Hydrogen

00:00:06: Substance.

00:00:05: Stories about the stuff

00:00:07: that shapes our world.

00:00:09: In many ways, hydrogen is at the foundation of this question of energy and habitability.

00:00:14: It's the first thing we look for.

00:00:16: It's becoming potentially an important part of how we're going to try to address humans' future, which we have compromised by this massive unplanned experiment in climate change and global heating.

00:00:30: Substance.

00:00:42: We humans are builders.

00:00:44: We are creators.

00:00:46: From the beginning, we've shaped the world around us.

00:00:49: It's what's made us what we are and allowed us to thrive.

00:00:54: Today, we know that to continue the human endeavor, we have to find new ways to work with the Earth instead of just taking from it.

00:01:04: Nearly all of Earth's energy begins as hydrogen.

00:01:07: And today, this simple element has become a key engine of human innovation.

00:01:12: It's one of the universe's most basic ingredients, one of society's most important resources.

00:01:19: But it's also one of the most challenging substances for humans to make sustainably.

00:01:25: However, that's changing fast.

00:01:29: I'm Joe Hansen, and this is Substance, a podcast about the discoveries and innovations in chemistry and beyond that are helping us build a sustainable society for the future.

00:01:42: In short, we tell stories about stuff that shapes our world.

00:01:47: And we're starting at the beginning with hydrogen.

00:01:54: The chemical element hydrogen is the first on the periodic table.

00:01:58: One proton and one electron in its most common form.

00:02:03: It fuels the stars, including our own sun.

00:02:06: A whopping three-quarters of all the matter in the universe is hydrogen.

00:02:12: So it's in the stars and in space.

00:02:15: Where do we find hydrogen in our lives?

00:02:18: I'd say the way you encounter the element hydrogen most frequently is in your water glass.

00:02:22: You know, the glass you probably have in front of you, the cup of coffee I had for breakfast today.

00:02:26: Hydrogen is the H in H-two-oh.

00:02:30: Professor Barbara Sherwood-Lowler is interested in the relationship between hydrogen, the element, and the hydrogen found in water.

00:02:38: She's going to take us on a journey to explore the strange and interesting ways all of that hydrogen is connected.

00:02:45: But first I want to set the stage somewhere else.

00:02:49: Not out in the far reaches of the solar system or the galaxy or the universe.

00:02:53: In nineteen eighty seven, the village of Boracabugu needed a new well for drinking water.

00:03:01: Boracabugu is in the landlocked West African nation of Mali.

00:03:05: It's located in the savannah over four hundred miles southwest of the ancient desert city of Timbuktu, at around thirty miles northwest of Mali's capital, Bamako.

00:03:16: On the savannah, groundwater can be dozens of meters below the surface.

00:03:20: So back in nineteen eighty-seven, to find a source for this drinking water well, teams of workers needed to drill several boreholes deep into the ground.

00:03:31: One of these boreholes had drilled down a hundred and eight meters and had still not hit water, so they basically gave up on it.

00:03:39: But overnight, something began to seep out.

00:03:43: Not liquid, but gas.

00:03:47: The next morning, a worker returned to investigate the borehole.

00:03:52: He lit a cigarette, then peered into the well, and

00:03:57: boom!

00:03:59: The gas ignited in a massive explosion.

00:04:04: The man was left badly burned and the flame he ignited burned for several days.

00:04:09: Villagers feared it might torch the whole town.

00:04:13: Many years later, a person who witnessed the ordeal told a petroleum engineer that the flame resembled blue sparkling water during the day and shimmering gold at night.

00:04:24: It burned strangely clean with no smoke.

00:04:28: Eventually, the flame was smothered and the hole plugged, and that's how it stayed for more than twenty years.

00:04:36: It was only many years later that someone realized the gas that seeped from the well in Boracabugu was a remarkable discovery.

00:04:45: It was made of nearly pure hydrogen in its elemental form.

00:04:51: Now, when we talk about pure hydrogen, we're talking about the form in which we actually find it here on Earth.

00:04:57: and that's in a molecule made up of two hydrogens, H-II.

00:05:02: It's usually a gas, and it holds the distinction of being the smallest molecule there is.

00:05:09: While a hydrogen atom has just one proton and one electron, in the hydrogen molecule, two hydrogen atoms share their two electrons between them to form a molecular bond.

00:05:21: The bond that holds those hydrogens together is full of energy, but you need a spark or the burning end of a cigarette, do rip it apart and release that energy.

00:05:33: But you need something else, too.

00:05:35: Oxygen, or O-II, which, like hydrogen, is a molecule.

00:05:40: This one made up of two oxygen atoms.

00:05:44: As long as there's oxygen around, when hydrogen gas ignites, the bonds between the two hydrogens in H-II and two oxygen in O-II burst apart, and a new molecule forms in a burst of energy.

