Prospectors chase hydrogen along an American continental rift

The drilling rig rises more stories over a field that is usually full of grazing cattle. Thush We are in Kansas, the rig flies both an American and an Australian flag to reflect its owner’s origins below: Hyterra has come all the way from Australia in search of natural hydrogen fuel produced deep inside an ancient rupture of North America.

“Behind us is midcontinent rift, which we believe is the kitchen where the brint is made,” says Avon McIntyre, the company’s CEO. Rift has drawn many companies to US Midwest, making Eastern Kansas one of the busiest boundaries in a worldwide search for “geological hydrogen” that many hope could serve as a zero-carbonal alternative to Fossil Fuel.

The story starts about 1.3 billion years ago when the continental record, now North America, began to split in two. Although the continent eventually stopped spreading, leaving the break up a 2000 -kilometer -long scars of iron -rich mantel rock. Today, this rift is clustered deep under the farms and ranches in the US Midwest.

In eastern Kansas, where the solid rock around the rock rises relatively near the surface, high concentrations of hydrogen have been measured in old oil and gas wells. To see if it can be harvested, a handful of companies have rented hydrogen drilling rights of more than 100,000 ha of land in the area. According to McInyres estimates, it is based on the publication of public courthouses. Hyterra and its competitor Koloma have moved on and begins to recently drill deep underground.

“It’s like Gold Rush, where everyone tries to find it,” says Kristen Delano in Colorado-based Koloma. She would not say where the company drills in Kansas, but says it is public now that they have dried there. Other companies, such as another Australian company called Top Energy, have purchased mineral rights based solely on where Koloma is assumed to buy.

“There have been a lot of humming around the community,” says Shawn McIntyre, who has no relationship with Hyterra’s CEO. Shawn is a rancher in Waterville, Kansas, who has rented several thousand hectares of his country for hydrogen drilling. “This can be a very good opportunity to bring the industry back to some of the smaller cities that dry up in this part of the world.”

The global hunt for underground hydrogen was spurred just a few years ago by revised estimates of how much the planet had to contain. Companies seeking accumulation of the gas hope it could serve as a low expert for the fossil fuel now used to produce fertilization and power heavy industry and transport. “Natural hydrogen just fits perfectly into that picture,” says Jay Kalbas at Kansas Geological Survey. “If we … sit on large quantities produced hydrogen, it can not only change the state and the region, but the country.”

At the drilling southwest of Manhattan, Kansas, Avon McIntyre and I trampled through the mud and climbing the drilling platform. “The whole thing is to find out what the hell is going down there,” McIntyre yells over the rig of the rig.

The company’s work theory is that hydrogen is generated when water from underground aquifers seeps into the iron -rich mantel rock in the midcontinent rift and responds with the metal in a process called serpentinization. This reaction releases the water’s hydrogen molecules that wander into the surrounding cliff.

This is the second of five investigative Wells Hyterra, who plans to drill in Kansas this year, which aims to detect hydrogen along a line that extends east from the rift itself to an underground increase in the mountain of the Berggrunden called Nemaha rim. Earlier this year, the company reported that the first well drilled into the high point of the back detected hydrogen concentrations of 96 percent.

Now, after weeks of drilling for 24 hours a day, the second well was approaching its maximum depth just over 1600 meters. At the top of the rig, mud daughter with cuttings from the granite far below the bread out of the hole into a wagons where pipes sucked gas out of the liquid for measurement.

In “Mud Shack”, a small mobile office on the outskirts of the site, a group of contractors on a bank of screens, when instruments reported the composition of the gas from different depths in real time. After staying at low levels through much of the fixed cliff, the hydrogen concentration had just begun to cross up to more than 800 parts per day. Million.

“” “[The first well] Had some really lovely tops, but this one just bleeds hydrogen, “says Hyterra’s Josh Whitcombe.

These mean that it means a little on your own. Gas samples must be offered site for more controlled testing. Furthermore, high concentrations of hydrogen do not indicate how much gas can actually flow from the well and how long.

Even if hydrogen eventually flows from any of these wells, there are several other questions, including how it would be septed from other gases, how it would be stored and transported, and who would buy it.

But McIntyre was excited that they had detect hydrogen so far back at all, and he pressed for the crew to continue to drill through the night. “We drill for information,” he says. “And now we have some.”