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Yeah I've sat on an exploration drill rig and I have a vague grasp of the physics and chemistry. That is why I'm a little sceptical - what exactly would the pro

by roenxi 2y ago

Yeah I've sat on an exploration drill rig and I have a vague grasp of the physics and chemistry. That is why I'm a little sceptical - what exactly would the process be for identifying a hydrogen resource? We're dealing with a light gas that would probably escape from core samples very quickly; especially under normal conditions. They'd need to get an accurate read during core drilling or be able to identify specific a non-magnetic gas with density of 0 underground which sounds pretty challenging - especially since it seems to have no special commercial interest for most of history. Is there a standard that you have to have a gas monitor attached to the drill hole? I don't remember anyone pointing one out to me or complaining that theirs was broken but stranger things have happened. Can hydrogen even be detected with magnets or surface chemistry analysis? The way sound waves bounce around underground makes it quite challenging to pick things up. The geologists have put a lot of effort into this exact problem but prospecting for hydrogen sounds damn difficult and I'd be surprised if we had global coverage for it.

defrost 2y ago
In the drill core, even after gas escapes, there'd be specific types of capping material that can trap hydrogen under pressure, below that there'd be a reduced density of more porous material. Hydrogen prospectors looking backwards at drill core logs would be looking for signature transitions and retesting fields, looking again at the seismic results to find ROI's in historic results. Hence: Geological signatures: https://academic.oup.com/jge/article/21/4/1242/7676857 https://academic.oup.com/jge/article/21/4/1242/7676857 Same authors, restricted access (for now): Geologic hydrogen: An emerging role of mining geophysics in new energy exploration - https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/image2024-4100417.1 https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/image2024-4100417.1 Old people rambling: Des FitzGerald on geophysical exploration for naturally occurring hydrogen. Des outlines the current state of exploration for natural hydrogen and discusses geological mechanisms for hydrogen generation. ~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14432471.2024.2438985 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14432471.2024.2... etc.
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- roenxi 2y ago
  If they have to theorycraft a resource based on traces of where the hydrogen used to be, but no longer is then it is entirely possible that big hydrogen deposits have just been missed. That seems to be literally what the article today is about. For 90% of minerals they can just say what is in the drill sample is what is underground, exploration geologists aren't generally in the business of imagining what might have been in the core independently of what was directly measured. If we need to apply specific theories to the exploration samples then the "There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now" logic doesn't hold. Since the evidence has to be interpreted before we can know if there is a deposit it is quite possible that it was interpreted wrongly on a mass scale. You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on. I'm not saying geologists are ignorant, just that Animats' logic doesn't hold for hydrogen. There could be massive deposits that we technically already have the data for except nobody ever bothered to look for it.
  - defrost 2y ago
    It goes to motivation, until recently there's been a lot of talk about 'pure' hydrogen extraction but little actual pragmatic hydrogen exploration; specifically funded hydrogen targetted developable resource programs. Now that there's growing economic justification for investing time and money (at least a decade, easily on the order of a billion (that seems low) outlay before return) in hydrogen, serious exploration starts. As in all exploration phases the money funnel begins with prospects which means record crawling looking for patterns - actively developing prospects and mapping prospect fields expands on the current pattern knowledge and that better understanding, trained on emperical results, gets cycled back into the record crawling phase. This goes to the original question, there is already detailed data, seventy years worth of logged geophysical, vaulted by major explorers; prospectors who look at a $50 million USD TSX prospectus as the absolute minimum low bar of any interest in capital rasing mineral development projects. Buried in that data is almost certainly (confidence) patterns that identify most of the larger near surface deposits. NB: the italic stresses are deliberate, across the entire globe, looking back from 50 years after today, that seems likely to stand up as a geostatistical statement of formal E(xpectation). In the course of going forward from today a better understanding of how to read the tealeaves wrt hydrogen will develop, and this: > You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on. will look exactly right only flipped: we have a big historic data archive, we need to develop a better prospect filter for a new resource of interest. Years ago a similar thing happened with gold data, a big historic data archive got reprocessed with better algorithms using the latest <cough> learnings </cough> and then a few years after that watered down academic papers appeared, eg: Towards the automated analysis of regional aeromagnetic data to identify regions prospective for gold deposits https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0098300408000435 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00983... that talked about trawling already existing data archives for correlated patterns. This is part of the ongoing grind of geophysical exploration.
lazide 2y ago
Uh, if the gas had any useful quantity at all it would be under pressure and would be coming out of the borehole with noticeable speed/pressure. Most natural gas is also hydrogen. This isn’t that unusual, in actuality. What is unusual is ‘pure’ hydrogen, as most processes end up combining it into a denser composite molecule. Like water, or methane, etc.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  Natural gas is methane. Methane is composed of hydrogen, but it is mostly carbon by weight. Chemicals are different than their components. Water is also made of hydrogen but it takes work to split it.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Natural gas depending on source can have a couple percent free hydrogen. Adding more is apparently becoming more popular. In some markets, it comes from LNG which is pretty pure methane, in others it comes from wells which has more hydrogen as well as other contaminants like sulfides.
- scott7ree 2y ago
  Water could be a key to discovery. Orange hydrogen is a theorized method of water fracking/stimulating ultramafic rock bodies to speed up the chemical reaction creating H2.
Animats 2y ago
Right, most analyses of cores might not find small traces of hydrogen. But if someone looking for natural gas drilled into a sizable hydrogen deposit, it would be hard not to notice that the methane had way too much hydrogen.

