Something we may hear a lot about this year! Geologic Hydrogen could be a massive opportunity.
We thought we’d kick off the New Year talking to a man in the know.
This is a fun conversation and terrific introduction to the subject with Dr Douglas Wicks, Program Director for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA E), a United States government agency tasked with promoting and funding research and development of advanced energy technologies.
We touch on geologic hydrogen in general, the big questions around its viability as a primary fuel source and the concerns and considerations exploration companies are faced with. This fascinating chat both informs and gives us a lot to think about.
The CleanTech Times (TCT):
Hi Douglas, great to meet you. Your LinkedIn Profile says you are “packing up your suitcase of experiences and prepping to launch into the world of geologic hydrogen production!” I’m not sure how much of that is tongue in cheek but do we have a new oil rush on our hands?
Dr Wicks:
“Well, no doubt the technologies are similar from a hydraulics and mining point of view. It’s a brand-new space that’s been moving along over the last years, primarily in the realm of geochemists and geophysicists. And it’s not a new discovery. I think there’s a realisation there may be enough accumulations found to have a major impact on the energy transition. The thing to emphasise right from the beginning, is that if it fulfils its potential, it’s actually a primary energy source, rather than an energy carrier. We look at Green hydrogen, Blue hydrogen, or Grey hydrogen. You’ve started out with a lot of energy from either electricity or natural gas, and the hydrogen that you get out of it has less energy than was put into it. So, it just carries the energy and what we’re looking at with geologic hydrogen; the full expectation is we’re going to get more energy out of its extraction than we put in to do the extraction. In that sense it’s more similar to natural gas than oil. We do put energy in to get actual gas out, but the energy we recruit is much larger. So, there’s lots of interest. People are finding it all over the place. I’ll say that the initial discovery that kind of got people thinking about it, is the deposit in Mali, West Africa. Where somebody back in the late 80s was drilling for water whilst smoking a cigarette and burned themselves from the emission. They survived thankfully.”
TCT:
What a way to discover something.
Dr Wicks:
“An entrepreneur saw that there had been this explosive well in Mali and went back to develop it thinking it was natural gas. And it turned out it was a deposit of hydrogen that was 98% pure. It’s literally 100 metres under the ground. You can tap this. Right now, it’s actually the cleanest electricity in the world because they have it plugged into a fuel cell, and it’s powering the local grid.”
TCT
Very exciting that the well in Mali is operational now.
Dr Wicks:
“Yes. The trouble is, it’s far from the coast. They don’t know if there is enough there to build pipelines. It’s a chicken and egg thing with hydrogen. Okay, we have hydrogen, now what do we do with it? So, they’re currently using it to generate electricity and negotiations are taking place for industrial development surrounding that if it can be done.”
TCT:
It’s almost as though we have found this by accident. I recently read that back in the 1920s, in the Australian Outback, there were several miners and oil explorers looking for hydrocarbons and they came upon a hydrogen field, but it wasn’t what they were looking for. So they shelved it thinking there was absolutely no value in it. That it wasn’t worth exploring further.
Dr Wicks
“That is now being redeveloped! They are going back to that exact site they found in the 1920’s. They found the original well and are now validating the results.”
TCT:
That’s amazing. In which areas of the world are we most likely to discover large Hydrogen fields?
Dr Wicks
“There are several things we must look at. First, I must say that hydrogen is being generated by the Earth everywhere. So, no matter where you are, somewhere down beneath you, hydrogen is being produced. The situation in Mali makes it very interesting. You have a place where it gets trapped and accumulates and doesn’t have any parasitic reactions or leaks that cause it to go away. Right now, those are expected to be very rare. Other places to look at… you’ll see announcements coming out of France that caused Emmanuel Macron to come out and say natural hydrogen is the future of France. Where, what they’re doing is, instead of finding a natural accumulation, they’re drilling down to where the hydrogen is being generated, in what they call a kitchen. That takes place in the subsurface and then you extract the hydrogen from there. And that’s similar to a discovery that they’ve announced in the Lorraine part of France and also, the Pyrenees. There are a lot of developments in the United States. People are looking throughout the Midwest in Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa. Looking for natural accumulations or deep sources that will allow production to take place. There are also wells in Arizona and New Mexico. So, there’s a lot of people looking right now. And we’re at the point where Mali can be viewed as the first Drake well. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Drake Well in the United States. This was in the 1850s and was the first person to actually drill for oil and that set off the oil boom in the United States.”
