Regular readers will be aware that one of the wildest of energy wild cards is so-called “White” Hydrogen – hydrogen that is naturally produced in the earth’s crust, and occasionally finds its way to the surface, or collects in reservoirs at accessible depths.
Deutshe Welle has a nice primer above on what we know now.
Like oil and gas, white hydrogen is naturally occurring. Generated by continuous geochemical reactions in hard rock, white hydrogen’s characteristics differ from hydrocarbon molecules in that they are small and light and more likely to escape cap rocks.
More research is still required, with practical field experience and data collection needed to establish the key components of a hydrogen play.
The world needs low-carbon hydrogen to decarbonize. Global low-carbon hydrogen demand is forecast to reach almost 200 Mtpa (million tonnes per annum) by 2050, up from 1 Mtpa today in WoodMac’s base case, with green hydrogen supply meeting the bulk of this future demand.
Green hydrogen’s production costs, though, remain stubbornly high, with a range as wide as US$6/kg to US$12/kg. This is driven by green hydrogen’s need for high availability of renewable power for electrolysis. It will also depend for years on substantial subsidies to work towards a commercial threshold in the range of US$3/kg.
White hydrogen offers a much cheaper alternative resource. Without the need for inefficient energy conversion or manufacturing processes, white hydrogen produced at scale from reservoirs sited close to end-user markets could be delivered well below US$1/kg. The co-existence of helium may also offer a valuable commercial lever for white hydrogen exploitation.
White hydrogen is not an energy transition panacea. Currently, WoodMac estimates that alternative forms of low-carbon hydrogen production — including methane pyrolysis, gasification and the extraction of naturally occurring white hydrogen — combined will form only a small portion of future supply.
This outlook may change in the coming decade if successful pilot projects prove technical and commercial feasibility and supportive policy frameworks are introduced. Based on prospective resource volumes, white hydrogen production could reach 17 Mtpa by 2050. Capturing similar levels of subsidy support to green hydrogen would also significantly boost infrastructure, displacing some higher-cost manufactured hydrogen production.
Not sure why this keeps popping up. The chemical industry currently produces hydrogen by cracking fossil fuels which is way more efficient than other methods (like electrolysis).
You are joking right.
In terms of energy used, it may very well be much more efficient to pull H2 out of hydrocarbons than out of water. If the input energy is low cost (e.g., what might have been curtailed anyway), that efficiency might be less of a concern. (And the O2 produced might be profitable “waste” product, too.)
Back in the 1970s/1980s, otherwise underused computing power—typically waiting for human input—led to more applications which could be run as “background” tasks, or run overnight when demand was otherwise low. I think we’ll develop more electric power usage applications that can take advantage of erratic amounts of [near-]free electricity, whether at the power plant scale down to rooftop solar scale.
Pulling H2 out of hydrocarbons can certainly be more efficient. As in saves/makes more money. Too bad, stop putting fossil fuels into the atmosphere even when it costs. Noble stance I know.
Absolutely love the idea of using erratic electric oversupply to run electrolysis plants.
Then the State of South Australia just cancelled a green hydrogen plant. Over several years, much tax money spent on ‘planning’ and (huge) payouts to no longer required executives. This state generates massive excess of renewables, especially solar, which ‘often’ cannot even be exported even at negative cost. Damn frustrating!
The building of storage and transmission and the creation of demand response strategies simply needs to catch up. Wind needs to catch up in some places.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/05/big-news-3-free-hours-of-power/amp/
J4Zed. Was unaware of the 3hour free proposal. Peak usage time is also cheapest time. Rates are contracted for consumers, not based on supply cost. Unlike Texas.
State of South Oz has the Hornsdale battery (the one that Elon said would be free if built late. Biggest in southern hemisphere then and much bigger now.) and a transmission connector to neighbouring state with 4 times the population. Still has periods when the power can’t be used and others when imports are needed. Having wasted unused generation is aggravating but not that much of a problem. Having insufficient generation is.
