Science Friday - Solar Activity Flares Up In 2024 | Underground Hydrogen Reserves And Clean Energy

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Look out for a total solar eclipse, more solar flares, and the Parker Solar Probe’s closest approach to the sun. Also, underground hydrogen stores have raised renewable energy hopes, but can the industry overcome the logistical hurdles of distributing it?Solar Activity Flares Up In 2024Look out 2024—this is going to be the sun’s year (for science, at least). There will be a total solar eclipse on April 8, and scientists are seeking volunteers to help them observe the event. Researchers also expect an uptick in solar activity—that means more sunspots and solar flares, which could increase the amount of auroras the Earth experiences and also might disrupt satellites and power systems on the ground. Plus, NASA’s Parker Solar probe is on track to make its closest pass to the sun yet in December, a mere 3.8 million miles from its surface.Umair Irfan, staff writer with Vox, sits down with Ira to talk about these and other science stories from this week, including why greenhouse gas emissions might actually start to fall this year, research showing that apes are able to recognize each other after decades apart, and the discovery of an enzyme that makes your pee yellow.Could Underground Hydrogen Reserves Put Clean Energy Within Reach?In 1987, a crew in the village of Bourakébougou, Mali, was digging for water. After drilling 108 meters deep, they still hadn’t found any, but the resulting borehole produced a steady stream of wind. When a driller lit a cigarette near the hole, the wind ignited, burning the worker. It took weeks for the crew to put out the blue flame, which produced no smoke, and they eventually capped the hole. It remained sealed until 2012 when a local oil and gas company reexamined it and found that the original crew had stumbled upon an underground store of naturally occurring hydrogen. They converted a Ford engine to burn the gas and soon connected it to a generator, providing electricity for the village.Hydrogen has long been touted as a source of renewable energy with the potential to replace fossil fuels to power transportation and factories. When burned, its only output is water—with no carbon emissions—making it extremely attractive as a clean energy source. But producing commercial hydrogen involves splitting water molecules into their hydrogen and oxygen components, an energy-intensive process typically powered by fossil fuels.But splitting water isn’t the only way to get hydrogen: It also occurs naturally in underground reservoirs when water heated by the planet’s mantle mixes with iron-rich rocks. The oil and gas industry hasn’t prioritized the search for these underground stores of hydrogen, but more of them have been found lately, including a potentially massive one in Lorraine, France that was discovered last year.Dr. Geoffrey Ellis, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, joins Ira to talk about hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel, why finding stores of it has been a lower priority than finding oil and natural gas, and the hurdles the industry faces as it aims to expand.Correction: In the original interview about hydrogen reserves, our guest stated that there may be as much as 500 million megatons of hydrogen in the Earth’s crust. This number is incorrect, the actual estimate is 5 million megatons. The audio has been updated to reflect the correct number.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs onsciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Did you know that hydrogen gas might be getting its big break as a clean alternative fuel source? People started realizing that actually hydrogen has been found in a lot of places where we previously really just hadn't taken notice of it. It's Friday, January 5th, which means today is Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Dee Petersmith. Last year, scientists discovered a potentially massive underground store of hydrogen gas in Lorraine, France. Why is this important? Because hydrogen is one of the cleanest burning fuels in nature.

It gives off zero greenhouse gas emissions. But currently, commercial hydrogen is made using fossil fuels. So can more of these underground stores of the gas be found and distributed at scale? But first, Iraflato talks with Vox staff writer Umer Erfan about the biggest science stories this week. Put on your sunglasses because 2024 is the sun's time to shine. Vox staff writer Umer Erfan is here to talk sun science and other big stories of the week. back, Umair. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. So 2024 is going to be a big year for the sun and we're going to have a solar eclipse. Let's get into that. But first, let's talk about

perihelian day, January 2nd, because it's sort of a teaching moment for me. It illustrates a point about why it's hotter in the summer than in the winter. That's right. The perihelian day is the point in which Earth's orbit is closest to the sun. And even though it's winter here in the northern hemisphere, that's actually on January 2nd was the point where we were actually the closest to the sun. So that indicates that our seasons don't actually have to do with how close we are to the sun, but rather how the hemispheres are oriented or tilted in the orbit. Yeah, tilt of the earth. All right, let's get into the big solar news that's coming up later. A total solar eclipse on April 8th? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think a lot of people are really excited about this. And

scientists are excited about it too because it's an opportunity to steady a lot of solar phenomenon without the sun's big bright disc blocking the way. So this year, scientists are raring to go with a lot of experiments. There are going to be chasing the eclipse with aircraft that can observe it above a lot of atmospheric distortion. But also, there are going to be recruiting scientists on the ground. There's an initiative called the Citizen Continental America Telescopic Eclipse experiment, and that's going to have 40 identical setups along the path of the eclipse here in the United States. And crucially, they're going to be training ordinary people,

