This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
In the quest to decarbonise the world, there is one element that is generating a lot of excitement: hydrogen. “If you burn it, it only produces water, with no impact on the environment,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, professor at the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna (Italy). Proponents of hydrogen believe it can be a solution to clean up everything from transport to agriculture and heavy industry.
But its green credentials are only valid if it can be produced without emitting carbon. And that is why some are very excited about geological hydrogen, or “gold”, the name given to the element when it forms naturally underground. This can happen as a result of a chemical reaction between water and iron-rich rocks, or by radiolysis – the splitting of water molecules by radiation into hydrogen and oxygen.
“Compared to other types of hydrogen, it doesn’t take energy to produce,” says Vitale Brovarone, which is why he foresees a golden hydrogen rush coming. The problem is that we know very little about the element when it forms naturally underground, so the research world is in a race against time to find out more before mass extraction begins blindly and hastily. “From the industry’s point of view, you just have to extract it,” says Vitale Brovarone. “Instead, you first have to understand how easily that can be done and with what consequences.”
Vitale Brovarone and his colleagues believed that Greenland could help answer these questions, so they organized a special mission to the Arctic territory to seek more information, as part of a five-year project. DeepSeep from the CEI Government Center Programme funded by the European Union.
Together with Vitale Brovarone, four scientists from the University of Bologna, one from the Institute of Geosciences and Georesources of the Italian National Research Centre and one from the University of Copenhagen spent ten days in this land of nearly 2 billion-year-old rocks, after having spent six months preparing their mission with maps and satellite data. Despite their meticulous planning, they had to be adaptable. Due to “unforeseen icebergs”, the researchers had to change areas, while at one point a bear sighted nearby forced them to seek shelter on a bank. But in the end, the trip was worth it: it provided them with samples rich in H2 Study.
Around the world, gold hydrogen is turning up where we least expect it, raising questions about the dynamics by which the element accumulates in deposits and the role it plays in underground ecosystems. There are already some concerns: if hydrogen reacts with geological substrates or is processed by certain microorganisms, geological hydrogen can produce methane or hydrogen sulfide. Vitale Brovarone uses these two examples to explain why diving headlong into gold hydrogen extraction risks creating new problems rather than solving existing ones, and why more information is needed.
Since we do not know exactly what has been regulating the presence of H2 If rocks have been preserved for millions or billions of years, it is better to wait before breaking them up by extracting the element, says Vitale Brovarone. The same goes for storing artificially produced hydrogen in underground reservesThe idea of doing so has already enthused the industry, prompting it to act in a time frame that is not compatible with what the research world needs to understand how the gas behaves.
“We are walking on different paths and at different speeds,” he says. “We need to understand how hydrogen behaves in nature, because many dynamics only become apparent after years. Industry wants quick and decisive answers; science needs time and also funds, which, in the case of hydrogen, are still scarce.” Unlike France, Australia and the United States, which have their sights set on collecting golden hydrogen, Italy has not yet invested in its collection, preferring instead to invest in hydrogen production. However, thanks in part to the University of Bologna expedition, Italy becomes one of the few countries in the world seeking to understand more about the subject.