00:05:58: That energy sets off a chain reaction that breaks apart more molecules of hydrogen and oxygen.

00:06:04: The reaction snowballs, or more accurately, fireballs downhill, emitting more energy until all of the hydrogen is consumed.

00:06:15: What remains is a new molecule that contains two hydrogens and one oxygen.

00:06:20: Two H's and an O. H-II-O.

00:06:24: Water.

00:06:25: In short, hydrogen gas plus oxygen gas and a spark makes water plus a whole lot of energy.

00:06:34: This is remarkable and it's important to our story because it means that unlike fossil fuels which emit planet warming carbon dioxide when they burn, burning.

00:06:44: hydrogen only emits water, making it one of the cleanest fuels there is.

00:06:52: So we know that the ocean floor produces hydrogen.

00:06:54: We know that the continents produce hydrogen.

00:06:56: How could we as humans take advantage of natural hydrogen for green energy transition for battle and climate change?

00:07:02: If we could even harness some of this, even a small proportion of this could be useful to humans.

00:07:08: There's enough there that if it even gets a small amount of what's out there, it could potentially help us in terms of either reducing the costs or decarbonizing the existing.

00:07:20: need for hydrogen.

00:07:21: We produce hydrogen through industrial and chemical techniques.

00:07:26: We put a lot of chemistry and energy in.

00:07:28: It costs money, electricity to do this.

00:07:35: The way we currently produce hydrogen is actually a huge source of carbon emissions, nearly two and a half percent of annual carbon dioxide output.

00:07:45: For every ton of hydrogen that we need, we produce about nine tons of CO two.

00:07:51: That's because almost all the hydrogen produced today comes from fossil fuel.

00:07:56: You heard that right.

00:07:58: By letting steam react with oil, natural gas, even

00:08:01: coal,

00:08:02: we can collect hydrogen.

00:08:04: But the byproduct of that process is even more carbon dioxide.

00:08:09: The good news is there's actually already one way to make hydrogen directly from water with no or very low greenhouse gas emissions.

00:08:20: The bad news is It's expensive, at least today.

00:08:24: Remember, the reaction that forms water from H-II and O-II produces energy.

00:08:30: To run this in reverse and get the hydrogen and oxygen back out, you need to put energy back in.

00:08:38: One way we do this is with electrical energy.

00:08:41: We call this process water electrolysis, and the machines that do this water-splitting work are electrolyzers.

00:08:50: Electrolyzers are becoming more common with the increase in clean sources of electricity like solar and wind power.

00:08:57: Companies like BASF are already using this low-emission green hydrogen.

00:09:02: But how expensive that green hydrogen is, it's directly tied to the price and availability of clean energy.

00:09:10: And right now, only a tiny fraction of the world's hydrogen is produced this way.

00:09:15: So why do we bother?

00:09:17: If it's so hard to make hydrogen, why go to all the trouble?

00:09:22: Most hydrogen today is used for its chemical reactivity.

00:09:26: It's key to manufacturing many of the trappings of modern society.

00:09:31: More than that, hydrogen is critical for feeding the world.

00:09:36: That's because the majority of hydrogen used today is used to manufacture fertilizers.

00:09:41: So if we care about food supply, sustainable, equitable food supply, then we need to understand fertilizers and fertilizers come from hydrogen.

00:09:50: And if we can do anything to reduce the costs of producing hydrogen or to decarbonize the production of hydrogen by using, for instance, some portion of natural hydrogen, then that's a worthwhile enterprise.

00:10:03: Of course, Barbara wasn't thinking about the food supply when she first encountered hydrogen.

00:10:08: She wasn't thinking about hydrogen at all.

00:10:12: But Barbara would eventually go on to be one of the first people to realize something huge, that hydrogen gas was naturally forming underground in the middle of continents.

00:10:22: Or at least one of the first people to publish her results and have people start paying attention.

00:10:27: I'm very careful about, you know, saying, you know, who's the first person to ever find hydrogen.

00:10:32: Well, it might have been somebody before me, but it didn't get published in the same way.

00:10:36: Barbara is a geologist, or, as she prefers it, an earth scientist.

00:10:41: Earth Sciences asks questions that really, really matter to human beings.

00:10:45: Barbara didn't encounter Earth Sciences until university.

00:10:49: It just wasn't a subject that most high school students ever encounter, unlike chemistry, physics, and biology.

00:10:55: In the nineteen eighties, when she was in school, this was a time when incredible new discoveries about our home planet were popping up everywhere.

00:11:04: Like barely a generation before that, scientists had just figured out that great chunks of crust were moving around on the surface of the Earth, crawling towards and away from one another, sometimes crashing into one another.

00:11:19: And that this geologic violence can be the source of earthquakes and mountain formation.

00:11:24: That process is now known as plate tectonics.

00:11:29: This was also around the time when these huge smoking chimneys spewing gas and hot water were found on the ocean floor.

