This story originally appeared on WIRED Italy and was translated from Italian.
In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element is all the rage: hydrogen. “If you burn it, you just produce water, with no impact on the environment,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, a professor at the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna in Italy. Hydrogen advocates believe it could be the solution to cleaning up everything from transportation to agriculture to massive industry.
But its green credentials are only valid if it can be produced without carbon dioxide emissions. And that’s why some are very excited about geological or “golden” hydrogen, the name given to the element when it forms naturally underground. This can happen through a chemical reaction between water and iron-rich rocks, or through radiolysis, the splitting of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen by radiation.
“Compared to other types of hydrogen, its production does not require energy,” says Vitale Brovarone. That’s why he predicts a hydrogen gold rush is on the horizon. The problem is that we know very little about the element when it forms naturally underground, so the research world is racing to learn more before it starts hastily and blindly mining it. “From an industrial perspective, it simply has to be extracted,” says Vitale Brovarone. “Instead, you first have to understand how easy it can be done and with what consequences.”
Vitale Brovarone and his colleagues believed that Greenland could aid answer these questions, so they organized a special mission to the Arctic territory to gather more information as part of a five-year program ERC CoG DeepSeep programme financed by the European Union.
Alongside Vitale Brovarone were four scientists from the University of Bologna, one from the Institute of Geoscience and Georesources at the Italian National Research Centre and one from the University of Copenhagen. They spent 10 days in this land of almost 2 billion-year-old rocks, preparing their mission for six months with the aid of maps and satellite data. Despite their precise planning, they had to be elastic. Due to “unforeseen icebergs”, the scientists had to change the area, and at one point a bear spotted nearby forced them to seek shelter in the school. But in the end, the journey was worth it: it provided them with samples affluent in H2 to learn.
Around the world, hydrogen from gold is turning up where you wouldn’t expect it, raising questions about the dynamics of the element’s accumulation in reservoirs and its role in subsurface ecosystems. There are already some concerns: if the hydrogen reacts with geological substrates or is processed by certain microorganisms, geological hydrogen could produce methane or hydrogen sulphide. Vitale Brovarone uses these two examples to explain why diving headfirst into extracting hydrogen from gold risks creating up-to-date problems rather than solving existing ones, and why more information is needed.
Since we do not know exactly what regulates the presence of H2 rocks for millions or billions of years, it is better to wait before breaking them down, extracting the element, says Vitale Brovarone. The same goes for storing artificially produced hydrogen in underground reserveshe says. The idea that this could be done has already excited the industry, prompting it to operate on a time frame that is at odds with what the research world needs to understand how the gas behaves.
“We are travelling on different lines and at different speeds,” he says. “We need to understand how hydrogen behaves in nature, because many dynamic issues only become apparent after years. Industry wants quick and decisive answers; science needs time, and also funding, which in the case of hydrogen is still in short supply.” Unlike France, Australia and the United States, which have their eyes on the golden hydrogen, Italy has not yet invested in collecting it, preferring instead to focus on hydrogen production. But thanks in part to the University of Bologna’s expedition, Italy is becoming one of the few countries in the world eager to learn more about it.