From NewScientist, February 8:
Huge deposit of natural hydrogen gas detected deep in Albanian mine
Companies are searching all over the world for deposits of geologic hydrogen that could be used as clean fuel, and a mine in Albania could give them clues about where to look
The largest flow of natural hydrogen gas ever recorded has been measured deep in an Albanian mine. The find could help us work out where to locate underground deposits of this clean fuel.
“The bubbling is really, really intense,” says Laurent Truche at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France, who measured the gas in a pool of water nearly a kilometre underground. “It’s like a Jacuzzi.”
Companies are now searching for deposits of natural hydrogen all over the world as a source of clean fuel, but evidence for large accumulations of this “gold hydrogen” is sparse. Most claims about vast hydrogen deposits beneath the surface rely on extrapolation, rather than direct measurements.
In search of more substantial proof, Truche and his colleagues descended into the Bulqizë chromite mine in Albania, where hydrogen gas seeping out of the rocks has caused several explosions. The mine is also located within an exposure of iron-rich rock, known as an ophiolite. Water is known to react with such rock to generate hydrogen in other places, such as Oman.
The researchers found that the gas bubbling from the pool was more than 80 per cent hydrogen, with methane and a small amount of nitrogen mixed in. It was flowing at a rate of 11 tonnes per year, almost an order of magnitude greater than any other flows of hydrogen gas measured from single-point sources elsewhere on Earth’s surface....
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