Happy Hydrogen Days!
Three fun news stories on the number one element. You can run but you can't Hyd-rogen.
Hydrogen, the first element in the periodic table, is a special thing.
Composed of one proton and one electron, it’s the most abundant element in the universe. It makes up the greater part of most stars, about 10 percent of the human body by mass, and is two parts of the supergroup1 H2O, otherwise known as water.
The full solution of the Hydrogen problem is perhaps the major triumph of Quantum Mechanics, the most successful scientific theory yet developed.
But we’re not here today to talk about physics, though I will include a picture of the probability distributions of the hydrogen atom below for fun. (The brightness indicates the probability of the electron being at a given distance from the center of the atom, the triplet of numbers (n,l,m) indicates the “state” the atom is in.)
Today I want to talk about three fun recent stories involving Hydrogen2- two involving its potential as a source of clean energy, and one involving its restorative health properties. Hydrogen has a lot of potential as a clean source of energy because, when burned, it produces heat and water as the only byproducts. And as a fountain of youth? We’ll have to see.
1. Hydrogen Tax Credit Fight
First up— tax talk. The folks over at the Treasury Department are hard at work deciding on the details around a tax credit for hydrogen energy production passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. In early December, leaked details of a draft version of the tax credit poured (hydrogen?) fuel on an already heated debate around its implementation.
The crux of the debate surrounds how strict to make the Hydrogen tax credit. The details get fairly technical fairly quickly, but it is essentially a fight about what counts as “clean” hydrogen production for the purposes of the tax credit.
The stakes are high for interested players, as the decision could effect “billions of dollars of investments” according to Reuters.
Hydrogen, when burned, produces heat and water. It has no associated CO2 emissions. This is why it is an attractive clean fuel.
However, though naturally abundant, hydrogen rarely occurs on its own. It is often bonded to other molecules (oxygen, in the case of water). Separating the hydrogen requires energy. The source of this energy determines how “clean” getting energy from hydrogen really is. There are a number of ways to produce hydrogen.
The cheapest and most efficient, natural gas reforming, involves mixing natural gas and hot steam and then separating out the hydrogen gas. This is obviously not “clean” though, as it requires natural gas. Hydrogen produced with natural gas or methane is sometimes called “gray” hydrogen, as opposed to “green” or renewably produced hydrogen.
Another way to produce hydrogen gas is to use electricity to separate the H2 from the O in water. This process is called electrolysis, and the devices that do the separating are called electrolyzers.
Now, if the electricity used to do the separating comes from renewable sources like solar and wind energy, then electrolysis is a way to produce clean or “green” hydrogen.
People around the world people are racing to make electrolysis cheaper and more efficient. This would enable cheaper production of larger volumes of clean hydrogen.
A tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, called the 45V Hydrogen Production Tax Credit aims to do just that. It will give money to companies who produce “clean” hydrogen, $3 per kilogram of hydrogen which satisfies their definition of “clean”.
The fight is over how “clean” is calculated. Because if the electricity you use to separate the hydrogen was generated from fossil fuel sources, the total emissions could be even greater than simply using the more efficient, fossil fuel dependent way of producing hydrogen.
Analysis from Energy Innovation finds that if certain requirements aren’t attached to the tax credit, the additional demand for electricity will end up having a worse overall impact on the climate. The suggested requirements, the so-called “three pillars” (additionality, deliverability, and hourly time-matching), are meant to ensure that electricity used for electrolytic production of hydrogen is generated in a renewable way.
Others, largely existing utilities and energy companies (and senators from natural gas rich states), have come out against these pillars. They argue that these requirements, particularly hourly time-matching, are too costly, will slow the deployment and harm the competitiveness of hydrogen production in the United States.
A spirited and technical back and forth has ensued. In April, a meta-analysis from Princeton’s Zero Lab found broad agreement between a number of studies that some version of the three pillars is necessary for “clean” hydrogen to truly be “clean”, and that implementing these measures is not likely to destroy “cost-competitiveness” in the United States. Center for Strategic & International Studies has an excellent summary of the whole issue for those interested in more detail.
An interesting angle is the international element. Europe released its own clean hydrogen standards, so if companies want to export to this market their production must be at least up to these standards. Perhaps this has informed the thinking of the administration.
The leaked draft guidance from the Treasury Department, while including some compromises (in the form of a phase-in time), seems to be a victory for the proponents of the “three pillars” of clean hydrogen production. From Canary Media:
If these provisions make it into the final version, “We would consider that to be a monumental win for climate, for consumers and for the hydrogen industry itself,” said Dan Esposito, senior policy analyst with decarbonization think tank Energy Innovation.
Bloomberg cited unnamed people with knowledge of Treasury’s plans who said that the draft guidance would require hydrogen projects to be supplied with new clean-power sources operating on the same grid, as measured on an annual basis through 2027, then switching to being measured on an hourly basis starting in 2028, with no allowance for projects operational before then to continue to use annual accounting after that time.
