Edit to add:

The article at the link is another example of the misunderstanding (or misinformation) that the media has of H2.

The article says this...

"Unlike hydrogen produced through industrial processes, white hydrogen emits only water when burned,..."

When the truth is that all Hydrogen only emits pure water when it is burned.

The difference between White Hydrogen and any other form (color) of Hydrogen is that all other forms need to be produced using electricity, and any form (color) other than White or Green Hydrogen do emit CO2 during that production process.

So we'd still have to get the oxygen out if co2 somehow.

Do you mean when it's burned?

Keep 2 things in mind, first, burning H2 would be replacing burning fossil fuels which also consume oxygen so no new loss there, and second, when H2 is produced through electrolysis, the process also releases the pure Oxygen in the water that is split.

The Hindenburg incident comes to mind though as hydrogen is extremely flammable. A whole infrastructure will have to be engineered and built to burn it safely as fuel.

It can be done though as gasoline is also very flammable, but one can see gasoline leaks. Not so with hydrogen.

...because H2 is lighter than air and so it rises up and away, while heavier-than-air methane pools and puddles among the near environment making the explosions much more damaging when they ignite.

A far as the Hindenburg footage, most of the flaming of the vessel that is seen on film was actually the canvas shell burning off quickly, that canvas was painted in flammable gels to make the canvas "air" tight to contain the H2 within. The H2 within did indeed burn, but mostly it rose quickly up and away due to being lighter than air.

Let me guess, we don't care what the other 85% is in the "drill baby, drill" industry, do we? Methane? Carbon Dioxide?

Who cares as long as we can drill like the demon!

The fossil fuel industry, including the part greenwashing fossil fuels as "hydrogen," is pretty transparent, every time, all the time.

The reported range of this "massive" is between six million and 250 million tons, which is pretty big variation.

The energy content of hydrogen when it is used to deplete oxygen is 33 kWh/kg which works out to 120 MJ/kg.

At the upper limit, 250 million tons is 250 billion kg, meaning that the total energy that might be released were this hydrogen mined in a stupid exercise in consuming the world's resources as quickly as possible, would be about 0.030 Exajoules on a planet that is currently consuming 642 Exajoules (as of 2023) according to the following table, which estimates how "big" the hydrogen "energy" industry is likely to be in some magical future (and how much energy it will waste)



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

We're saved I guess.

The fossil fuel industry never fails to encourage magical thinking in greenwashing itself.

"White Hydrogen" fantasies are designed to encourage the "drill, baby, drill" mentality.

The bullshit never stops, especially as we have a credulous media to hand it out.

... has been underground all this time, and that in centuries* of drilling, somehow NO ONE ever realized it. It's as if millions of people who have been mining and drilling and sampling and studying the Earth for all these years just kind of pulled a massively collective oopsie and failed to notice one of the Universe's most common and best-studied elements was just sitting on their doorstep, in abundance. Considering that most of the chemical elements -- including relative rarities such as gallium, germanium, the lanthanides, thorium, and uranium, and even rhenium, the rarest stable element** -- were discovered by mining engineers and chemists who, for the most part, weren't really even looking for them, I just found the whole idea to be wildly implausible -- like, Brilliant Light Power implausible. I suspect, in the end, this will turn out to be just like Randell Mills' repeatedly renamed corporation-in-tireless-pursuit-of-funding -- a superficially (semi??)plausible theory backed by plenty of abused and misused scientific terminology and ambiguous evidence to secure lots of $$$$$$$$, with the principals involved being fully aware that there's no hope of delivering a fraction of their promises. Or maybe I'm being too cynical, and "white hydrogen" will turn out to be the "N-rays" of the 21st century.


* In 211 BCE, the first known natural gas well was drilled in China to reported depths of 150 meters (500 feet). The Chinese drilled their wells with bamboo poles and primitive percussion bits for the express purpose of searching for gas in limestones.

** Re has only one stable isotope; the majority of natural Re is actually an unstable isotope with a very long half-life.

...why this bullshit is only designed to encourage the continuous wishful thinking about hydrogen, which in my firm view is just another effort, like carbon capture and sequestration, is utilized to greenwash fossil fuels.

If it were meaningful, we would have know as much close to a century ago.

To know that you have Hydrogen in a mix of gases, you would need to intentionally test for it's presence.

The article explains how the recent find contains only a percentage of Hydrogen in the total gases mined.

But are you saying that Hydrogen doesn't naturally exist?

Edit to add:

We've known Hydrogen was being naturally produced underground for decades at least, but it has only recently been discovered that in certain geologic conditions, it can pool and collect, so we are only now discovering those collection pools or "reservoirs'.

but it just seems very strange that for all the gas that has been collected over the centuries it's not been mentioned in any book I've ever read, and I've read plenty on chemistry (admittedly, not very specific on geochemistry). Of course any major gas producer would at some point thoroughly analyze the gas they're collecting, and know exactly what was in it, using techniques that had been thorough worked out over the years ! Wouldn't they have gotten excited about that ? (GC - MS would reveal every volatile component without testing for anything specific, BTW. The idea that you can't detect a substance without searching for it specifically is utter rubbish. Most of the science of analytical chemistry is devoted to doing exactly that.)

Your last statement about it only rarely pooling makes more sense, but if it's a rare phenomenon, how much of an energy supply can it possibly constitute ?

...that's why exploration is being done to first determine what areas exist with the correct geologic conditions, and then to measure the volume and density of the pooled Hydrogen.

Luckily, we're dealing with planet-scale deposit areas that have never been tapped after millions of years of production, so hope is high.