Hydrogen plays an increasingly important role in the world of mobility as an alternative energy source. The automotive industry took the initiative by adopting this technology to develop more sustainable vehicles, later giving way to other transportation models. Apart from cars, planes, trains and ships are also actively exploring the application of hydrogen in search of cleaner and more environmentally friendly mobility, as we have seen in other information published on Moveo.
Until now, the focus was mainly on gray hydrogen (obtained from natural gas or other hydrocarbons) and green hydrogen (obtained through an electrolysis process), but the appearance of natural hydrogen reserves opens the door a little more to the use of this gas to accelerate the decarbonization process.
In recent years, deposits of so-called white hydrogen have been discovered in places as diverse as the United States, Turkey, Australia, Oman, Finland and Mali. The latest discovery took place recently in France. In a survey carried out in the Lorraine region to search for methane for possible exploitation, around 46 million tons of natural hydrogen have been found, according to estimates by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“The discovery of a hydrogen deposit is interesting news in itself, since there are not many hydrogen wells in the world. It is very important for the industrial hydrogen sector,” admits Xavier Giménez, professor of Environmental Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (UB).
If the CNRS calculations are confirmed, the discovery of the largest natural hydrogen deposit in the world would be equivalent to more than half of the annual production of gray hydrogen, that is, that obtained from fossil fuels. Although the data may lead one to believe that this deposit opens the way to fully satisfy the demands of the world of mobility, this is not the case, since it is an amount that would have practically no impact.
Giménez emphasizes that every day 16,000 million kilograms of oil are consumed in the world and that, therefore, 46 million tons (46,000 million kilograms) “is very little compared to oil consumption.” “Taking into account that hydrogen yields much more by mass than oil, the two quantities cannot be directly compared. It is equivalent to saying that in about 100 days all the hydrogen in the deposit would be consumed,” adds the chemist.
The university professor concludes that in order to trust white hydrogen as a viable alternative for decarbonization in the context of mobility “there should be hundreds, if not thousands, of deposits of this type.”
The most common hydrogen used in industrial or energy-intensive processes is gray hydrogen, which is obtained from fossil fuels. When obtained from natural gas or other light hydrocarbons, such as methane or liquefied petroleum gases, it produces C02 emissions, a gas that is not found in white hydrogen.
Natural hydrogen also has a series of advantages over green hydrogen. Renewable hydrogen is obtained from electrolysis, a process that separates oxygen and hydrogen particles from water using electricity from renewable sources. Although the carbon footprint of green hydrogen is zero, since CO2 is captured and mixed with hydrogen at high temperatures to obtain liquid fuel, obtaining renewable hydrogen is expensive.
Although natural hydrogen is a versatile energy source that can be used in a variety of applications, only one field is currently exploited in the world. It is a well located in Mali, specifically in Burakebugu, about 60 kilometers northeast of the capital Bamako, which was discovered by chance in the late 1980s when the subsoil was being drilled in search of a water well.
In Nebraska (United States), the first white hydrogen well is being drilled and in Australia around thirty exploitation licenses have been granted in recent months.
As far as Spain is concerned, the startup Helios Aragón intends to begin the extraction of natural hydrogen in Monzón and surrounding areas, in the province of Huesca, in 2024. Those responsible for the project hope to commercially exploit the deposit for 20 or 30 years from 2028. According to its forecasts, a total of 1.1 million tons of white hydrogen could be extracted.