And Politico reported that the draft guidance would require electrolyzers to use carbon-free electricity from resources built no earlier than three years prior, to ensure that the gigawatt-scale demands of hydrogen production are supplied by new carbon-free resources rather than using clean power already available on the grid.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for that final version. But for now, it looks like a win for proponents of green hydrogen and a clean energy future.
2. White Hydrogen in France
So much colorful talk about hydrogen. Moving from green to white.
Naturally occurring hydrogen gas, called white hydrogen, is a ready-made fuel source. It doesn’t require any splitting of water molecules or other production processes that require energy (and hence money) to complete.
The problem? Finding it, and getting it out of the ground.
That’s why, when exploring for methane in the soil of a former mining town in Lorraine, France, researchers were excited to discover what might be the world’s largest quantity of naturally occurring hydrogen (estimated to be between 46 to 260 million metric tons) below the abandoned coal mines.
Less substantial deposits of white hydrogen have been found in the United States, Africa, Australia, and Russia. Previously, it has been fairly common to discover hydrogen while prospecting for natural gas, but there was not significant demand for the resource and extraction wouldn’t be pursed.
There is currently only one place in the world actively extracting natural hydrogen, a well in western Mali. It’s output is a not-very-substantial 5 tons per year.
From the New York Times, speaking about the potentially large reserve in in Lorraine:
“If they do verify this discovery, then it is very significant and would have a big impact on society,” Geoffrey Ellis, a geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey and a global expert on hydrogen, said of the French finding. “There are many other places around the world where similar finds could also be made, and people are looking at it because it really could be impactful.”
Using existing knowledge and techniques for extracting natural gas to extract white hydrogen for use as a clean energy source is an exciting and increasingly likely possibility.
However, substantial questions about white hydrogen extraction still remain. Again from the NYT:
Whether white hydrogen lives up to the hype remains to be seen. So far, the finds range from potentially huge ones that may take years to verify, like the one in Lorraine, to small or extremely deep accumulations that may not be economically viable to go after, Mr. Ellis said. Questions linger about whether it is an unlimited source of clean fuel. Big oil companies, like TotalEnergies of France, have not jumped in to invest and appear to be waiting on the sidelines to see how things develop.
I am optimistic the existing technical and logistical challenges for “white hydrogen” extraction could be overcome, but it will take time. Large existing oil companies getting in on the game could really help speed the process, with their vast resources and existing expertise in prospecting.
Finally, back in Lorraine:
If all goes according to plan in Lorraine, new drilling will start next year with an advanced probe that will take gas samples from as far as 1.8 miles below ground — deeper than the Golden Gate Bridge is long — to test the magnitude of the hydrogen trove, with the aim of extracting natural hydrogen by 2027 or 2028.
If things continue apace, white and green hydrogen could be well on the way to becoming a significant part of our clean energy future. I think that’s worth getting excited about.
3. Hydrogen for Health
Finally, a fun story on the potential of hydrogen to slow (or reverse) aging.
A group of scientists in China have developed an exciting new method for delivering hydrogen for medicinal purposes. The results, published in Nature Communications and found here, demonstrate enhanced healing of bone-injuries in aged mice. The authors claim there are significant implications for slowing aging and treating age-related illnesses. From Dunya News:
Corresponding author He Qianjun, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University said: “We believe that continuous hydrogen supply will be a universal anti-ageing technology that can treat various ageing-related diseases, including preventing and treating diseases like Alzheimer’s."
I am skeptical of some of the most grandiose claims, but it’s an exciting result nonetheless.
Apparently it has long been known that our trusty friend hydrogen has anti-oxidant activity and anti-inflammatory properties. Some think it is key to slowing the progression of age related illnesses. This paper discusses potential improvements in quality of life from drinking hydrogen-rich water.
However, there wasn’t really a way to deliver enough hydrogen or have it stick around in the body long enough to treat specific problems that might be improved by good ol’ H2. Previous methods included drinking hydrogen-rich water or inhaling hydrogen gas.
The scientists claim they’ve devised a method to deliver hydrogen safely in much larger doses to be released over longer periods of time. Specifically they deliver nearly 50,000 times as much H2 as hydrogen-rich water and it is dispersed over a period of a week rather than 30 minutes.
Their method involves synthesizing nanoparticles of CaS2, a substance which is not bioactive but upon interacting with water releases hydrogen gas, the desired medicine. To prolong the drug delivery time they use a coating on the nanoparticles and a “scaffold”, a sort of container enabling a slow release of the medicine. It seems like quite a technical achievement.
And the results seem promising for safe and potentially quite effective hydrogen-based aging therapies . Fountain of youth? No. But I’m excited to see where things go.
Happy holidays everyone, I hope you enjoyed this hydrogen roundup and these three stories bring some hope and excitement to your holiday season (or whenever you find yourself reading this).
Thanks to John Ellis’ News Items for making me aware of the last two stories, and to Dan O’Brien for talking about the first on LinkedIn.
This is a play on musical “supergroups,” a group formed as a combination of individually successful artists.
Brief note- for all three stories, we’re really talking about H2, two hydrogen atoms bonded covalently. This is stable hydrogen gas- one atom on its on will eagerly pair up with the first thing it can.