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Natural Hydrogen Development-Potential and Challenges

Natural Hydrogen Development-Potential and Challenges

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2025.05.357. This is version 3 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Arnout Everts, Jos Bonnie, Ramon Loosveld

Abstract

Natural hydrogen has recently been identified as a potential source for future energy systems. This paper investigates the technical development potential of natural hydrogen by estimating, for some recent finds and identified prospects, in-place and recoverable hydrogen, well productivity, water production and other byproducts that a future development would have to cater for.


Finds are in three broad play types:
1) focused-seepage plays where predominantly aqueous hydrogen migrates with minimal trapping;
2) coalbed plays where hydrogen is adsorbed molecularly in coals;
3) reservoir-trap-seal plays with gaseous hydrogen trapped underneath an impermeable seal.


Focused-seepage plays have a low to modest hydrogen resource-density, low well-productivity and developments may co-produce large volumes of water. Coalbed hydrogen plays may have higher resource density but again, low well-productivity. Only developments of reservoir-trap-seal plays could potentially achieve industrial offtake but to date no accumulations of this type have unambiguously been discovered.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5VH9R

Subjects

Earth Sciences

Keywords

Natural HydrogenWhite Hydrogen, Play Classification, resource assessment, Field Development, decarbonization, natural hydrogen, white hydrogen

Dates

Published: 2025-01-31 07:44

Last Updated: 2025-06-01 06:39

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License

CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data Availability (Reason not available):
Data will be made available (in the form of sample spreadsheets illustrating the formulas used) as part of Journal peer-review and publication (ongoing)