00:11:37: We now call those hydrothermal vents.

00:11:40: And just a few years before Barbara started university, scientists discovered that some of them were teeming with life.

00:11:47: Life where no one thought it could survive.

00:11:50: Life fueled not by the light and heat of the sun, but surviving in the dark depths, miles below the ocean's surface.

00:11:59: powered by the heat and chemistry of the Earth.

00:12:02: There was a sense that we were still exploring, still discovering new things about life as we didn't know it on our planet.

00:12:09: So it was between that and, of course, the rising, finally, focus on protecting the environment, on beginnings of our understanding of climate change.

00:12:22: It was a very exciting time.

00:12:24: Today, Barbara is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.

00:12:29: She's dedicated her career to studying the interplay between molecular hydrogen and water, between H-II and H-II-O, deep underground.

00:12:40: Back in the mid-nineteen eighties, at almost the same time drilling began in Mali on the other side of the world, Barbara was a graduate student working in Canada on what she thought was a more practical problem.

00:12:52: there was, it turns out, a phenomenon that was well-known to miners all over the world and that that is in some of the most ancient rocks on earth where they were mining for gold or diamonds or precious metals or nickel and cobalt and critical minerals.

00:13:09: And particularly in the oldest rocks on earth, billion-year-old rocks that formed the core of the continents, they found and were working with really salty water.

00:13:23: For them, it was an operational issue.

00:13:25: It causes corrosion problems.

00:13:26: The fact that this water is so salty in some places can be up to ten times the salinity of seawater.

00:13:32: And it obviously wasn't seawater.

00:13:34: So any miner who'd worked in those systems knew that these phenomenon existed, but it hadn't really been understood.

00:13:41: We were asked by one of the mines to come in to take samples of this deep salty water and these funny bubbling things that were happening with that salty water and tell them really what it was and how it got there and how much they might expect to get because that helped them figure out how to deal with the corrosion issues associated with it.

00:14:01: Barbara went into the mines looking to solve this really practical problem.

00:14:06: Why was this salty water bubbling around these rocks?

00:14:10: And how could miners deal with it?

00:14:13: She ended up discovering something that would change how people thought about the

00:14:17: planet.

00:14:18: Like so much science, there's really very happily blurred lines between what we consider to be fundamental and what we consider to be applied.

00:14:28: Those are actually not two things.

00:14:30: So we went up to help in a very applied way, but began to make some very fundamental discoveries.

00:14:34: Barbara had the first real inklings that she was onto something new while working on a project analyzing gas from mines across Canada and Finland.

00:14:44: In one mine in particular, the Coppercliff South Mine near Sudbury, Ontario, she seemed to be losing huge percentages of the gas that she collected, or at least whatever was there seemed to disappear when she tested it.

00:14:58: of things that you run because that's what you expect to come out of the ground.

00:15:01: But it became obvious very quickly that there was something else.

00:15:05: And I remember this vividly.

00:15:06: It's four thousand feet underground, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

00:15:10: The Coppercliff mines have rocks rich in all kinds of metals.

00:15:14: Copper, of course, but also platinum, gold, silver, nickel, palladium, cobalt, and iron.

00:15:22: Thanks to all the different minerals, the cracked and creviced walls of the mine can make for a beautiful sight.

00:15:28: But Barbara wasn't there for sightseeing.

00:15:31: It'd be lovely to think we had time to sort of, you know, look around and think about how poetic and beautiful it all is.

00:15:38: But frankly, mostly we're super focused in on getting the samples we need.

00:15:43: Through the din of miners, the scraping and banging of the mining equipment, and through the ear protection they wear to protect them from the noise, researchers collecting samples in mines try to listen for hints of what can't be seen.

00:15:59: Namely, water and gas.

00:16:02: If you get close up to something, you can sometimes hear the water flowing or hear the bubbling or hissing sound that we're looking for.

00:16:08: They smell the walls for hints of sulfur.

00:16:10: The smell of rotten eggs is a sulfur smell.

00:16:14: And there are many different sulfur smells.

00:16:16: Ours is different.

00:16:17: But nonetheless, we know what it is.

00:16:19: And keep in mind, they're surrounded on all sides by pitch black darkness.

00:16:24: The only light you've got is the light on your helmet.

00:16:27: So imagine yourself in your kitchen in the morning.

00:16:30: There's been a blackout, but it's so blacked out that no light is coming in from outside.

00:16:34: None.

00:16:36: And you've got light on your middle of your head.

00:16:39: and you're gonna try and make your coffee.

00:16:42: Well, you can do it, but you're doing it by moving your head around in a very focused way, right?

00:16:47: You gotta go over and find the spoon and then back over to the coffee and then look for the filter.

00:17:04: She hoped it might be.

00:17:11: And it was this moment where, when I did the analysis, tested to see if it was hydrogen.

00:17:16: It was more than thirty percent hydrogen.

