Aberthaw Power Station and Decarbonisation

[whole diary]

[Red Squirrel]

From John Redwood on Twitter:

Ford  is cutting  jobs  in  the  UK^▸ (United Kingdom)  and  Europe  to make  electric  cars  in the USA.  Honda  has  gone  home ,  shutting  Europe.  The  electric  Mini  will  be  made  in  China, not  Oxford. The  move  to electric  cars  is  doing  big  damage  to  the  UK  car  industry.

Any thoughts?

[ellendune]

From John Redwood on Twitter:

Ford  is cutting  jobs  in  the  UK^▸ (United Kingdom)  and  Europe  to make  electric  cars  in the USA.  Honda  has  gone  home ,  shutting  Europe.  The  electric  Mini  will  be  made  in  China, not  Oxford. The  move  to electric  cars  is  doing  big  damage  to  the  UK  car  industry.

Any thoughts?

How about the failure of the government to get a good trade agreement with the EU^» (European Union - about) and the failure of the government to provide support to a UK battery factory at the time it was needed is doing big damage to the UK car industry. It will get worse if the UK slashes all EU legislation in its proposed deregulation cull. 

[TonyK]

From John Redwood on Twitter:

Ford  is cutting  jobs  in  the  UK^▸ (United Kingdom)  and  Europe  to make  electric  cars  in the USA.  Honda  has  gone  home ,  shutting  Europe.  The  electric  Mini  will  be  made  in  China, not  Oxford. The  move  to electric  cars  is  doing  big  damage  to  the  UK  car  industry.

Any thoughts?

I blame John Redwood. He is a member of "Leave Means Leave". It looks like the motor industry is doing just that. He is also wrong about the move to electric cars being the cause of the big damage. That is like saying the move to colour TV damaged the black and white telly industry. Moving away from fossil fuelled cars is inevitable, so if it is doing big damage, it's because of an inability to adapt - or a handy smokescreen. The car companies are moving because we aren't an attractive place to build cars any more, especially not for export. Such raw materials as are available have to be competed for these days, with the finished product subject to the sort of taxation we didn't need to think about between 1973 and 2020.

[Bmblbzzz]

He is also wrong about the move to electric cars being the cause of the big damage. That is like saying the move to colour TV damaged the black and white telly industry. Moving away from fossil fuelled cars is inevitable, so if it is doing big damage, it's because of an inability to adapt - or a handy smokescreen.

Very good analogy. 

[stuving]

We know that this reaction is occuring at all the mid-oceanic ridges constantly but it is unknown how much of this hydrogen enters the marine environment and exhausts to atmosphere. We know it is produced where old oceanic crust is faulted to surface such as Oman and Cyprus, and hydrogen is currently being produced from an old water well in Mali northwest of the capital Bamako. It is powering a generator to provide electricity to the village. Our study group is attempting to understand how this hydrogen system works and where else should we be exploring for it.

Because this reaction is so common, it suggests that there is currently a large hydrogen flux to the atmosphere that is being buffered by natural earth processes and I suspect that this is dominated by reactions in the soil and hydrosphere. We see these reactions on satellite imagery in the form of ‘faerie rings’ caused by changes in vegetation around hydrogen seeps.

Frustratingly, there is very little data on natural hydrogen emissions  from wells etc., the majority of data is currently from Russia. It is not routinely analysed even in areas where we strongly suspect it is present.

...The word is spreading! From a long article in Science:

The Malian discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas—but not in the same places. These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
...
Since 2018, however, when Diallo and his colleagues described the Malian field in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, the number of papers on natural hydrogen has exploded. “It’s absolutely incredible and really exponential,” says geologist Alain Prinzhofer, lead author on the Mali paper and scientific director of GEO4U, a Brazil-based oil and gas services company that is doing more and more hydrogen work. Dozens of startups, many in Australia, are snatching up the rights to explore for hydrogen. Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed its first natural hydrogen committee, and USGS began its first effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the United States. “We’re in the very beginning, but it will go fast,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, CEO^▸ (Chief Executive Officer) of Natural Hydrogen Energy. In 2019, the startup completed the first hydrogen borehole in the United States, in Nebraska...

[Oxonhutch]

...The word is spreading! From a long article in Science:

One of our Natural Hydrogen Study Group members is featured in that article, and we have a conference organised on that very subject at the Geological Society, London this coming July.

