Obtaining hydrogen from rocks.
The goal of Iwnetim Abate is to increase subsurface natural hydrogen production, which could open up a new avenue for the development of an affordable, carbon-free energy source.
Related Posts:
It is widely believed that hydrogen, the most prevalent element in the universe, mostly coexists with other elements. Examples of these other elements are carbon in methane and oxygen in water. However, naturally occurring hydrogen-rich subterranean pockets are challenging that idea and drawing interest as a potentially endless source of carbon-free energy.
The U.S. Department of Energy is one interested party; this month, it gave $20 million in research grants to eighteen teams from labs, universities, and private businesses to develop technology that could result in low-cost, clean fuel from underground sources.
As iron-rich rocks combine with water, the iron oxidizes and produces geologic hydrogen, as it is known. The research group led by MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate, one of the award recipients, will utilize its $1.3 million grant to identify the optimal parameters for subterranean hydrogen production, taking into account elements like pH levels, temperature, pressure, and catalysts to start the chemical reaction. Enhancing efficiency for large-scale production is the aim of meeting the world’s energy needs at a competitive price.
According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, geologic hydrogen buried in the crust of the Earth may amount to billions of tonnes. Worldwide accumulations have been found, and numerous startups are looking for reserves that can be extracted. By employing “proactive” strategies that include boosting output and gathering the gas, Abate hopes to accelerate the generation of natural hydrogen.
According to Abate, the Chipman Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), “Our goal is to optimize the reaction parameters to make the reaction faster and produce hydrogen in an economically feasible manner.” The main focus of Abate’s research is developing technologies and materials for the shift to renewable energy sources, such as improved batteries and cutting-edge chemical energy storage techniques.
Promoting creativity
At a time when governments throughout the world are looking for carbon-free energy alternatives to oil and gas, interest in geologic hydrogen is rising. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, announced in December that his administration will finance research into natural hydrogen. Additionally, in February, representatives from the public and commercial sectors addressed US senators on the potential for obtaining hydrogen from the earth.
Commercial hydrogen is produced now for $2 per kilogram, mostly for use in steel, fertilizer, and chemical manufacturing. However, the majority of these processes require burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon that warms the planet. Although “green hydrogen,” which is created using renewable energy, is pricey at $7 per kilogram, it shows promise.
“If hydrogen is available for one dollar per kilogram, it can be competitively priced in terms of energy content with natural gas,” states Douglas Wicks, who oversees the geologic hydrogen grant program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a Department of Energy agency.
The Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and private businesses like Koloma—a hydrogen manufacturing firm backed by Bill Gates and Amazon—are among the recipients of the ARPA-E funds. The projects themselves are varied, ranging from creating models to comprehending hydrogen generation in rocks to using industrial oil and gas methods for producing and extracting hydrogen. To answer queries in what Wicks refers to as a “total white space” is the goal.
According to Wicks, “We don’t know how to engineer the subsurface so that we can safely extract it, nor do we know how to accelerate the production of geologic hydrogen because it’s a chemical reaction.” “We’re attempting to combine the most proficient members of each group to work on this with the expectation that the group will be able to provide us with quality responses in a reasonable amount of time.”
One of the leading authorities on natural hydrogen, geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, concurs that there are many unanswered questions and that the path to the first commercial projects is lengthy. However, he claims that there is “tremendous potential” in attempts to maximize the natural reaction between rock and water, which produces hydrogen.
The founder and CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy, a Denver-based firm with mineral licences for exploratory drilling in the US, Zgonnik, says, “The idea is to find ways we can accelerate that reaction and control it so we can produce hydrogen on demand in specific places.” “If we succeed in achieving that goal, stimulated hydrogen may be able to take the place of fossil fuels.”
“A complete circle moment”
Abate has a personal link to the project. When he was a child, power outages were commonplace in his Ethiopian hometown; there would be blackouts three or maybe four days a week. When doing schoolwork at night, flickering candles or kerosene lamps that released pollutants were frequently the only sources of light available.
Additionally, Abate notes, “we had to use wood and charcoal for household chores like cooking.” “That was my story up until my high school graduation and before I travelled to the United States to attend college.”
An explosion occurred in 1987 when Western African nation of Mali’s well-diggers discovered a naturally occurring hydrogen deposit. Many years later, the surrounding village received energy from the burning of hydrogen in the well that was accessed by Malian businessman Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company.
Diallo abandoned oil and gas to found Hydroma, the first hydrogen exploration company in history. The gas has been found in large amounts in wells the company is drilling close to the original location.
According to Abate, “so, what was once known as an energy-poor continent is now creating hope for the future of the world.” “I felt like I had come full circle when I learned about that. Naturally, the issue is worldwide, as is the answer. However, I am personally linked to both the problem and the solution because of the connection to my own journey and the fact that the answer originates from my home continent.
Trials that are scalable
Abate is developing a fluid recipe in his lab that will cause the chemical reaction that causes rocks to produce hydrogen.
According to Gao, “some catalysts are very expensive and difficult to produce, requiring complex production or preparation.” “We can increase the production rate with an affordable and plentiful catalyst, enabling us to produce it at a rate that is both economically feasible and yields a profit.”
All throughout the world and in the United States are the iron-rich rocks that are the site of the chemical reaction. Abate and Gao are creating what they refer to as a high-throughput system, which consists of robotics and artificial intelligence software, to test different catalyst mixtures and simulate what would happen when applied to rocks from different regions, with different external conditions like temperature and pressure, in order to optimise the reaction across a diversity of geological compositions and environments.
And using that information, we calculate how much hydrogen we are generating for every potential combination, according to Abate. “After that, the AI will pick up knowledge from the experiments and advise us to test this catalyst material composition for this rock based on what it has learned and what I’ve read in the literature.”
In the upcoming months, the team hopes to publish the article it is writing about the research.
After creating the catalyst recipe, the project’s next major task is to design a reactor with two uses. First, equipped with tools like Raman spectroscopy, it will enable scientists to pinpoint and enhance the chemical conditions that result in higher yields and production rates of hydrogen.