by roenxi 2y ago

defrost 2y ago

In the drill core, even after gas escapes, there'd be specific types of capping material that can trap hydrogen under pressure, below that there'd be a reduced density of more porous material. Hydrogen prospectors looking backwards at drill core logs would be looking for signature transitions and retesting fields, looking again at the seismic results to find ROI's in historic results. Hence: Geological signatures: https://academic.oup.com/jge/article/21/4/1242/7676857 https://academic.oup.com/jge/article/21/4/1242/7676857 Same authors, restricted access (for now): Geologic hydrogen: An emerging role of mining geophysics in new energy exploration - https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/image2024-4100417.1 https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/image2024-4100417.1 Old people rambling: Des FitzGerald on geophysical exploration for naturally occurring hydrogen. Des outlines the current state of exploration for natural hydrogen and discusses geological mechanisms for hydrogen generation. ~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14432471.2024.2438985 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14432471.2024.2... etc.

deleted 2y ago
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roenxi 2y ago
If they have to theorycraft a resource based on traces of where the hydrogen used to be, but no longer is then it is entirely possible that big hydrogen deposits have just been missed. That seems to be literally what the article today is about. For 90% of minerals they can just say what is in the drill sample is what is underground, exploration geologists aren't generally in the business of imagining what might have been in the core independently of what was directly measured. If we need to apply specific theories to the exploration samples then the "There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now" logic doesn't hold. Since the evidence has to be interpreted before we can know if there is a deposit it is quite possible that it was interpreted wrongly on a mass scale. You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on. I'm not saying geologists are ignorant, just that Animats' logic doesn't hold for hydrogen. There could be massive deposits that we technically already have the data for except nobody ever bothered to look for it.
- defrost 2y ago
  It goes to motivation, until recently there's been a lot of talk about 'pure' hydrogen extraction but little actual pragmatic hydrogen exploration; specifically funded hydrogen targetted developable resource programs. Now that there's growing economic justification for investing time and money (at least a decade, easily on the order of a billion (that seems low) outlay before return) in hydrogen, serious exploration starts. As in all exploration phases the money funnel begins with prospects which means record crawling looking for patterns - actively developing prospects and mapping prospect fields expands on the current pattern knowledge and that better understanding, trained on emperical results, gets cycled back into the record crawling phase. This goes to the original question, there is already detailed data, seventy years worth of logged geophysical, vaulted by major explorers; prospectors who look at a $50 million USD TSX prospectus as the absolute minimum low bar of any interest in capital rasing mineral development projects. Buried in that data is almost certainly (confidence) patterns that identify most of the larger near surface deposits. NB: the italic stresses are deliberate, across the entire globe, looking back from 50 years after today, that seems likely to stand up as a geostatistical statement of formal E(xpectation). In the course of going forward from today a better understanding of how to read the tealeaves wrt hydrogen will develop, and this: > You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on. will look exactly right only flipped: we have a big historic data archive, we need to develop a better prospect filter for a new resource of interest. Years ago a similar thing happened with gold data, a big historic data archive got reprocessed with better algorithms using the latest <cough> learnings </cough> and then a few years after that watered down academic papers appeared, eg: Towards the automated analysis of regional aeromagnetic data to identify regions prospective for gold deposits https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0098300408000435 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00983... that talked about trawling already existing data archives for correlated patterns. This is part of the ongoing grind of geophysical exploration.

lazide 2y ago

Uh, if the gas had any useful quantity at all it would be under pressure and would be coming out of the borehole with noticeable speed/pressure. Most natural gas is also hydrogen. This isn’t that unusual, in actuality. What is unusual is ‘pure’ hydrogen, as most processes end up combining it into a denser composite molecule. Like water, or methane, etc.

ianburrell 2y ago
Natural gas is methane. Methane is composed of hydrogen, but it is mostly carbon by weight. Chemicals are different than their components. Water is also made of hydrogen but it takes work to split it.
- lazide 2y ago
  Natural gas depending on source can have a couple percent free hydrogen. Adding more is apparently becoming more popular. In some markets, it comes from LNG which is pretty pure methane, in others it comes from wells which has more hydrogen as well as other contaminants like sulfides.
scott7ree 2y ago
Water could be a key to discovery. Orange hydrogen is a theorized method of water fracking/stimulating ultramafic rock bodies to speed up the chemical reaction creating H2.

Animats 2y ago

Right, most analyses of cores might not find small traces of hydrogen. But if someone looking for natural gas drilled into a sizable hydrogen deposit, it would be hard not to notice that the methane had way too much hydrogen.