[TonyK]

I have lived for decades under the assumption that there is practically no free hydrogen on planet Earth, and yet here it is, practically gushing out of holes in the ground in unimaginable quantities. Did I miss something, or did we all miss something?

[Bmblbzzz]

The irony is at the end of the article, where the village now has a ready, free, source of hydrogen, and a fuel cell, but still no electricity. Let's hope it's not predictive...

[Mark A]

I have lived for decades under the assumption that there is practically no free hydrogen on planet Earth, and yet here it is, practically gushing out of holes in the ground in unimaginable quantities. Did I miss something, or did we all miss something?

I don't think you missed anything, it's just that any free hydrogen is either going to be trapped or is just passing through. It's certainly possible to envisage a boom in the future.

Mark

[stuving]

I have lived for decades under the assumption that there is practically no free hydrogen on planet Earth, and yet here it is, practically gushing out of holes in the ground in unimaginable quantities. Did I miss something, or did we all miss something?

You can have a huge amount of a gas percolating up through the ground and still not notice because its density is so low ('cos the world's a bit big). It needs to be trapped by an impermeable cap before it builds up to noticeable (or exploitable) quantities.

That's not just true of hydrogen - methane does the same thing. I think (but I don't think I've seen it said) that the overwhelming majority of the natural gas produced in the past vented to the atmosphere ages ago. Of course hydrogen does have a different idea of what "impermeable" means from other gases.

That idea - of methane continuously rising through the ground almost everywhere - I had filed away as one of Tommy Gold's theories, though that is probably only half true. But I did assume that this subterranean hydrogen was called "gold hydrogen" after him. But it seems not, officially. So it must be either pure coincidence, or a kind of in joke or punning reference.

[Oxonhutch]

And now the New York Times.

It's all getting a bit main stream 

[Oxonhutch]

That's not just true of hydrogen - methane does the same thing. I think (but I don't think I've seen it said) that the overwhelming majority of the natural gas produced in the past vented to the atmosphere ages ago. Of course hydrogen does have a different idea of what "impermeable" means from other gases.

That idea - of methane continuously rising through the ground almost everywhere - I had filed away as one of Tommy Gold's theories, though that is probably only half true. But I did assume that this subterranean hydrogen was called "gold hydrogen" after him. But it seems not, officially. So it must be either pure coincidence, or a kind of in joke or punning reference.

Methane (and petroleum ['rock oil']) is derived primarily from high organic rich shales heated to between 90 to 120 deg Celsius through natural burial (known in the industry as the 'oil window' - gas will be produced at a slightly higher temperature). It is estimated that 98% of all hydrocarbons that are/have been produced are lost to nature where they form very rich feedstock for other creatures. Hydrogen is the same - an energy rich feedstock.

The chairman of BP^» (Beyond Petroleum (Former name - British Petroleum) - home page) got into trouble after the Deepwater Horizon disaster by saying it isn't as bad ecologically as it is made out to be. His reading of the room was entirely wrong and deemed to be highly insensitive under the circumstances - and I whole heartedly agree, but as a geologist he was geologically correct. The sea bed of the Gulf of Mexico is constantly bleeding oil and gas that is being produced as we speak by entirely natural processes. There is a huge natural biota that feeds off this output and consumes it with great efficiency.

Gold hydrogen has nothing to do with the chap you mention, it was chosen by the industry as it has to be mined from the ground like the precious metal.  Also referred to as 'white' because it is so naturally clean compared to the other different shades of hydrogen - some of which are decidedly dodgy!

[TonyK]

It's certainly possible to envisage a boom in the future.

Depends on how much there is in the area when the match is struck.

[broadgage]

I have lived for decades under the assumption that there is practically no free hydrogen on planet Earth, and yet here it is, practically gushing out of holes in the ground in unimaginable quantities. Did I miss something, or did we all miss something?

I believe that your assumptions were correct.
Few natural processes produce free hydrogen, and the alleged discovery of useful volumes of free hydrogen sound very improbable indeed.

[Oxonhutch]

I believe that your assumptions were correct.
Few natural processes produce free hydrogen, and the alleged discovery of useful volumes of free hydrogen sound very improbable indeed.

It might put you in your discomfort zone but natural hydrogen generation is around us, and has been understood as a geological process for a long time.

Come to our conference in July to hear several dozen respected geoscientists deliver their papers to a hundred or so of their peers; I'll buy you a port.

Natural Hydrogen: A New Frontier for Energy Geoscience.

Oxonhutch FGS