TCT:
Just stepping back from discussions on using it as a resource… last week you posted, “Wow, bravo to all the intrepid believers who laid the groundwork for this new primary energy source. Well, I should say “new to humanity”, Mother Nature has been using it for a long time to power and do many amazing things.” Briefly explain that statement.
Dr Wicks:
Well, if you look at the subsurface… this Geologic Hydrogen that’s being formed continually; the vast majority of it is consumed in the subsurface. So, it’s produced, and it’s consumed, in transformations of hydrocarbons to give us our natural gas. There at the centre of that, in the deep earth, there’s lots of carbon dioxide, there’s lots of hydrogen and those are combined, and this is where a lot of our natural gas comes from. It’s also a primary energy source for the subsurface microbiome. People don’t think about how much life there is under the surface of the earth. The question is, where does the energy come from? And it really comes from the chemical and reducing potential that we have in hydrogen. And there’s entire microbial communities down there that have developed and evolved to use hydrogen as a primary energy source instead of sunlight. And the same thing is found in the middle of the deep ocean near vents of hydrogen around the mid-Atlantic Ridge. In the Pacific you find a lot of bacteria that thrive on hydrogen, which is the basis of an ecosystem 20,000 feet under the water where the sun don’t shine. So, it’s a major primary energy source for nature as well as potentially for us.
TCT:
This might seem like a silly question, Douglas. But assume we become adept at utilising Geologic Hydrogen at scale. Is there any concern that humans using it as a primary resource will take away from natural processes in the Earth’s crust in a manner detrimental to the earth’s crust and life above? Or will humans only ever be using such a small percentage that it’s never going to be a concern?
Dr Wicks:
“My expectation is that we’re only going to be looking at localised uses of hydrogen from the subsurface. So, earth wide we’re not going to be affecting the subsurface. I will say that we have funding opportunities out and one of our major asks of people is “what’s the impact of extracting hydrogen on the microbiome?” Can we see effects from depriving them of hydrogen or overwhelming them with hydrogen? It can go both ways. We might release more than is coming up. A lot of this has to be developed. And again, I expect the amount that the localities we’re going to be at are small and it’s not going to be a huge impact. But it is something we’re looking at. The same thing with Hydrogens release into the air as has been looked at by the Natural Resources Defence Council. They have looked at it and they have put out proper concern that we have about hydrogen releases. The same way we worried about methane releases because it does have a climate impact.”
TCT:
It’s one thing these processes taking place and hydrogen being available in the Earth’s crust at a depth of a kilometre or more. Is there any way that we can divert this gas so that it makes it more accessible? Is there any way that we can simulate some of the processes deep in the crust that would make it more readily available to us very, very close to the surface?
Dr Wicks:
“You just described the funding opportunity I put out. So, we’re now evaluating proposals for funding this. ARPE A is a funding agency. And so, we’ve developed exploratory topics around geologic hydrogen. One focus is purely on how we stimulate Hydrogen. Because we understand the chemistry of how it’s formed, the question is, can we at depth, stimulate that and increase the production of hydrogen and control it so it would be on demand? The second exploratory topic is how we get it out of the ground. How do we monitor what’s taking place in the subsurface? Such that we can efficiently bring the material up without any negative environmental impacts. And so, you literally described my programmes. How do we stimulate and how do we harness it.”
TCT:
I watched an element of your Distinguished Speaker series where you’d said that if we were to be able to stimulate one of these processes, we could provide unlimited hydrogen for 200 years of humanity’s current consumption. That’s incredible. What would need to happen for that to be true.
