Geologic hydrogen may be an answer

The internal combustion engine is less than 100 years old. Same for the technologies we have developed to pull oil and gas from the ground.

It’s hard to imagine life without our cars and planes and buildings heated with natural gas and oil. But it really wasn’t that long ago that people had none of these things. Sometimes, advances happen, and clever people change the way we live.

A group met at the University of Alaska Fairbanks last week to brainstorm a possible new economy for Alaska and clean energy source for the world — geologic hydrogen.

We bump into hydrogen every second of our lives. It’s a colorless, odorless, explosive gas that is the most abundant element in the universe, making up about 75 percent of everything.

Including you. Hydrogen comprises 10 percent of your body mass as it combines with oxygen to make water, which makes up about 65 percent of you.

But all those scientists were not gathered in a Fairbanks ballroom to talk about whether human hydrogen might power a gold mine in the Bush. They were interested in hydrogen that may be trapped underground by the types of rocks that also trap gas and oil.

Mark Myers thinks Alaska might be a great place to find this geologic hydrogen. At an age when many people retire and with a resume line that includes “Director, U.S. Geological Survey,” one might wonder why he cared enough to travel to Fairbanks to gather geologists and policymakers.

Because, he said after the meeting, pivoting to an energy source that emits only water vapor when burned would solve so many problems.

Like the existential one of humanity blowing past the stop sign of planet-heating carbon levels in the atmosphere. As well as the question of what might power Alaska’s economy after gas and oil?

Myers is a geologist who earned his doctorate at UAF and then went to work for the state of Alaska as a petroleum geologist, where he roamed all over the state and Canada looking at rocks.

President George W. Bush interrupted Myers’ field career when he tapped him as the 14th director of the USGS in 2009. Myers and his wife Alice lived in Washington, D.C. until a change of administration led them back to Alaska. Here, then-governor Sarah Palin made Myers coordinator of the state’s gas line project.

Myers is now commissioner of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. Wearing that title, he gathered around 100 experts at UAF to see if geologic hydrogen could be a next big thing.

Though manufacturers now produce hydrogen as a fuel, the process emits a lot of carbon dioxide and is expensive to produce. That’s what makes a natural source intriguing.

Drilling wells to tap into pockets of hydrogen is not common in America yet. But villagers in Mali, a country in Africa, found a source of hydrogen while unplugging an old water well in 2011. Now harnessed, that hydrogen gas generates electricity for a local village.

People have also found natural hydrogen deposits in Canada, Russia, Australia, Germany, New Zealand and other places. Alaska is a good place to look because it has similar geologic conditions, Myers said.

The downside of harvesting geologic hydrogen gas molecules is that they are hard to find, microbes like to eat them and they scatter when they reach the surface. And, even if people find pockets of them underground, deposits may not be located in convenient places.

The upside of geologic hydrogen: If geologists can find pockets and figure out how to mine them, a hydrogen plant could power a nearby village that now has diesel generators rattling every second of every day. Or, a remote gold mine’s power plant could run on fuel that emits only water vapor into the air.

If technology followed that would allow Alaska to become a geologic hydrogen exporter, the state would have an industry that might someday replace oil and gas.

Everyone at the conference agreed that those are all Alaska-size ifs. But a few of those geologists might soon be hiking around Alaska looking for signs of a clean fuel that is part of who we are and the air we breathe and makes up most of the known universe.

“I’m optimistic we have lit the fire,” Myers said.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell ned.rozell@alaska.edu is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.