likely going to need it for desalination anyway as fresh water gets more scarce with melting glaciers, other forms of climate change, and increasing population.
Hydrogen also "burns" completely cleanly in a fuel cell, with no nitrogen o
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What exactly is the point in converting methane to hydrogen?
Doing so releases just as much CO2 as burning it would, and discards a considerable amount of the energy as conversion losses.
Such "blue hydrogen" has always been a greenwashing scam. We're considerably better off just burning the methane for energy directly.
Wow. I've heard blue hydrogen being called a scam before, but never by someone who considered burning methane directly to be better.
You know the point, the point is we need to burn something directly. We need to do so in places where they are inefficient, such as small burners, heating systems, industrial furnaces, engines, etc. All of that releases CO2.
Not all CO2 releases are the same. Just imagine for a moment if all the CO2 was released at the same point, suddenly it starts becoming economical to actual
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Depends on the method.
CH4 + heat => C + H2
instead of steam
CH4+ steam = CO2 + H2.
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Extracting hydrogen would likely require flaring methane and impurities
What makes you say that? The whole project was based on looking for methane for extraction so there is already a market case for using the methane. Then it just becomes an exercise in separation. If the oil and gas industry has one singular expertise, it's the combination and separation of H and C molecules, that doesn't mean there's a need to burn off either.
The reality is we will need hydrogen going forward. If some incidental carbon is involved in extraction it is still largely preferable to burning carb
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He’s assuming they’d have to flare off a non-zero amount of the adjacent methane to access the hydrogen. Way too early to say that but for the sake of the argument, if they did, you might still be able to justify development. If the hydrogen offsets a substantial amount of carbon despite the methane flaring it’s a net win. If the climate crisis is as bad as he’s implying (I tend to concur that it is) we really ought to stop allowing "perfect" to be the enemy of "better"
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If the hydrogen offsets a substantial amount of carbon despite the methane flaring it’s a net win.
Unfortunately, that's a big if. So far, most energy sources have just been additive to the ones we were already using.
So for hydrogen to "offset" some carbon, that would mean that the equivalent of fossil fuels should not be burned in addition to using it.
Seeing that self-called "green" countries like Germany (which is the 2nd CO2 emitter in the EU, but who cares) prefer to close their low-CO2 emitting nuclear plants, and keep gas/coal plants open instead, this is not a given.
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So for hydrogen to "offset" some carbon, that would mean that the equivalent of fossil fuels should not be burned in addition to using it.
True, but it doesn't have to be fossil fuels that we're currently burning - it can also be fossil fuels that we *would have* been burning if not for the cleaner sources.
Unless you truly believe that without the cleaner alternatives, we would have instead elected to NOT increase our total energy consumption? That seems unlikely.
Re:Mining fuels is counterproductive, tone deaf (Score:5, Insightful)
He’s assuming they’d have to flare off a non-zero amount of the adjacent methane to access the hydrogen.
Methane is flared in remote areas when there is no economical way to move it to market.
Folschviller is in a populated region of France and within spitting distance of Germany's Rhineland industrial area.
Flaring gas would make no sense.
we really ought to stop allowing "perfect" to be the enemy of "better"
Indeed. Europe still generates 16% of electricity from coal, much of it filthy lignite, so complaining about gas is silly.
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If they don't flare it, what do they do with it? Selling it will also result in it getting burned. Coal and gas are both dropping fast [energyandcleanair.org] in the EU, let's not counter that trend.
Using SCWG reformation to make more hydrogen still leaves you with a CO2 waste stream. Perhaps some of that CO2 could be captured, but far from all, and then what do you do with that?
We're already falling short of our climate goals, and the consequences are just beginning. The last thing we want to do is make it worse by digging up mor
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If they don't flare it, what do they do with it? Selling it will also result in it getting burned. Coal and gas are both dropping fast [energyandcleanair.org] in the EU, let's not counter that trend.
Yes it could be burned for energy or other industrial uses. Gas is still needed and is currently getting extracted elsewhere.
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If they don't flare it, what do they do with it? Selling it will also result in it getting burned.
Yes.
Coal and gas are both dropping fast [energyandcleanair.org] in the EU, let's not counter that trend.
Burning Methane would accelerate the drop in coal. The only reason gas isn't being burnt more is because of our lack of supply, this is something which has resulted in Europe firing up a significant portion of coal power which was previously mothballed.
Burning methane is a fuckton better for the environment than most things we do, and burning it productively would result in net emissions improvement. While you try and find a perfect solution presumably putting magic pixies on lots of hamsterwheels the r
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Burning Methane would accelerate the drop in coal. The only reason gas isn't being burnt more is because of our lack of supply
Do you have a source for that? I understand that the Russian war has caused a significant supply shortfall, particularly in the short term - but can that not be made up with imports from elsewhere instead? At least until alternatives can be developed, like e.g. replacing building furnaces with efficient heat pumps. I understood from my link above that any extra coal required in the last year or so was relatively minor.
