13 thoughts on “Hydrogen”

  1. If it works, the ecologists will be against it. We’re making Gaia heavy-hearted by pumping out all her hydrogen, or something.

  2. For most geologists, the key information would be the D/H ratio, usually expressed as a per mil value difference from seawater. It would say a lot about whether the H2 is primordial or was fromed via subsurface reactions. Unfortunately, that does not seemed to be addressed in the article, but maybe other “Natural H2” papers look into that.

    1. The article claims that natural subsurface reactions of water with iron-bearing rocks could generate pure hydrogen.

      1. But did it in this case? The isotope ratios could put constraints on that and it would be the first thing a geologist would ask about. It’s the elephant in the room. Strangely, it wasn’t even referenced in the promotional write-up. No doubt there’s some mention in the peer-reviewed paper.

  3. Validate Thomas Gold’s theories?

    Well, not exactly.

    Carbon is found in abundance in reduced (not oxidized) form on Titan, but is that the case for Earth? Gold invoked “cold accretion” whereby Earth formed from the dust grains of the Solar Nebula without Earth turning into a blob of magma, which goes against the impact with a Mars-sized planet as the event forming the Moon. Even so, there is a vast amount of carbon in the rock, but the preponderance of it is not in reduced form (meaning combustible with oxygen) but is bound to oxygen in calcium carbonates.

    J F Kenney and his colleagues from the former Soviet Union took a different view, that contra-Thomas Gold, deep Earth hydrocarbons are not primordial, but there is a process by which they are formed in conditions of the upper mantle. Kenney goes to great length to explain the especially oil, that is straight-chain alkane hydrocarbons beyond methane cannot form in the crustal regions where just about every petroleum geologist says oil comes from and can only form in the upper mantle because of equilibrium-thermodynamic chemistry — just like that is where diamonds come from. As to the mystery of how oil migrates upward from those depths without being broken down into methane, Kenney argues along the lines of “if every other path is impossible, migration from the upper mantle, however improbable, must be what is happening.”

    Kenny invokes thermodynamics and entropy and Gibbs free energy to claim that the Dead Dinosaurs origin of oil in crustal rock won’t work — you can break Dead Dinosaurs or buried swamps and forests down into methane, but you cannot get the methane — under equilibrium conditions — to form gasoline and diesel fuel fraction of petroleum, much as diamonds do not form under those conditions.

    I’ve looked into this, and the biotic Narrative of the formation of oil from buried organic matter in crustal temperatures and pressures of the Oil Window does not seem plausible. What Kenney may get wrong is that oil doesn’t form from carbohydrates from dead plants and maybe not even from dead dinosaurs. People-in-the-know claims that it comes from buried algae in “anoxic lakes” — very specialized conditions, accounting for the apparent scarcity of oil.

    I have searched the scientific literature, and there are claims that oil doesn’t come from any old algae but rather from species that form vesicles, the contents of which are pretty close to petroleum.

    That said, one of the things that Kenney points to is a little-known paper in Nature, where someone made straight-chain hydrocarbons by combining things available in the mantle — calcium carbonate (limestone), ferric oxide (the “black” not “red” iron ore) and water — in a diamond “anvil cell” replicating mantle temperatures and pressures and observed the formation of methane and higher alkane hydrocarbons by laser-light spectrographic analysis.

    Again, there could be vast pools of oil formed that way, by plate tectonics bringing water and limestone back down to the mantle to feed that reaction, but how does not oil migrate back to the crust without being oxidized? Gold’s theory covered that part in terms of rock, pressure and pore sizes, or so he claimed.

    But then how does biotic oil form under the conditions that petroleum geologists claim it does. I looked our Department Chair of Chemical (and Biological Engineering) in the eye and asked him if the chemical pathways by which oil forms from biotic material in the Earth’s crust are known, and this man has Federally funded research into the synthesis of motor fuel from bio feedstocks. He looked back at me and told me, “No.”

    Given how politically fraught the theories of abiotic oil are, I was astounded, but we were on our way to hear an outside speaker talk about the industrial process for chemical synthesis of diesel fuel from “stranded” natural gas resources, and I haven’t yet followed up.

  4. I’ve invented a way of storing hydrogen easily. Attach hydrogen atoms to nano backbones of chains of carbon atoms. I’m going to call my invention “gasoline”.

  5. It’s strange that this seems like a politically charged opinion and, honestly, I’m not an expert. I can buy that coal and maybe even oil are mostly dead dinos, but it just seems unlikely to me that the vast majority of natural gas is decomposed organic matter.

    With the sheer volume difference of the core + mantle vs. the mineable crust, even at miniscule solubilities it seems the trapped volume of anything light would be dominated by diffusion from below.

      1. The people who claim a biologic origin for oil regard “comes from dead dinosaurs” as a trope from oil company TV advertising.

        Current thinking is that it comes from dead algae that sunk to form sediments of anoxic lakes. I commented above in a long-ish remark that where exactly oil comes from if it is biologically sourced remains uncertain. I read a recent paper that it may come from specific species of algae that form something chemically close to petroleum rather than from generic “fats (lipids) produced by plankton.” Converting oxygenated organic material into oil under conditions in the Earth’s crust where mainstream geologists say it comes from, whether the organic matter is fats or carbs, is problematic from the standpoint of chemical thermodynamics.

        Both the biotic and abiotic theories of where oil comes from have “gaps”, so I am skeptical of claims of certainty on this topic.

    1. Yes, vast quantities of coal are found in the Pennsylvanian stratum of the Paleozoic (“Age of Amphibians”). The Wyoming Powder River deposits, however, are of a broad range of geographic ages, but large deposits date from the Cretaceous (the last of the three strata of the “Age of Dinosaurs.” Many of the creatures featured in Jurassic Park date from the Cretaceous, but I guess author Michael Crichton didn’t think “Cretaceous Park” had the right sound to it?

      Oil is found in rocks of a broad range of geologic ages, including the Nonesuch formation having non-commercial quantities of oil in a formation in Upper Michigan long predating the Cambrian, when life forms other than microbes began to proliferate.

  7. ” As radioactive elements in the crust such as uranium and thorium decay, they emit beta particles, aka helium nuclei…”

    Ahem…beta particles are electrons. Alpha particles are helium nuclei.

    This magazine is Science?

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