00:17:19: And that was a big aha moment, because at that point in time, we hadn't understood that these systems would be so full of what's now become known as natural hydrogen.

00:17:32: Where did that hydrogen come from?

00:17:35: How did it form?

00:17:36: If it's so hard to split apart a water molecule, then why does it seem to happen so easily underground?

00:17:43: After Barbara reported her discovery in nineteen eighty-eight, it took the next few decades for scientists to begin to puzzle out that mystery.

00:17:53: During all that time, the well in Mali remained plugged and forgotten by almost everyone outside Boracabugu.

00:18:01: Well, one thing I should point out is this is an active area of research, but at the moment there are two major categories.

00:18:09: Depending on where you are, serpentinization, radiolysis, or a little bit of both.

00:18:14: And indeed, again, just to emphasize, there's all kinds of very interesting work going on by people all over the world right now, so that in a couple of years I may list three, four different other reactions.

00:18:25: Collectively, the reactions that generate H-II underground are called water rock reactions.

00:18:31: Water comes into contact with rock.

00:18:33: Something in the rock can split apart the strong hydrogen-oxygen bond in water, and hydrogen gas begins to bubble out.

00:18:43: The first reaction Barbara mentioned, serpentinization.

00:18:47: That's a mouthful, but you notice the root word that begins it, serpent, as in snake.

00:18:54: As the rocks react with water, they change.

00:18:57: patterns in them form that resemble those on a snake's skin.

00:19:02: What's left behind is a kind of mineral called serpentine.

00:19:06: If you've ever seen the beautiful carvings that come out of Southern Africa or the beautiful carvings that come out of artists, Inuit artists in Canada, sometimes it's referred to as soapstone.

00:19:18: Geologically they're called serpentine, and they have this beautiful green color.

00:19:22: So the parts of the Canadian shield where this rock is found, we are actually referred to as the greenstone belts because of this gorgeous green color.

00:19:30: It starts from something called olivine, another green rock.

00:19:33: And so when these olivine minerals interact with water, they get hydrated and they change.

00:19:39: And that's when they form this softer serpentine or soapstone type rock.

00:19:45: And the byproduct of that interaction between the olivine minerals and water is not only the production of serpentine but the production of hydrogen.

00:19:55: The rocks in Mali are also rich in iron-containing minerals that can react with water.

00:20:01: Oxygen forms even stronger bonds to iron than it does to hydrogen.

00:20:07: That's why objects made of iron rust.

00:20:09: That's oxidation.

00:20:11: The oxygen that was once in water is left behind, attached to the iron in the serpentine, and the hydrogen bubbles out.

00:20:20: In Canada, the minerals that undergo serpentinization are found in some of the oldest rocks, the ones that make up the very roots of the continents.

00:20:30: Still, only some of that rock is of the magnesium and iron-containing hydrogen-producing variety that Barbara and other earth scientists call ultramafic.

00:20:40: There are younger ultramafic rocks around the world, but it is a fact that the largest real estate of ultramafic rocks was all formed earlier than two point five billion years.

00:20:54: So when I referred to the famous greenstone belts of the Canadian Shield, these are all rocks that are older than two point five billion years, but they're vast.

00:21:04: I mean, I can, I can turn the keys and my ignition and drive for days and not leave it.

00:21:10: So it's really a very, very major part of the ancient rock system.

00:21:17: However, the rocks don't need to be old.

00:21:20: They don't even need to contain iron.

00:21:22: The second hydrogen-creating reaction Barbara mentioned, radiolysis, can occur in any type of rock.

00:21:29: I'm a big buff on the history of science, and sometimes things get discovered and then forgotten.

00:21:35: And there's a number of people who've raised this idea, but some of it actually goes right back to the work of Madame Churri at the turn of the century in her treatise on radioactivity.

00:21:45: You see there were experiments in which they put just plain old water in contact with radioactive minerals, radioactive rocks.

00:21:52: And they had discovered that the radioactivity naturally in the rocks was breaking apart water molecules and producing hydrogen.

00:22:00: All rocks contain radioactive elements.

00:22:04: It's just the nature of rocks.

00:22:06: Every rock has a certain amount of uranium, thorium, potassium.

00:22:10: And all of those three elements decay.

00:22:14: And when they decay, they release radioactivity, alpha, beta, and gamma particles.

00:22:19: And so we know all the way back to Marie Curie that if those alpha, beta, and gamma particles contact water, they can split it apart and produce hydrogen.

00:22:29: So that process is called radiolysis or radiolytic decomposition of water.

00:22:36: A graduate student at Princeton named Lee Hung Lin was working in a place where there were no ultramafic rocks to be found,

00:22:43: but

00:22:44: the rocks there still produced hydrogen.

00:22:47: It turned out this radiolysis was happening inside the Earth.

00:22:52: So what Lee Hung did was to show for the first time that this was not just some sort of curiosity.