Aside. Son Mk1 has just installed 13 1/4 KW capacity solar with a 32 KWH battery. Drool. That is a shed load and he can’t use it all. Will be watching if he ever needs grid input.
bjstwm,
Well, yeah, but oversupply is almost the same as undersupply. Unused electricity raises the price per MW, makes it harder to get more built. The free stuff will likely lead to a (metaphorical) explosion of storage both homey and businessy. That could stimulate even more solar, EVs, electrification (a la Ozian Saul Griffith) etc. etc. til Oz is 100% renewable.
Besides Canada and Saudi Arabia, it’s probably technically the easiest country in the world to get to 100%. Tiny populations, huge land areas, phenomenal RE potential.
Even better connections are needed to further E and W places, if necessary via undersea cable. And more storage of course. And offshore wind, which might add another 2 times zones to Oz’s generation, complement the solar, and better utilize the storage. (2x the ramp ups and downs/day.) And geothermal, of which Oz haz lotza.
And Mk 1, nice.
Michael Liebreich, long-time renewables financer, has been waging war against hydrogen hypesters for years. His latest debate on his ‘Cleaning Up’ podcast features Erik Rakhou, hydrogen enthusiast and author. Michael claims that even for uses where there is no substitute for hydrogen, like fertiliser production (as opposed to using it, or ammonia derived from it, as a fuel) it may be cheaper to use hydrogen derived from fossil fuels and pay a surcharge to bury an equivalent amount of CO2. Even if mined hydrogen is cheaper than from electrolysis, it will still have all the other disadvantages of this pesky molecule. These are so significant that even rocket makers, for whom weight is crucial, and who could benefit from a fuel 3x lighter than methane, are giving up on it. There could be edge cases where an easy source could be used in situ, but it’s not going to swing the dial on emissions. https://www.cleaningup.live/why-therell-never-be-a-hydrogen-economy-ep232-erik-rakhou/
There’s a substitute for everything. We must abandon the use of chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen, and substitute organic permaculture methods including edible forest gardens. Yields will hold steady at least, and are almost certain to go up over time.
Sri Lanka banned non-organic fertilisers in 2021. Crop output, especially of vegetables but also the tea industry, collapsed. So did the economy, and the government – the president fled the country while mobs wrecked his residence. We can use legumes that fix their own nitrogen, and maybe could even breed other crops to do it (it’s actually the bacteria hosted by their root nodules that do the work), but meantime, banning nitrogen fertilisers would have the same effect as banning diesel – mass starvation.
Historically, some sort of gradual restriction (a tax, rationing) can push a transition more effectively than a step-function ban could. For one thing, you can “tune” the restriction based on how fast the alternatives come into play. My takeaway form the Sri Lanka situation is that sharp transitions don’t work as policy. (Ideally, subsidies should be bled off on a known schedule.)
We’re pissing away a source of nitrogen every day. Extracting ammonia from city sewage or livestock lagoons could be an alternative (of course, ammonia is a chemical, and chemicals are bad 🙄).
Fine – one more potential source to keep an eye on. Meanwhile we already have cheap, safe and efficient clean technologies exploiting wind and solar. Indeed they are about to get a whole lot more efficient with new-generation PV panels verging on 40% energy conversion and sodium-based, utility-scale super-batteries capable of replacing old-fashioned nuclear plants. But we need to expand their usage very quickly, and massively in order to slow then halt the mad rush towards fatal tipping points.
Yes, nuclear fusion will probably become reality one day – but we don’t know when. So we have to use what we have. It’s all-important and urgent. For Chrissake, guys! We can’t afford to wait for “one day”. When are the politicians going to get that into their damn heads?
While I’m at it (never waste a good rant!), I’ve noticed a particularly worrying tendency. The debate over CO2 emissions, such as it is, is always in terms of % reductions per country. But that misses the point. The number we have to concentrate on is the level of atmospheric CO2. That’s the killer. In his 2014 paper on Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms, Hansen pointed out a blip on the graph some 14,000 years ago when atmospheric CO2 last hit 400 ppm. That caused sea level to rise by 100m. Sure, it took 400 years to do so – but that’s still 25m per year. Today atmospheric CO2 is at or approaching 430 ppm and no one seems to give a damn!