Dr Wicks:
“Again, we understand the chemical reactions that lead to the formation of hydrogen and actually, it’s the oxidation of iron. So, think about rusting. The Earth’s crust is made up of 5% iron (II). This is iron in an oxidation state (II). A reduced form. What happens to generate hydrogen is that iron (II) reacts with water to give you iron (III), basically, hematite or magnetite. So, it’s a mineral reaction and hydrogen. Well, think about this, the Earth’s crust is 5% iron (II). So, the potential is that you can go through and say we can drill this across the world. And that allows you to calculate how much iron there is, and you can come up with a chemical potential. That is a very big number! I think the comment you probably saw in my talk, was from another one of my colleagues from the USGS. Jeff Ellis gives a talk saying that there’s enough hydrogen being accumulated to last for 200 years over the whole earth. I looked at it and said that if less than 1% of that iron (II) reacts in the United States, it’s enough hydrogen for 1000 years of our total energy requirement.”
TCT:
That sounds like a holy grail to us Dr Wicks.
Dr Wicks:
“A billion tonnes of hydrogen would power the entire United States economy. We’re sitting on chemical potential of trillions.”
TCT:
Wow, that’s incredible.
Dr Wicks:
“The real challenge is for the engineers and scientists to say how we unlock this potential and harness it in a way that meets the environmental, social, and economic concerns of society.”
TCT:
What level of interest is the US government showing in funding exploration?
Dr Wicks:
“It’s a very new topic that’s been brought up. I will say that when I started looking at this three years ago, I was a total sceptic. I have now changed into a supporter. And I think we’re finding the same thing within Governments. No government recognised the potential, really until this year. And now I think it’s coming out and so you’ll see that our exploratory topic is at $20 million of funding. We’re trying to lay the groundwork for future programmes in the area. These exploratory topics will set the baseline for what we can do and exploit forward. It is paid attention to by US Department of Energy and other branches of the US government.”
TCT:
It’s exciting stuff.
Dr Wicks:
“It’s being seen around the world. Emmanuel Macron, the President of France has literally said natural hydrogen now factors into their decarbonisation goals for 2030.”
TCT:
Yeah we read that. Any special safety considerations for hydrogen being a dangerous flammable gas?
Dr Wicks:
“Safety is always an issue. I would say that natural gas also has similar issues but with different problems. My focus is on how we produce the hydrogen from geology. There’s a lot of work going on in Europe and the United States on once we have the hydrogen out, how do we move it, store it and use it safely. So this is the remit of hydrogen hubs that we’ve announced in the United States. We’re investing billions of dollars into hydrogen and into how we deploy it to aid in the energy transition. And the same thing is taking place in Europe, Japan and wider Asia. So I think it’s going to take a lot of work from the governments and standards agencies to make it safe. Natural Gas and gasoline are very dangerous compounds also. So it’s going to take some time, it’s not easy. But I think we can pull it off. I don’t think people realise how much hydrogen is already being used in the economy. There are pipelines all over the southern United States and the Gulf area. Hydrogen is being moved between oil refineries as an industrial intermediate.”
TCT:
How similar is the extraction process going to be to natural gas? There are huge advantages to having been in that realm if companies are transitioning across.
Dr Wicks:
“My expectation is there’s going to be a lot of similarities. The places where we find hydrogen accumulating or being generated, are different than where you find oil and gas. And even though a lot of oil and gas comes from hydrogen, it’s where we’ve been developing those fields, all the hydrogen has depleted reacting with co2 in the subsurface. So, we’re going to be looking at very different mineral types for hydrogen exploitation and exploration. But, as I’ve heard from someone in the oil field services business, they see it as drilling holes and putting things down holes, taking gas out of holes and putting them it a pipe. We know how to do that. So, I would expect we would see applicability of a lot of our oil and gas background to this field. And the other great advantage of a country like the US is we have built workforce for doing this.”
TCT:
I understand that Hydrogen is a clean gas in so far as when burned its only by-product is water. But is it only truly renewable if we master replicating its natural chemical production?