00:22:57: that's happening in the laboratory, it's actually happening in the real world.

00:23:01: in these rocks and is producing enough hydrogen for the microbes to eat that.

00:23:06: Yes, you heard that correctly.

00:23:09: Microbes inside the Earth eating hydrogen.

00:23:13: Oh, I always say the same thing.

00:23:14: It's the jelly donut of the microbial world.

00:23:18: You know, if hydrogen's there, microbes are likely to flock to it just as if you put out a pizza table in front of a bunch of people at a party.

00:23:26: And so, I mean, who can't get interested in the thing that is one of the most sought after energy sources for the life form that far outnumbered us, which is the microbial biosphere?

00:23:39: Barbara's work in the nineteen eighties didn't set off a frenzy of people searching for hydrogen in mines.

00:23:45: They weren't interested in hydrogen for making chemicals or as an energy source.

00:23:51: These scientists were interested in what hydrogen could tell us about the limits of life itself.

00:23:57: When I was in high school, we still thought life was just a green film on the surface of our blue dot because.

00:24:05: Of course, we're thinking about photosynthesis as being essential to all life.

00:24:09: The hydrothermal vents and the work that's been done since then in the oceans and the marine lithosphere has shown that there is also a deep subsurface biosphere in the oceans.

00:24:19: Remember, the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean were discovered just before Barbara started college.

00:24:25: They showed that life can also get its energy from the Earth.

00:24:29: Microbiology gets its energy from the surface, of course from photosynthesis, we're all used to that idea.

00:24:37: But one of the things that the discoveries at the hydrothermal vents showed us is there's actual ecosystems at which that chemo-synthesis rather than photosynthesis is the foundation of the energy cycle and the sustaining of life.

00:24:52: And so there became this real interest in these what we call water rock reactions that produce hydrogen.

00:24:58: In twenty

00:24:58: fourteen, Barbara, along with several colleagues around the world, published a study that showed that rocks deep beneath the ground on all the continents could produce as much hydrogen as rocks on the ocean floor.

00:25:12: This meant they could also harbor life.

00:25:15: You know, the continents are not sterile if you go down a little bit.

00:25:18: In fact, they're more like Swiss cheese.

00:25:21: There are spaces and water and energy sustaining chemistry like hydrogen-producing reactions.

00:25:31: So our continents, too, are habitable, even to depths of three, four, maybe five kilometers.

00:25:37: And so it changed how we think about the habitability of Earth and where we can find life.

00:25:46: We're still at the stage where we're just finding out what's down there.

00:25:50: new species are being found, new genuses are being found.

00:25:54: I mean, to this point, there's no second origin of life.

00:25:57: Everything is still DNA-based.

00:25:59: Everything on the planet that we found is clearly all interrelated.

00:26:02: But nonetheless, there are novelties.

00:26:04: There are differences.

00:26:05: And so microbiologists are very interested and continue to explore this massive amount of subsurface real estate that we now understand partly due to hydrogen studies, and we now understand is habitable.

00:26:19: So the question is not, does the Earth produce a lot of hydrogen?

00:26:22: So we know that the ocean form produces hydrogen, we know that the continents produce hydrogen, but no one's arguing that every bit of that hydrogen is available.

00:26:31: It should, we as humans, decide we want to start competing with the microbes for it.

00:26:36: Substance.

00:26:39: My interest in hydrogen definitely came from the fact that it's kind of magic, basically.

00:26:44: You have a molecule that comes out from a reaction where a mineral hydrates.

00:26:49: by taking in water and produce hydrogen.

00:26:51: And this hydrogen reacts very rapidly with this environment.

00:26:56: It can reduce rocks.

00:26:57: It can be consumed by microbes.

00:26:59: It can react with CO₂ and produce organic molecules.

00:27:02: So that was something that sounded amazing to me, and I wanted to understand that a bit more.

00:27:07: If Barbara Sherwood Lawler represents the first generation of scientists who focused on hydrogen gas, Olivier Sissman represents the next generation of researchers who emerged to carry the field further.

00:27:20: So actually, I encountered Professor Chaboulolat before I encountered her work because I was still a student in Paris.

00:27:26: And she came to visit and gave a seminar.

00:27:29: And she talked about the formation of hydrocarbons, the consumption of hydrogen, the first bricks of life.

00:27:36: And she made a very, very complete and extraordinary lecture that basically stayed with me to this day.

00:27:43: Today, Olivier works as a researcher for IFPEN, a French Energy Research Institute, and as a lecturer in geophysics.

00:27:51: And for the past ten years, I've been working on native hydrogen emissions, collecting rock and gas samples around the globe whenever the opportunity arose, and mentoring students on the subject.

00:28:03: Olivier calls this stuff native hydrogen, Barbara natural hydrogen.

00:28:08: I mean, what else is it called?

00:28:10: Geologic hydrogen?