Meltwater Pulse 1A was 16 to 25 metres – about a metre every twenty years. That was mainly from the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet over North America, comparable to today’s Antarctic ice cap. That’s unlikely to all go in a hurry, but West Antarctica and Greenland are more vulnerable – especially the massive glaciers in West Antarctica whose bases are well below sea level. They would give 3 to 5 metres SLR.
Yes, we can do insane things stupidly or we can do wise things wisely. You prefer the former. I prefer the latter.
And nobody, ass, said anything about banning anything instantly, the same argument used by insane people strawpersoning the obvious and only sane action with fossil fuels. It always comes down to this with you and all nuclear and phossil phanatics—lying and manipulating, one way or another.
After more than 50 years of it, I’m so fucking tired of it and furious about its effects that I begin to understand the guillotine. I remain absolutely dedicated to peaceful action, but many aren’t, and they’re at least as furious as I am.
Take the truth and reconciliation plea—if it ever comes up for such a mean-spirited petty pebble in our shoe; meanwhile, you should stop shitting on every discussion with ridiculous technological fantasies that only delay real solutions.
“Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained”
Kenny Torrella, Vox, July 15, 2022 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-lanka-organic-fertilizer-pesticide-agriculture-farming
“There’s no singular cause for the crisis, which had been building for years due to political corruption and right wing authoritarian politics that weakened democracy.”
Unfortunately, the article buys the lie that synthetic fertilizers necessarily increase yields, and it vastly and misleadingly simplifies the chemical/organic reality in other ways as well. They increase yields of some crops, but also dramatically worsen climate catastrophe (more than a quarter of global emissions come from agriculture, most from meat production) and intelligent organic methods increase the yields of many crops while dramatically reducing the damage done to agricultural lands, adjacent and downstream lands, and both freshwaterways and seas—vastly reducing ocean dead zones, for instance.
Organic permaculture methods can be even more effective. Three Sisters horticulture, more complex milpas and chinampas and other methods and their culmination in combinations of methods, like Edible Forest Gardens (see the exhaustive and mind-blowing 2-volume work of that name by Jacke and Toensmeier) can significantly outperform chemical-industrial agriculture in total yield. Of course (duh!) such results depend on rebuilding soil, the education and experience of farmers, and increasing the labor pool.
Attacks on organics and permaculture (if the terms offend you, use “agroecology” or “agrovoltaics” and ignore the fact that the agroest agriculture is chemical-industrial) rely on Sri Lanka the way nook boosters rely on France; neither argument has any merit against permaculture or renewables but they’re the only remotely relevant-seeming examples the far right has. (Sri Lankan tea yields dropped 18%, as the article points out—not good at all, but hardly a “collapse”. Yet another of the multiple lies ONeill tries to foist on us to attack a necessary, crucial, and vastly superior solution to the larger ecological crisis.
Mechanization and chemicalization of agriculture has destroyed rural communities; permaculture could restore them by requiring more labor. Yes, that would make (some) food more expensive.
The bread-and-circus cheapness of (invariably unhealthy) food is dependent on government subsidies to big corporations and corporate farms that are a result of lobbying, but again, we can do insane things stupidly or we can do wise and necessary things intelligently.
The problem with food costing more is that billions of people have been impoverished by psychopathic capitalist governments fused to huge corporations; people by the hundreds of millions are brought to the edge of starvation and homelessness by policies that increase the wealth and power of mbillionaires. For civilization and millions of species to survive, that system must be ended. The chemical, technological, social, and political changes related to wise use of permaculture can help with that, which is part of the reason oligarchies and fascists fear and hate it. (It also collaborates with nature rather than try to dominate, kill, and destroy, as chemical industrial ag does.)
“White hydrogen is not an energy transition panacea.”
Fortunately, no single green energy source needs to be.
A “most of the above” approach* can supply our energy needs. Industry’s long familiarity with fossil fuel gives it inertia that’s hard to displace: Executives—especially old ones—take it for granted. Before pipelines and coal trains, it was usually cheaper to build where the energy supply was: water mills by streams, windmills on hills.
Efficient PV solar and modern wind give local areas a new resource, and a lot of people are sick of paying a volatile price for use-once fuel.
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*Leaving out fossil fuel, of course.