Dr Wicks:
“The Earth naturally goes through Project processes to generate hydrogen so I guess you would call it renewable. My opinion is that to be a viable energy source, we’re going to have to learn how to stimulate the production of it. And that really comes down to the major cost for bringing hydrogen to the market is going to be drilling. And if you think about it, the more gas you can put through a pipe the lower the cost per kilogramme. And I like to use the example from the United States and the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Yes, they produced natural gas there, but it was not the most attractive and people didn’t want to drill for it. But once they understood how to stimulate it with hydraulic fracturing, all of a sudden it became a very attractive place. If you had gone back to a gas field 30 years ago in the United States said the Marcellus could produce gas at less than two hours, million Btu they would have thought you were crazy. But now, they can produce gas very inexpensively just by increasing the volume of gas coming through a well.”
TCT:
What are the challenges with Storage and transportation of hydrogen?
Dr Wicks:
“Those are challenges being addressed by other parts of the Department. So, there are challenges, but we have infrastructure to do it. And one of the advantages that we see with geologic hydrogen if we understand how to stimulate it, you really don’t need to store large amounts of it. It’s basically having a stopcock on your hydrogen. If you need more, you open the stopcock. That’s where we would like to go. To have the reservoir that we’re developing be the storage itself for it. And obviously, if it’s going to be like natural gas, you’re going to have to find places to put large quantities of it for seasonal variations and the likes. But the expectation is, it’s going to obviate a lot of the needs for storage and transportation, especially if you begin to find it in places like Japan and Korea, where they’re actively looking for geologic hydrogen. Right now, they were basing their ideas that they were going to make hydrogen in Australia, liquefy it and put it on a boat, send it up to Korea, or Japan, which would have been phenomenally energy and cost expensive. But there is the expectation that there’s going to be geologic hydrogen, pretty much everywhere. It’s a matter of what it’s going to take to drill for it, what it’s going to take to manage the subsurface.”
TCT:
Just on that point, Douglas is it more or less difficult to liquefy hydrogen as it is natural gas?
Dr Wicks:
“Much more! Much, much more difficult. You’re going down to 20 Kelvin, you’re getting close to absolute zero to do this. Even at that temperature, its density is low. So, the energy within a liquid hydrogen container ship is much less than NLG ship.”
TCT:
Any regulatory challenges that you think will be associated with hydrogen that that needs to be considered?
Dr Wicks:
“From a development standpoint, a lot of the exploration and drilling within the United States is covered by existing oil and gas. The one challenge that we have that we’re going to have to face is the tax credits for geologic hydrogen. You can read out in the industry that geologic hydrogen, if produced today, would not be eligible for the US tax credits. That’s something that needs to be overcome. There is a lot of discussion taking place on subsurface ownership rights for this material. That’s obviously going to be a challenge. There’s a whole bunch of business stuff that must be done. Every state has different regulations. In my opinion though, it will less than the regulatory challenges surrounding co2 storage, which are huge barriers.”
TCT:
Looking ahead to 2024, what are you most excited about? If we have this conversation at this time next year, what would you like to have happened.
Dr Wicks:
“Well, I have a funding opportunity and I hope to have made my selections by early 2024 and will be kicking off research programs in the area. That’s TBD. We are evaluating proposals now. My expectations are that there will be the first commercial wells outside of Mali West Africa that have been flow tested and we can say how much they can produce. And once that ball gets rolling it’s going to go very fast.
Looking back on 2023, everyone in the field is shocked at fast things are moving now between announcements and govt funding. Department of Energy was really the first to announce competitive funding in the area. Now the French and Australians are jumping on board. I would expect to see announcements out of Canada, the UK, the EU and Korea and Japan. All are in very fast order opening developments.”
TCT:
That’s great to hear. In doing brief research prior to our chat, I could only really find info on the subject from the last 6 months.
Dr Wicks:
“I’ll give you an example of the power of press. Really it was the “Science” article published in February on hidden hydrogen. Eric Hand pushed the snowball over the crest of the hill.
Erics paper, first is an excellent paper and very well written but I think it was the first mainstream article talking about the potential of geologic hydrogen even if there are several scientific papers going further back.”
TCT:
Dr Douglas Wicks, thank you so much for your time, we learnt a lot. It’s a super exciting space. Great talking to you and best of luck for 2024.