Underground Hydrogen Touted As 'Significant' Clean Energy Resource In First U.S. Hearing

Koloma CEO Pete Johnson testifies before the Senate's Committee on Energy & Natural Resources.

Underground Hydrogen Touted As 'Significant' Clean Energy Resource In First U.S. Hearing

Forbes | Alan Ohnsman | Feb 28, 2024

The Senate held the first congressional hearing on geologic hydrogen, a promising new form of clean energy generated naturally underground, that’s attracted growing interest and investment over the past year.
The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, chaired by West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, heard testimony on Wednesday from the Energy Department’s advanced research unit, the U.S. Geological Survey and Pete Johnson, CEO of Koloma, the best-funded startup in the geologic hydrogen space. They concurred that more research is needed to identify the most abundant, promising sites and to develop techniques to amplify the natural production process, but were upbeat about the outlook.

“The potential for geologic hydrogen represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about hydrogen as an energy source,” Evelyn Wang, director of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy told Senators. “This new source of hydrogen could lower energy costs and increase our nation’s energy security and supply chains.”

Federal scientists have begun working with universities and energy companies to find ways to map and locate potentially large pockets of hydrogen as current estimates are inadequate, said the Geological Survey’s Geoffrey Ellis. “The estimated in-place global geologic hydrogen resource ranges from 1000s to potentially billions of megatons,” he told the committee. “Given our understanding of other geologic resources, the vast majority of the in-place hydrogen is likely to be in accumulations that are either too far offshore or too small to ever be economically recovered. However, if even a small fraction of this amount could be recovered that would constitute a significant resource.”

Hydrogen is already heavily used in industry, including at oil refineries, chemical plants and as a key ingredient in ammonia for fertilizer. But nearly all of it is made by extracting hydrogen from natural gas, a dirty process that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide. Like green hydrogen — a new clean form of the element made from water and electricity, ideally from renewable power — the geologic variety is carbon-free. Scientists believe it’s generated in underground pockets of iron-rich rock in warm, moist conditions that are extremely common. Uniquely, it’s an energy source that’s just sitting there, not one that needs to be created....more
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2024/02/28/underground-hydrogen-touted-as-significant-clean-energy-resource-in-first-us-hearing/?sh=1288e6a740ed
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Energy Vault Kicks Off Construction of Largest U.S. Green Hydrogen Storage System

Amy Baxter | Feb 26, 2024

Energy Vault, a company that develops and deploys utility-scale energy storage solutions, has started construction on what it said will be the largest green hydrogen long-duration storage system in the United States.

The previously announced utility-scale green hydrogen plus battery ultra-long duration energy storage system (BH-ESS) will have a capacity of 293 megawatt-hours of dispatchable carbon-free energy. The system is being developed for Pacific Gas and Electric Company on less than one acre of land in Calistoga, California, and is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of 2024. PG&E received approval for the system by the California Public Utilities Commission in April 2023.

The BH-ESS, also known as the Calistoga Resiliency Center, is the first-of-its-kind and the largest utility-scale green hydrogen energy storage project in the United States, accordion got Energy Vault...more
https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/2024/02/energy-vault-kicks-off-construction-of-largest-u-s-green-hydrogen-storage-system/