This French source is unlikely to be developed at scale any time soon, so it could only he
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He’s assuming they’d have to flare off a non-zero amount of the adjacent methane to access the hydrogen.
Is there not some way to capture the methane gas? If so, it might be a source of non-GG energy via a process I noted in an earlier comment here: https://www.pnnl.gov/news-medi... [pnnl.gov]. That could be pie-in-the-sky, but if it's not...
Thank you for mentioning the flaring off issue. I hadn't been aware of what a huge problem it is until I was prompted by your comment to look it up. For anyone else interested in how abysmally bad flaring off is, check this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com].
Mammoth (Score:5, Funny)
It's hard to believe there were once enough mammoths in France to produce this much gas.
Re: Mammoth (Score:2)
But if so we need to get to work resurrecting them immediately!
Stop your massive fart :) (Score:2)
Stop your massive "mammoth" fart :)
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Estimation? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Estimation? (Score:4, Insightful)
At -5000 m the free gas pressure i 1.5 bars, thus, technically you may well have 150% of hydrogen with respect to pure hydrogen at sea level :)
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No moderator points for me today, someone else mod +1 insightful....
As A Citizen Of Earth (Score:3)
When can I get my percentage of the profits from this natural resource?
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France. You just need to turn up, contribute some effort to the extraction process, and you'll be given part of the profits.
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When can I get my percentage
I would speculate, by investing in the company that holds the prospection rights, which seems to be "Française de l'Énergie" listed on EuroNext stock exchange.
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Whoosh!
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CBM is a challenging subject for environmentalists, since the coal beds will continue leaking methane into the atmosphere regardless of anything that we do, leaving the choice between adding X tonnes of carbon as methane to the atmosphere, and capturi
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Actually, knowing the French, they'll probably put non-francophones after all francophones, so that'll move you a few hundred million down the queue. Somewhere between the 3 and 4 hundred million mark, I guess.
Hydrogen energy density (Score:4, Interesting)
The energy density of hydrogen is about three times that of oil.
But the world uses about 4 billion tonnes of oil each year. So that would be equivalent to a billion tonnes of hydrogen (yes, I'm rounding optimistically).
Thus this massive deposit, assuming they are correct, 46 million tonnes of hydrogen would give us about 46 million/1 billion of a years supply. That's about 5%.
So about 16 days.
I think we need to find a heck of a lot more.
Still, every little helps.
Re:Hydrogen energy density (Score:5, Interesting)
The energy density of hydrogen is about three times that of oil.
That's by mass but by volume the density is about 1/10th, and that creates problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Getting hydrogen to a liquid helps with the energy density but that also creates problems, a big one is the energy required to get it to a liquid. Liquid hydrogen is so difficult to deal with that space launch companies are steering away from it in favor of methane.
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Hydrogen is definitely a huge headache to work with, but to be fair there's another huge reason to use methane in potentially long-range rockets like Starship:
It's relatively trivial to keep methane cold enough to stay liquid in space without any boil-off, and even better there's a fairly wide range of temperatures at which both methane and oxygen will be stable as liquids. Hydrogen in contrast needs extreme measures to keep cold enough to remain liquid (below 33K), far below what will freeze your oxygen s
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So about 16 days.
No current or future hydrogen demand models consider the complete supplanting of oil. But really anyone downplaying this discovery is missing something far more significant: Only a few years ago we thought hydrogen deposits like this didn't exist. The discovery of "white" hydrogen is so recent that it wasn't even considered a possibility when they came up with the blue / green / grey colours, much less deposits of millions of cubic meters of the stuff.
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Mammoth deposit (Score:5, Funny)
So basically at some point 100,000,000 years ago a mammoth, having tried a Taco Bell bean burrito and cheesy Gordita for a the first time, took a giant dump?
This could prove useful for fuel synthesis. (Score:3, Informative)
There's been experiments with synthesizing hydrocarbons to maintain the viability of hydrocarbon burning vehicles while closing the carbon loop on the fuel. A big part of that process is optimizing the production of hydrogen. If someone can figure out how the hydrogen was produced naturally with such high purity then that could lower the cost of synthesized fuel.
The carbon neutral method of producing hydrogen now is to use wind and solar power to drive a water electrolysis process. That's not very efficient, both in terms of thermodynamics and in energy costs. Experiments in using heat and a catalyst is proving helpful in lowering costs but the best catalysts discovered so far are rare and precious metals, not exactly cheap. If there's an iron deposit driving the process then that can lower costs considerably.
Why be so concerned about preserving the viability of hydrocarbon fueled vehicles? Because there's few substances with energy density as good as jet fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Jet fuel has a nice balance of energy density without getting too thick in cold temperatures and not boiling off when hot, and not having these properties means we won't have as efficient aircraft. Not having aircraft would be bad, and needing to redesign aircraft for a different fuel would be expensive. With careful choice of the mix on the fuel it's also difficult for it to hold a flame if spilled, and that's an important safety consideration for vehicles carrying people, especially aircraft and spacecraft. These properties are also helpful as a fuel for portable heaters, lamps, stoves, generators, and so forth. It's these properties that lead the US military to standardize on kerosene based fuels for all uses, with very rare exceptions. In peacetime they use common marine diesel on the ships, common road diesel for their trucks, and common kerosene for portable stoves and such. But in wartime everyone is using JP-5 or JP-8 to minimize logistics issues.
