Wait. Am I getting this right? They want to inject high-pressure steam and chemicals into a massive underground natural gas reservoir. Then set off a big fire + explosion.
I never said it was good. I said it was a well established practice in response to @fubarx who seemed surprised that anyone would even consider it. I was surprised to learn about it as well, but it makes sense to use the oil or gas in the deposit to directly help fuel the process.
None of those things are in situ combustion thermal recovery. It may well be that this method isn't appropriate for the process described in the paper. The paper also suggests RF thermal recovery as an alternative. The process just requires additional heat besides the steam to affect the SMR reaction and get the hydrogen out.
No but they all claim their business practices were safe...
The water dilutes and carries the toxins away. Until the river catches fire..
If there's a mine fire just close up the entrance and it'll go out. Except it hasn't for 60+ years.
Fracking can't cause earthquakes, except it does and there is evidence the chemicals could actually be getting in ground water... This one is particularly interesting. Considering they claim this process is safe.
I disagree. We need hydrogen for GHG-free fertilizer and steel production and it's the superior choice for powering vehicles. Regardless, this research is interesting because it could help solve the natural gas problem.
Are you implying that there are subterranean ecosystems somehow dependent on natural gas deposits that are harmed by the exploitation of these resources?
That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I guess these specific bacterial ecosystems would suffer, so to speak. Perhaps there should be rules to prevent oil and gas deposits from being completely depleted, or some could be set aside as nature preserves.
It depends a lot on where the hydrogen is sourced from. Hydrogen that is generated from electrolyzers using renewable power is completely green (and funny enough, called Green Hydrogen), and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Oil companies however want to market hydrogen from drilling and refining, which is dirty as hell.
It's an important differentiation to make though. Hydrogen is not inherently bad and will have plenty of green applications. We just have to make sure it's coming from the right places.
Sadly almost all hydrogen currently making its way to market is dirty. I have high hopes for it in the future but it seems like thinly veiled poison at the moment.
And this article is definitely about the dirty kind or at least feels like it is.
And yes, this is definitely the dirty kind. It may still be an improvement on using natural gas directly, but there would need to be a fairly comprehensive analysis to tell for sure. One possible advantage though is we could start building up a hydrogen infrastructure that we can then feed green hydrogen into and completely replace the dirty hydrogen.
Anyway though, you're right to be skeptical. It's important though to look into the details to determine if it's legitimately green energy or if it's just oil companies greenwashing. We need to shun the latter while we promote the former.
(There is a grey area, and it's the same as electric cars -- if we're using electricity from the grid to power cars, and electrolyzers which make hydrogen, is it truly green? I would say this is acceptable for the same reason EVs are acceptable. It'll become completely emission free once the grid is run on renewables.)
"That good of a storage method" in terms of what, arbitrage? We should be producing hydrogen for the practical and environmental benefits of having emissions-free vehicle fuel (that avoids the problems of battery production and disposal), steel, and fertilizer.
I don't see any good reason why the merits of hydrogen for vehicle fuel would be any better than production and disposal of batteries. The other cases I agree that hydrogen will have a useful niche.
This article is a little old, but it explains the problems on the disposal side pretty well. This one covers the production side. Hydrogen powered vehicles avoid all that.
We'll need it anyway to produce existing chemical materials sustainably. It may not be the best energy carrier nor most efficient, but it shines in specific applications. Vehicles are a promising example.
There are some use-cases where hydrogen will be useful, but I don't think storage is one of them. Nor do I think vehicles are a particularly good use-case either, as compared to just iterating on battery technology.
Acording to this paper/article, its better than technologies such as batteries, but the study isn't the most comprehensive and doesn't consider things like pump hydro.
It's hard to assess the validity of those claims as the article doesn't bring any numbers and the paper itself is paywalled. As the fossil fuel industry is pushing hard towards wedging in hydrogen as a means of keeping themselves alive for a while longer, it's vital to be able to assess the actual claims, lest they are just planted there by the fossil fuel industry.
That used to be my thinking, but there's a lot of natural gas ready to be exploited and we need hydrogen. Therefore, methods like the one described in the article as well as ex situmethane pyrolysis are worth investigating.
You forgot to quote the rest of that sentence. We need hydrogen, which is easy to get from natural gas, of which there is a lot. The right thing to do is figure out how to use it without emitting greenhouse gases. The problem is the same whether we're under the current mode of production or some hypothetical moneyless condition.
This worst case scenario is probably the same as with any reservoir of natural gas (a massive leak and explosion), which is all the more reason to convert it to hydrogen and sequester the weaker, non-flammable GHG byproduct in situ.
Natural gas is also odorless and able to displace oxygen so I don’t see how it being CO2 underground instead of natural gas changes anything from a risk perspective. Maybe because the molecules are smaller and thus more prone to leaks? I’m admittedly way out of my depth here.
Methane is lighter than air and goes up while co2 is heavier than oxygen and stays down. I don’t know maybe in case of some disaster where water leaks in the well and then pushes out the co2
I wouldn’t want to live nearby in both cases anyway
The alternatives are the status quo or severely restricting natural gas extraction. I won't say the latter isn't doable, especially if we can ramp up nuclear power capacity, but there's a lot of baggage there. We should welcome a solution that effectively makes natural gas an emissions-free resource.
Keeping in mind I have zero knowledge of what you're telling me about, but these examples don't include anything about carbon monoxide.
If the similarities to the other gases are close enough to mean that it can be safely stored using the same techniques, then I'm inclined to feel a lot less worried about the whole thing.
But I don't really trust these sectors to act on our behalf, only to make profit line go up. Lying and bribing appears to be part of that, as can be seen all around us these days.
I'm unaware of any examples of subterranean carbon monoxide storage. However, underground helium storage has been done successfully for a while. Helium is one of the best gases at leaking because of its small size, which should provide some reassurance as to the storage of larger gases underground.
I agree that greed and corporate malfeasance are a thing, but it's kind of a separate problem. The government is either going to enforce environmental regulations and manage our resources properly or it's not.