00:28:12: Geogenic hydrogen, there used to be white hydrogen, but there's really no difference in all those names.

00:28:18: Okay, so whatever you want to call it, the key is the Earth makes hydrogen, and Olivier, like Barbara, studies that process.

00:28:27: While Barbara's journey into science started underground, Olivier's dreams began among the stars.

00:28:34: I became a geoscientist firstly because I was always interested in the formation of planets.

00:28:40: And not just Earth, I mean the solar system, distant planets.

00:28:44: And then I realized there was a lot to understand about what was going on on planet Earth, how life had appeared.

00:28:51: And so that drove me to study the appearance of life on Earth.

00:28:55: And my first internship, when I started doing my undergrad, was on the first traces of life in Archean rocks.

00:29:03: Archean rocks are very, very old rocks, over two point five billion years old.

00:29:08: Those are the same age as the rocks Barbara mentioned that host ultramafic rocks the rocks that make up most of the continents.

00:29:16: and many of these ancient rocks formed when life on earth was young.

00:29:21: Still though it was the idea of life elsewhere that sparked Olivier's interest.

00:29:25: He did eventually have to come down to earth not because it had swear the rocks are but because of more everyday human concerns.

00:29:34: I was very much interested in energy and Studying those processes, I found out that they were very important because those processes that make the first risk of life, those first molecules, they're the same ones that consume the hydrogen.

00:29:48: So if you want to understand whether or not you can get an accumulation, you have to understand the chemical reactions that you're going to make the hydrogen go away.

00:29:56: After he finished his PhD, he boarded a massive research ship designed to drill into the ocean floor almost six miles below the waves.

00:30:06: Scientists on that ship and its predecessors helped redefine what we know about the Earth's geology, from advancing plate tectonics to studying deep sea life.

00:30:24: And I was going up the stairs.

00:30:36: I was feeling like this is exactly what the great geoscientists of the past fifty years have done climbing up those stairs.

00:30:44: We got one nice flip and the ship stalled off into the big blue.

00:30:49: And the first thing that happened, which I had not expected because I'm used to doing sailing.

00:30:55: I got seasick.

00:30:56: I rushed myself to the side of the boat.

00:31:00: There

00:31:00: must have been four or

00:31:00: five of us.

00:31:02: And that lasted for the first twenty-four hours.

00:31:04: I did not take in anything that was being told to us.

00:31:09: I was completely sick.

00:31:10: And then, after twenty-four hours, I got us accustomed to the movement of the boat.

00:31:14: And the real fun started.

00:31:16: We navigated for about three days non-stop to get to the first drilling sites.

00:31:22: And that was on subcontinent mud volcanoes, the only active mud volcanoes on the planet, picking out certainty.

00:31:32: The boat wasn't staying in the Atlantic.

00:31:34: but instead headed around Africa towards the Pacific.

00:31:38: Those serpentine mud volcanoes border the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean.

00:31:46: While volcanoes that belch mud, water, and gases exist all over the world, the ones near the Mariana Trench are special.

00:31:54: They're the only ones in the world producing serpentine, that green mineral left behind when rocks generate hydrogen from water.

00:32:02: And of course, there are lots of scientists on board who are microbiologists.

00:32:06: They were interested into actually living organisms.

00:32:09: Others were just interested in hard rocks.

00:32:11: And I was interested into maybe finding gas, such as hydrogen.

00:32:16: And there was nothing of interest for me on the first week.

00:32:18: But the second week, we arrived on another mad volcano.

00:32:21: And then as we started drilling one of the staff said, this is weird.

00:32:25: There's a lot of pressure coming back up.

00:32:27: And so when the cores come back up, ten meters for ten meters, I just saw the cores just splitting apart on deck and gas coming out.

00:32:36: And so very quickly, I sampled it, I analyzed it, and it was hydrogen.

00:32:40: And I thought, this is the great discovery.

00:32:42: What I had not accounted for is that I was the only one very interested in the hydrogen.

00:32:47: And all the microbiologists who were there, they analyzed the water and said, those conditions are way too extreme for us to find anything interesting.

00:32:54: We should

00:32:54: move.

00:32:55: I

00:32:55: looked

00:32:56: up at the mission chief and said, no, we can't move.

00:32:58: We have exactly what I've been searching for for the past three to four years.

00:33:03: And he said, so we managed to stay on site and continue accumulating rocks, gas, and data.

00:33:12: From that expedition and others that followed, Olivier was able to learn more about the chemistry of these rocks at the bottom of the Atlantic.

00:33:21: The fact that hydrogen is reacting to make all those molecules, those first bricks of life, it's still happening right now, either because it's reacting with other inorganic molecules, just CO₂, or because it's being consumed by microbes.

00:33:35: And so that's key into understanding whether or not we can have viable reservoirs of hydrogen, viable accumulations over time, because hydrogen is consumed very, very rapidly in the subsurface, and we need to understand in which conditions it can actually survive long enough to create a viable economic accumulation.