It is because JP-5 is so desired that the US Navy is working on means to synthesize JP-5 using nuclear power, such as that found on aircraft carriers, and seawater as raw material. A big hurdle to making this process cheaper than buying petroleum derived JP-5 from refineries is the cost of producing the hydrogen. If they can bring the cost of the hydrogen down then they can likely produce the fuel cheaper than they can buy it. If the US Navy can produce jet fuel cheaper than they can buy it then so can many other consumers of kerosene type fuel.
If the theory of producing hydrogen by applying heat and an iron based catalyst to water proves true then maybe we just cracked the code to replacing fossil fuels with a carbon neutral alternative, one that is a drop in replacement for the fuels used in existing vehicles as opposed to getting battery-electric vehicles or something.
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If the theory of producing hydrogen by applying heat and an iron based catalyst to water proves true then maybe we just cracked the code to replacing fossil fuels with a carbon neutral alternative, one that is a drop in replacement for the fuels used in existing vehicles as opposed to getting battery-electric vehicles or something.
Given the description, the iron isn't a catalyst in this process -- it gets converted to rust.
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It also gets invented out of "whole cloth" - I guess by "The Verge" 's "reporters".
Siderite is iron-II-carbonate, not metallic iron and some mythical substance they envisage as zero-ionic charge carbonate. (any chemist, or geologist, could have told them that ; but they're probably above learning any science) Yes, siderite probably could provide some reducing power to reduce methane to hydrogen, but it would be a
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You and that fuel synthesis bullshit. The math doesn't work. Let me see if I have this straight.
I burn fuel to create a new fuel, and somehow yield more fuel than I started with?
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Electricity + water = Hydrogen.
Hydrogen is then used to make the fuel.
Yes you have less energy in the resulting fuel then was used to make the electricity but liquid fuel is more valuable then electricity for some applications.
Re: This could prove useful for fuel synthesis. (Score:2)
You seem to have comprehension issues. The iron isn't being used as a catalyst, it's being converted to rust. Additionally, we've known for a long time about using iron and water to produce hydrogen. In fact, the process was used by Germany in WW I to fill their zeppelins. Just pass steam over hot iron filings and you get rust and hydrogen.
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Apparently from what I can find Iron Oxide above 2000C will go back to Iron and Oxygen.
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What high purity? From TFS, the observed "purity" is 86% methane / 14% hydrogen, and they hypothesise that deeper (off the crest of the structure) it may be less impure (only 10% methane to 90% hydrogen). IF that hypothesis is proved by experiment (drilling, then flow-testing the new borehole), then you'd have a product that the chemical industry might consider worth c
46 million tons is peanuts (Score:2)
France uses approximately 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas each year. One cubic metre of gas is 0.76kg, so this is roughly 30 billion kgs, or 30 million tons of gas used each year. Obviously the specific energy of hydrogen is slightly different, but it's in the same ballpark.
So basically this 'Mammoth' and 'world's largest' hydrogen deposit consists of a single year's gas consumption for the country.
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France uses approximately 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas each year. One cubic metre of gas is 0.76kg, so this is roughly 30 billion kgs, or 30 million tons of gas used each year. Obviously the specific energy of hydrogen is slightly different, but it's in the same ballpark.
So basically this 'Mammoth' and 'world's largest' hydrogen deposit consists of a single year's gas consumption for the country.
I believe that should have been 0.076kg so would last 10x. Kudos for doing the calculation (even if it contained an easily spotted mistake :).
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Hmm, I don't think that number is right either.
I'll try again - 1kg of hydrogen has 142e6 J of energy. 46 million tons is 46e9 kg. So total energy in the field is 6.532e18 J.
This is 1814TWh. France's annual natural gas usage is ~450TWh. So this hydrogen field is equal to 4 year's worth of usage.
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France uses approximately 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas each year.
So what you're saying is France uses a completely different material for a different purpose? What's your point exactly? Right now the entire global demand for hydrogen is only 90million Mt, and nearly all of that is consumed in industrial processes generated entirely from methane reforming which is an incredibly CO2 intensive process.
This is a pretty significant discovery considering that only a couple of years ago people thought white hydrogen didn't exist in a meaningfully extractable form on this planet
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For a sufficiently large ballpark I suppose - hydrogen has roughly 3x the energy density of hydrocarbons, which are mostly within about 20% of each other (at least until you get into things like sugars and proteins, which only have about 1/3 as much)
Asking a favour (Score:2)
Does any one have a very large "No Smoking / Interdiction de fumer" sign I can borrow?
Sooner would be better than later... there's a lot of smokers here.