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Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources

Geoffrey S. Ellis·Sarah E. Gelman
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Abstract

Geologic hydrogen could be a low-carbon primary energy resource; however, the magnitude of Earth’s subsurface endowment has not yet been assessed. Knowledge of the occurrence and behavior of natural hydrogen on Earth has been combined with information from geologic analogs to construct a mass balance model to predict the resource potential. Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [10 3 to 10 10 million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10 6 Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction (e.g., 1 × 10 5 Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years. This amount of hydrogen contains more energy (~1.4 × 10 16 MJ) than all proven natural gas reserves on Earth (~8.4 × 10 15 MJ). Study results demonstrate that further research into understanding the potential for geologic hydrogen resources is merited.

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Geoffrey S. Ellis, Sarah E. Gelman. 2024. Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado0955

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