Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39671493.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.ado0955 and PMC identifier 11641016.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Geologic hydrogen could be a low-carbon primary energy resource; however, the magnitude of Earth's subsurface endowment has not yet been assessed. Knowledge of the occurrence and behavior of natural hydrogen on Earth has been combined with information from geologic analogs to construct a mass balance model to predict the resource potential. Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [10<sup>3</sup> to 10<sup>10</sup> million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10<sup>6</sup> Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction (e.g., 1 × 10<sup>5</sup> Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years. This amount of hydrogen contains more energy (~1.4 × 10<sup>16</sup> MJ) than all proven natural gas reserves on Earth (~8.4 × 10<sup>15</sup> MJ). Study results demonstrate that further research into understanding the potential for geologic hydrogen resources is merited.