00:33:57: The rediscovery of natural hydrogen in Mali showed that natural hydrogen might be a resource worth seeking.

00:34:04: In its wake, a new industry has emerged.

00:34:07: Over the past five years, people have started to take its potential more seriously.

00:34:12: Olivier is on the front lines.

00:34:14: Since two years ago, I've become a co-leader of the International Energy Agency technical collaboration program on native hydrogen.

00:34:24: And so I work with colleagues from all around the world to bring new data and recommendations to the energy industry and the government that are interested in this potential new source of energy.

00:34:34: All over the world, there are rocks emitting hydrogen that might be ripe for exploration, including Kansas in the United States.

00:34:43: on what we call the mid-continental rift, which are volcanic intrusions that intruded into the continental crust about a billion years ago.

00:34:52: And now that if you go up the continental rift, so Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Ontario, where Professor Shaul Lola is also working, we have found hydrogen emissions.

00:35:05: And all across Australia too.

00:35:07: In the nineteen thirties, People actually published in Australia, when they were searching for hydrocarbons, that they had plounds drilling into a world about fifty-two percent hydrogen being emitted

00:35:19: along

00:35:19: with methane.

00:35:21: But no one really paid attention.

00:35:23: And it was not only in the early twenty-twenties that this work was really discovered

00:35:28: in Europe.

00:35:29: In France, we do see hydrogen coming up in the area of the prairie and mountain, and companies are exploring right now to try to estimate the amount of hydrogen that is either stored underground or that is being constantly generated and regenerated each year.

00:35:46: And across Eurasia.

00:35:48: There's been hydrogen discovered in Russia and you need to really know about until the early twentieth, because even though it's been known for decades in Russia, scientists were publishing in Russian.

00:36:01: So in the international community, what's not aware of it?

00:36:05: We know there are hydrogen emissions near iron mines in Africa, whether it's South Africa or Namibia.

00:36:12: We also know that, and there's one country that has been leading research in South America.

00:36:20: Columbia has invested a lot in hydrogen exploration.

00:36:25: We're basically at the beginning of the natural hydrogen industry.

00:36:29: Very much like we were at the beginning of the hydrocarbon industry over A hundred years ago, we know it's being generated.

00:36:37: We don't exactly know how.

00:36:38: We don't know exactly at which scale it's being produced, especially.

00:36:45: As exploration progresses, our knowledge will expand as well, and so hopefully we will get those answers in the next few years.

00:36:53: It's not yet clear what the answers to those questions will mean for the potential of hydrogen that seeps from the ground.

00:36:59: There

00:37:00: are still a host of unknowns and challenges that threaten to derail the entire project.

00:37:07: Those pesky microbes are one of the biggest challenges.

00:37:11: One of the problems when dealing with geologic hydrogen is that hydrogen is one of the main source of food for the microbial communities in the subsurface.

00:37:20: Hydrogen can be consumed in about hours, days, weeks.

00:37:25: And so there's not renewable flux of hydrogen coming back.

00:37:29: into the reservoir to replenish it, then you're not going to end up with an accumulation.

00:37:35: Even if all of that can be overcome, Olivier still thinks there will be a need for more ways to make hydrogen, like using electrolysis to make green hydrogen.

00:37:45: I think that as great a geological hydrogen could be, we will probably need to resort to electrolysis because being able to produce your energy anywhere at any given time.

00:37:59: and predict how much energy you're going to produce is important.

00:38:03: And being able to make sure that people will get energy no matter what is something that is important.

00:38:13: I mean, that's what the energy mix is about, finding the right process to produce energy in the right place at the right time.

00:38:20: So I believe in both, basically.

00:38:24: I mean, from an application point of view, it's not really relevant where it comes from.

00:38:29: As Barbara mentioned in the beginning, we already need hydrogen to power modern society.

00:38:35: It's one of the most important chemical feedstocks for companies like BASF.

00:38:40: My name is Volker Irrit.

00:38:41: I work as the production manager at the synthesis plant.

00:38:46: At BASF, Volker works in a synthesis plant that produces hydrogen.

00:38:51: Hydrogen finds its way into a huge number of the compounds BASF produces.

00:38:56: That includes the ammonia used to make fertilizer.

00:39:00: But ammonia is just the beginning.

00:39:02: It can be found everywhere.

00:39:04: I mean, if you look at anything organic, it has some hydrogen.

00:39:10: So it's probably as old as chemistry itself.

00:39:15: And so it's very fundamental.

00:39:19: It has to be there to get other things done.

00:39:23: You might equate the term organic with something natural or alive.

00:39:27: But when a chemical engineer like Fulker uses organic, he's referring to organic chemistry, also known as the chemistry of carbon.

00:39:37: Of course, organic chemistry started out as the study of chemical compounds that come from living things.

