Geologic Hydrogen - A Critical Part of a Net-Zero Strategy? - CANCELED

Hydrogen is projected to play a significant if not crucial role in the future energy mix, with the IEA forecasting an increase of almost an order of magnitude compared to hydrogen consumption today. This increase is driven by the possible dual use of hydrogen: to provide a clean or green high energy density fuel as well as a clean “chemical building block” towards more circular sustainable chemical manufacturing industries. Current technology to produce large volumes of hydrogen with low/zero CO2 footprint at competitive low cost (e.g. < 1 USD/kg) struggle to scale to the projected volumes needed in a few decades. Methane reforming or electrolysis routes appear inadequate to scale up fast in either a carbon-neutral or a cost-effective way for some time to come. Without a realistic view to low-cost bulk volume hydrogen, the energy transition may significantly slow down.  The possibility of producing hydrogen generated in situ from iron-rich rocks in the subsurface is not new but perhaps attractive to jumpstart a clean “hydrogen economy”. Indeed, as is well known, naturally occurring serpentinization reaction mechanisms are slow hence stimulation and production techniques need to be developed to make this a real opportunity. I will discuss new insights and ideas partly developed with colleagues at MIT to radically increase production rates in a sustainable way, which brings the prospect of fundamentally changing the landscape for a carbon-constrained energy future. Naturally produced hydrogen from the subsurface seems the cleanest way to produce low-cost, bulk volumes of hydrogen. I will put these ideas in the context of recent discoveries, in as much as this is known in the public domain, for example the recent discovery in Europe (France, Albania). Alongside, I will stress, as with any production of large volumes of hydrogen, the need for a careful assessment of possible atmospheric effects caused by processing and conversion of hydrogen as an integral part of studies into large scale hydrogen production. This field is still quite immature, with only rudimentary quantitative knowledge of the many (natural and anthropogenic) fluxes of hydrogen.

Speaker: Dirk Smit, Oxford University

Editor's Note: This talk has been replaced with a talk by Jeffrey Rissman.  See our listing for details.