HIDDEN HYDROGEN
Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?
… historically, when well loggers cataloged their borehole emanations, they rarely bothered to measure for hydrogen. “The bottom line---they weren’t really looking for hydrogen,” says Geoffrey Ellis, an organic geochemist at USGS. “We weren’t looking in the right places with the right tools.”
THE MAIN ENGINE of natural hydrogen production is now thought to be a set of high-temperature reactions between water and iron-rich minerals such as olivine, which dominate Earth’s mantle. One common reaction is called serpentinization, because it converts olivine into another kind of mineral called serpentinite. In the process, the iron oxidizes, grabbing oxygen atoms from water molecules and releasing hydrogen.
He thinks Earth produces orders of magnitude more hydrogen each year than the 90 million tons that humans manufacture. But it’s not only that flow that matters---it’s the size of the underground stock. “How much can be trapped in the subsurface that we can actually go after?” Ellis asks. “That’s a much more difficult question to answer.”
He and his USGS colleague Sarah Gelman gave it a try using a simple “box” model borrowed from the oil industry. The model accounted for impermeable rock traps of different kinds, the destructive effect of microbes, and the assumption---based on oil industry experience—that only 10% of hydrogen accumulations might ever be tapped economically. Ellis says the model comes up with a range of numbers centered around a trillion tons of hydrogen. That would satisfy world demand for thousands of years even if the green-energy transition triggers a surge in hydrogen use.
The contribution of the Precambrian continental lithosphere to global H2 production
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14017
Hydrogen emissions from hydrothermal fields in Iceland and comparison with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
More recently the H2 content within the Larderello geothermal zone of Italy has been studied and the authors concluded that the H2 observed in the steam is due to the serpentinization of the ophiolitic nappes involved in the Apennines thrusts. Native hydrogen has also been discovered in the western Pyrenean foothills and is attributed to mantle rocks serpentinization, in Mount Chimaera (Spain), Tablelands (Canada) and Happo (Japan), but also in Prony Bay (New Caledonia, in the Voltry massif hyperalkaline springs (France) and in Oman.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319922001938
We shouldn't spend a nickel to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. All of this hand wringing is pure BS. We are at a historic low point in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The average atmospheric CO2 content over the last 250 million years is around 1000 to 1200 parts per million. We're at 415 ppm today.
CO2 is plant fertilizer. We should double or triple our current levels if we wanted the plants and animals to flourish. Instead we spend trillions of dollars to satisfy some wackjob elitists that only want to depopulate the world and enslave the survivors.