“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” stated Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is a part of a staff of geoscientists finding out a website at Bulqizë in Albania the place miners at one of many world’s largest chromite mines could have by chance drilled right into a hydrogen reservoir.
The query Donzé and his staff need to deal with is whether or not hydrogen has a parallel geological system with big subsurface reservoirs that might be extracted the best way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé stated.
Greenish power supply
Water is the one byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a possible go-to inexperienced power supply. The drawback is that the overwhelming majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make annually comes from processing methane, and that does launch greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé stated.
And the important thing to a type of alternate options could also be buried within the Bulqizë mine. Chromite, an ore that accommodates a lot of chromium, has been mined at Bulqizë because the Nineteen Eighties. The mining operation was going easily till 2007, when the miners drilled by way of a fault, a discontinuity within the rocks. “Then they started to have explosions. In the mine, they had a small electric train, and there were sparks flying, and then… boom,” Donzé stated. At first, Bulqizë administration thought the trigger was methane, the same old wrongdoer of mining accidents. But it wasn’t.
Hydrogen at fault
The mine was purchased by a Chinese firm in 2017, and the brand new homeowners instantly despatched their engineering groups to take care of explosions. They did measurements and located the hydrogen focus within the mine’s galleries was round 1–2 p.c. It solely must be at 0.4–0.5 p.c for the ambiance to change into explosive. “They also found the hydrogen was coming from the fault drilled through back in 2007. Unfortunately, one of the explosions happened when the engineering team was down there. Three or four people died,” Donzé stated.
It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was launched from the Bulqizë mine annually. Donzé’s staff went there to determine the place all this hydrogen was coming from.
The rocks didn’t comprise sufficient hydrogen to succeed in that kind of circulate fee. One attainable rationalization is the hydrogen being launched as a product of an ongoing geological course of referred to as serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” stated Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added.
“Probable,” in fact, is way from sure.