00:39:44: Those compounds, it turns out, are also made of carbon.

00:39:48: Chemists eventually figured out how to transform one carbon-based compound into another.

00:39:54: That chemistry births everything from medicines to plastics to new materials for everything from computer circuit boards and textiles to wind turbines and spaceships.

00:40:05: All of them contain carbon.

00:40:07: And where we find carbon, we almost always find hydrogen.

00:40:12: To make new compounds, we need a source of hydrogen.

00:40:16: To make new compounds sustainably, we need a source of hydrogen that doesn't also produce CO₂.

00:40:22: There are a lot of conventional ways to produce it, which come along with emissions.

00:40:27: Those are well known at high capacities and high at a large scale.

00:40:32: So those things, they can be used very easily and supply a large amount.

00:40:37: And to get away from that emissions, you want to use a different process.

00:40:44: For BASF, where Fulker works, that process is water electrolysis.

00:40:50: the water-splitting reaction.

00:40:52: It comes with pretty much no emission.

00:40:55: You use water as a feed, and then some electricity, which is produced

00:41:02: with

00:41:03: wind or solar, and then that's pretty much it.

00:41:08: In lubivix often, a giant electrolyzer built in collaboration with Siemens Energy is now integrated into chemical production.

00:41:16: It's probably the size of a soccer field.

00:41:20: And there's one larger building which has the gas generation and a smaller building which then has the gas refinement in it.

00:41:29: And our capacity is to produce one ton of hydrogen per hour.

00:41:34: So using fifty megawatts of electricity.

00:41:38: Or fifty-four megawatts, to be exact.

00:41:41: One ton per hour translates into eight thousand tons of hydrogen per year.

00:41:47: Since March, that hydrogen is supplied DASF plants with a low emission source of hydrogen for its chemistry and provide the surrounding area with access to hydrogen for transportation fuel.

00:42:00: Here in Ludwigshafen, we supply around about seventy plants that consume the hydrogen we produce.

00:42:10: So I think that alone tells how relevant it is.

00:42:16: We also have an outlet to the region where they now start to supply some mobility projects and also some other demands.

00:42:27: So it's pretty much everywhere already.

00:42:31: And I think that demand

00:42:34: will

00:42:35: develop and increase.

00:42:37: While natural hydrogen has potential to help meet that increasing demand, Water electrolysis is currently the only way to produce hydrogen with low carbon emissions.

00:42:48: As Olivia Sissman pointed out, even if natural hydrogen works out, electrolysis will still have many advantages.

00:42:57: Hydrogen can be produced where it's needed, when it's needed.

00:43:01: And having more ways to get hydrogen will only help bring the price of hydrogen down so that each source can be tailored to its use.

00:43:11: Hydrogen in Mali can power villages.

00:43:14: Hydrogen found near an iron mine might allow for nearby production of low-carbon steel.

00:43:20: Green hydrogen in places like Ludwigshafen can continue to be an integral part of the chemistries that power modern society and the local transportation network.

00:43:30: And sometimes people say to me, oh, this use of hydrogen is new.

00:43:33: Well, no, some of these things they're suggesting is new.

00:43:37: But some of it is a giant hydrogen economy that we've been relying on for a long time.

00:43:43: Hydrogen is at the heart of the human endeavor.

00:43:47: It's in our factories and beneath our feet.

00:43:50: It connects us to the stars and to life in the farthest reaches of our planet.

00:43:56: Hydrogen is the element that makes up Molecular clouds in the galaxy that you see from far away with your telescope.

00:44:04: It's the gas that's been emitted at the mid-ocean ridges at the bottom of the ocean that allows big life communities to develop.

00:44:12: It's the gas that gets produced and becomes an energy source when you dissociate the water molecule.

00:44:18: It's the lightest element.

00:44:20: It's the most abundant element.

00:44:22: It's everywhere, basically, even though you don't see it.

00:44:25: The story of hydrogen shows how research into life's origins can lead to innovations that carry us into a sustainable future.

00:44:35: A future that uses nature's most simple gifts to protect everything we've built so far.

00:44:41: So we can go

00:44:42: on building,

00:44:43: creating, and living in a world in balance.

00:44:46: There's a lot to learn, there's a lot to do still about hydrogen.

00:44:49: This is just the beginning.

00:44:53: Next up on Substance, plastic.

00:44:56: An extraordinary material that has changed life as we know it.

00:45:01: But can we find a way to keep reaping those benefits while reducing the waste that's come along with them?

00:45:08: Join us on our next episode to answer that and more.

00:45:13: This has been Substance.

00:45:15: Stories about the stuff that shapes our world.

00:45:19: Substance is a podcast by BASF produced by a territory agency in collaboration with Wake Word and me, Joe Hansen.

00:45:29: Research and scripting by Daniel Sedbrook, Claudia Doyle, Hardy Röder, and Joe Hansen.