They invested more in electrolisis hydrogen than gold hydrogen. If we want hydrogen cars and trucks we must emphasise in gold hydrogen as it is cheaper and can unlock huge quantoties.

Hi Jer:

We should know within the next year or two whether there are indeed vast resources of natural hydrogen.
If that proves to be the case, it is utterly transformative for energy supply:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/02/possibly-a-trillion-tons-of-mineable-hydrogen.html

' Hydroma and other companies have recently bought land rights and built mining operations. They are close to pumping commercial hydrogen from underground mines. If there are huge hydrogen resources that can be mined then it could change the economics of a potential hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is currently produced by using electrolysis to split water or other processes to separate hydrogen from methane. Producing hydrogen is usually quite costly and energy intensive. Mining hydrogen could be far cheaper and there could be a 1000 times more hydrogen available underground than we currently produce.

At USGS (US Geological Survey), Ellis, thinks the Earth produces orders of magnitude more hydrogen each year than the 90 million tons that humans manufacture. But it’s not only that flow that matters—it’s the size of the underground stock. They used a simple box model borrowed from the oil industry. The model accounted for impermeable rock traps of different kinds, the destructive effect of microbes, and the assumption—based on oil industry experience—that only 10% of hydrogen accumulations might ever be tapped economically. Ellis says the model comes up with a range of numbers centered around a trillion tons of hydrogen. That would satisfy world demand for thousands of years even if the green-energy transition triggers a surge in hydrogen use. Much of this global resource could end up being too scattered to be captured economically, like the millions of tons of gold that are dissolved in the oceans at parts per trillion levels.'

And:

' The first target for natural hydrogen explorers should be shallow accumulations that sit under impermeable caps within a kilometer or two of the surface. If the source rocks themselves are within reach, hydrogen could be collected from them directly, like oil from fracked shale; water could even be injected into the iron-rich rock to stimulate production. While collecting hydrogen, the well could also tap the geothermal energy in the heated water that returns to the surface. If carbon dioxide were dissolved in the injected water, it could react with magnesium and calcium in the iron-containing rocks and be locked up permanently as limestone. This would also sequester carbon while extracting hydrogen.'

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/02/possibly-a-trillion-tons-of-mineable-hydrogen.html

As for why if the resource indeed exists, we have not much come across it, although there has been a working mine for a decade in Mali in spite of oil and gas exploratory wells, the answer is basically because we have not been looking for it:

https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-hydrogen-earth-may-hold-vast-stores-renewable-carbon-free-fuel

Since I am also optimistic about the chances of manganese hydride Kubas-1 low pressure storage which will cost a fraction of the price of batteries per KWh of storage, including in cars, there would seem to me to be a significant possibility that the future may look very different to the battery, wind farm etc future assumed by so many,.

When fossil fuels are used up, the future is in electricity and it derivatives; electricity, when produced in surplus, can either be thrown away or stored. We can store it in batteries or store it as surplus hydrogen. If we can store it as hydrogen, it would be at the ready for hydrogen aircraft usage, seaships or any other application that makes sense.
Yes, we still must develop the hydrogen applications; however, from my reading, it appears that there are forces hell-bent to provide just that.

Hi Lad

I was noodling your comment a bit more, as we are all in a different landscape to that which we had assumed if natural hydrogen is a large exploitable resource.

I remember when I was young, many moons ago, the concern was running out, or running short of, commercially viable fossil fuels to sustain our civilisation, in line with Malthusian derived notions that as the cheapest, most readily available resources are exploited first, costs inevitably rise.

The fact that over 150 years or so the reverse had happened was largely assumed to be a temporary phenomena, due to be overwhelmed.

Hence books like Fred Hoyle's 'Energy or Extinction' which profoundly influenced my thinking as a counter to the 'Limits to Growth' meme, where the likes of Erlich even advocated not attempting to alleviate poverty as that would lead to more births, and invitable famine.

It has since been shown that knowing that your children are likely to survive means that people have far less of them, somewhere below replacement rate, whilst leaving people with high infant mortality results in more, not less, of them growing up and reproducing.

In another switch, concerns about running out of cheap fossil fuels has been replaced by a concern that there is so much of them available so cheaply, disruptions such as the Ukraine aside, that dealing with climate change and replacing them with renewables will be somewhere between difficult or impossible.

And the fuels in question were oil, gas and coal, all products of organic decomposition, if hardly ' dinosaur fossils'

They are primarily decomposed vegetation, but of course any organic matter.
That was and is being used at a far greater rate than it is being replaced, although there is plenty enough in store to parboil the planet.

But natural hydrogen appears not to be associated with decayed organic matter, and to be in no sense a fossil fuel, if I have understood what is being discovered.

And the rate it is created is far greater, it appears.

So it seems that refering to it as fossil fuel is entirely inaccurate, and deeply misleading.

Of course, I may have got this wrong.

Thoughts?