'White hydrogen' could help save the world. Scientists just found one of the largest deposits

[Jilly_in_VA]

When two scientists went looking for fossil fuels beneath the ground of northeastern France, they did not expect to discover something which could supercharge the effort to tackle the climate crisis.

Jacques Pironon and Phillipe De Donato, both directors of research at France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, were assessing the amount of methane in the subsoils of the Lorraine mining basin using a “world first” specialized probe, able to analyze gases dissolved in the water of rock formations deep underground.

A couple of hundred meters down, the probe found low concentrations of hydrogen. “This was not a real surprise for us,” Pironon told CNN; it’s common to find small amounts near the surface of a borehole. But as the probe went deeper, the concentration ticked up. At 1,100 meters down it was 14%, at 1,250 meters it was 20%.

This was surprising, Pironon said. It indicated the presence of a large reservoir of hydrogen beneath. They ran calculations and estimated the deposit could contain between 6 million and 250 million metric tons of hydrogen.

That could make it one of the largest deposits of “white hydrogen” ever discovered, Pironon said. The find has helped fuel an already feverish interest in the gas.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/29/climate/white-hydrogen-fossil-fuels-climate/index.html

[WhiteTara]

1. calling NNadir

what is your take? If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could make a positive change and save our home from total destruction.

[brush]

2. This is the second large deposit of hydrogen I've heard of recently.

There was an article on it a few weeks ago in west Africa.

But almost 20 years later, drillers on the hunt for fossil fuels confirmed the accidental discovery: hundreds of feet below the arid earth of west Africa lies an abundance of naturally occurring, or “white”, hydrogen. Today, it is used to generate green electricity for Bourakébougou's homes and shops.Aug 12, 2023

[Caribbeans]

3. Australia too

NASA.gov: Circular Depressions Seep Hydrogen Gas

Pockmarked landscapes in Australia may be a treasure map of sorts for a natural source of clean energy. Clusters of so-called “fairy circles” in the North Perth Basin of Western Australia have been found to seep hydrogen gas from their perimeters. Natural sources of hydrogen such as these, which have been found on multiple continents, are receiving more and more attention in the quest for fossil fuel alternatives.

This image shows groups of fairy circles near the town of Moora, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Perth. It was acquired by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 on June 27, 2023. In this area, groups of round depressions are found along the north-south-trending Darling Fault. Sometimes called salt lakes, the features seen here are several hundred meters in diameter, and the amount of vegetation and water contained in their interiors changes over time...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151764/circular-depressions-seep-hydrogen-gas

See it on Google Earth

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Moora+WA+6510,+Australia/@-30.6130793,115.987053,22769m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2bcdbc2d8e33ce01:0x400f6382479de60!8m2!3d-30.6410361!4d116.008009!16zL20vMDdqMm5u?entry=ttu

[brush]

4. Ok, ok. Hydrogen maybe as plentiful in the earth as oil was/is...

and will be the clean energy source for the next century or more.

Get with it energy companies and scientists.

[Think. Again.]

5. I'm curious about...

...when this study (and possible find) was done, there's no reference to that in the article.

The article does express the importance of moving these studies along quickly, which is good, but I fear if the wrong hands (fossil fuel industry) have time to cease control of this emerging interest, we won't see any possible benefits until all the petro-fossils are used up, and that would just be too late.

[hunter]

6. Yet another distraction.

We'll continue to use fossil fuels as the world burns.

It seems to me this is a geological curiosity of extremely limited potential.

I'd probably compare it to various small hot springs found around the world. There's often enough energy in those hot springs to be useful locally but all the small hot springs in the world combined will never power a civilization of eight billion humans.

For example, the geothermal heating district of Boise Idaho:

https://www.cityofboise.org/departments/public-works/geothermal/

So, if you drill a hole and hit hydrogen, wonderful. But that hydrogen isn't going to save the world, any more than finding a penny will pay a $100,000 medical bill.