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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 deposit

by 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.

by roenxi 2y ago

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.