A❤️441-word🧡under💛3-minute💚read
I first wrote about a massive white hydrogen discovery in France in November of 2023. Prior to that find it wasn’t believed that meaningful amounts of white hydrogen existed.
What is white hydrogen and why might it greatly accelerate hydrogen’s deployment?
White hydrogen is naturally occurring. More accurately, it’s naturally occurring “green” hydrogen – the industry’s holy grail.
For hydrogen to play a major role in combatting climate change a multitude of technical challenges need to be resolved. Arguably, the biggest is producing green hydrogen at scale and at a cost acceptable to the market.
We aren’t close.
Producing green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive. The Inflation Reduction Act’s $7 billion in funding to create eight hydrogen hubs was intended to accelerate progress. Even if the funding remains – which is a big if – it’s questionable how much progress would be achieved.
Today, most hydrogen production use electrolysis. The problem is that electrolyzers are power hungry, highly inefficient, and require substantial amounts of highly purified water. That’s all before the industry figures out how to power its electrolyzers with renewable energy – a requirement to achieve the green label.
But recently, the hydrogen game may have dramatically changed, and those in the electrolyzer business may want to update their resumes.
What happened?
Australian company HyTerra discovered a deposit of 96.1% pure hydrogen in Kansas. Hydrogen that pure requires little in the way of refining. The discovery also proves that highly pure hydrogen exists naturally.
The next question: Can the hydrogen can be extracted at an acceptable cost?
The answer seems to be yes.
HyTerra believes it can achieve a cost equal to the Department of Energy’s “EarthShot” target price of $1/kg. That’s well below current costs.
Better yet, HyTerra does not employ fracking.
Kansas wasn’t a case of drill and hope. HyTerra has partnered with Avant Energy which has developed subsurface imaging technology to identify the best places to drill. They also have something called hydrogen isotopic analysis which discerns deep-earth hydrogen from the surface level stuff.
In others words, luck has nothing to do with it. The company appears to have the means to locate deposits of natural hydrogen in a similar fashion as the oil industry finds oil.
If HyTerra can scale its operations, hydrogen’s other challenges which include storage and transport are next up. Existing natural gas pipelines don’t work for hydrogen, and today, storing hydrogen requires it to be either highly pressurized or super-cooled.
But one step at a time.
This find could accelerate the deployment of hydrogen by a decade or more. I’ll keep you posted, and here’s the link to my original video.
White Hydrogen Discovered in France
#hydrogen #hyterra #greenhydrogen #hydrogenproduction
