A mountain of hydrogen is lurking beneath Earth’s surface — and scientists say that just a fraction of it could break our dependence on fossil fuels for 200 years.
New research suggests the planet holds around 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. That’s roughly 26 times the amount of oil known to be left in the ground (1.6 trillion barrels, each weighing approximately 0.15 tons) — but where these hydrogen stocks are located remains unknown.
Most of the hydrogen is likely too deep or too far offshore to be accessed, and some of the reserves are probably too small to extract in a way that makes economical sense, the researchers suspect. However, the results indicate there’s more than enough hydrogen to go around, even with those limitations, Geoffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and lead author of the new study, told Live…