community scientists and citizen scientists, to be doing these observations. And the idea is, if we can follow the eclipse, taking a lot of snapshots from the ground from different angles at different points along the path, we can gain a lot more sharper of a picture of what's going on with the sun. And the National Science Foundation and NASA

are teaming up to provide them with training and resources as well. Wow. can still apply if you look up and go to their website. That is cool. And the sun is expected to get a lot more active this year, right? Right. The sun has already been pretty active. Just on New Year's Eve, we saw a coronal mass ejection. This is basically a big bubble of plasma that sends a burst of solar wind towards the earth. The sun is actually heading towards the peak of its 11-year cycle, the solar maximum. And that leads to more sunspots and more events like flares and coronal mass ejections.

For us here on Earth, the consequences typically are very spectacular auroras, but if these events can get severe enough, they can cause geomagnetic storms, which can lead to interference with electrical systems and communication satellites. And then we also have NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which has been orbiting and studying the Sun, what, for five years? It's going to make its closest approach to the sun. That's right. In December, the year is going to end with the Parker Solar Probe, basically getting the closest any human-made object has gotten from the surface of the sun. It's also going to be one of the fastest human-made objects because the sun's gravity is going to be pulling it very fast. This probe is meant to try to answer the question of why the sun's corona is actually

hotter than its surface. This is the solar heating problem. And by getting really close and getting a close-up snapshot, scientists hope that they can actually figure out what the mechanism is. And just how close to the sun will it get? We're talking about four million miles or less. from the sun's surface, the Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun, and so that should give you a sense of just how close it's going to be. So that's about as close as you can get without landing on the sun. Right, exactly, yeah. Otherwise, you'd have to just go there at night.

Good point. Good point. All right, let's transition to a heat-related story speaking about the sun. Researchers are expecting that 2024 is going to be the hottest year on record. Didn't we just come from the hottest year on record? Yeah, it sounds like a broken record. Yes, 2023 was established to be one of the hottest years humans have measured in at least 175 years, possibly in hundreds of thousands of years. But a lot of the same factors that made 2023 so hot are still in play this year. The big one being the El Nino. This is the warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean. And that tends to drive up global temperatures. And right now, it's still flexing in the southern hemisphere. We're seeing intense heat waves in Africa. in Australia and in South America, but also the other things like the temperature cycles and the oceans, those are also amplified this year.

And, of course, humans are continuing to emit heat-trapping gases, which are heating up the planet and raising average temperatures. And I know that you've talked to several scientists studying these climate changes who say they feel a little bit of optimism and urgency on this issue. Tell me about that. Right. I was at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco last month, and that conference was just at the tail end of that big COP28 climate meeting. And I was kind of

surprised to see a lot of scientists were taking some of these observations personally that, like, you know, it was starting to have an effect on them and that raised the urgency for trying to figure out exactly what's going to happen with the planet as temperatures go up. But I was also kind of surprised to hear a lot of them were very optimistic. Some of them told me about some of their, yeah, exactly. Some of them were telling me about like how they have new tools that they can use to observe the Earth. They have a better analysis of models. And a lot of of the trajectories that they can anticipate for the planet. And they think that these tools can help us get a better handle on the problem and then work towards solving problems like greenhouse

gas emissions and methane pollution and so on. And that's one bright spot to this story, right, that greenhouse gas emissions might even fall this year. Yeah, that's right. There's a German think tank called climate analytics. And according to their estimates, if everybody on Earth continues to follow their pledges on climate change, the things that they've already promised to do, we could potentially see 2024 as the first year where emissions level off and perhaps even decline, which is the first step we need in order to start keeping climate change in check. Yeah, we're going to be needing steep reductions in the years to come if we're going to get to net zero by mid-century. Yes, we're doing more than ever, but right now still not enough in order

to keep in line with our targets. Let's talk about a story that everybody loves to talk about I'm talking dinosaurs. There's a T-Rex debate in the dinosaur world. That right? Yeah, that's right. When you find a dinosaur skeleton, how do you know it's a new species or how do you know it's a different version of an existing species? That's been a big debate with a lot of skeletons, but there's been one in particular that's been really riling up scientists for a long time. There was a Tyrannosaurus skull that was found in Montana in the 1940s. And initially scientists thought that this was actually a separate species, and they dubbed this nanotyranosaurus lancinesis. And later, though, other scientists looked at that and said, well, that's not a new species.

Maybe it's just a smaller version of the existing T-Rex that we know and love. And scientists have been going back and forth for years afterwards, and this year there was another entry in this front. There was a paper that came out this week where a research team said they analyzed the anatomy of these smaller Tyrannosaurus fossils and found that there were about 150. anatomical differences that they couldn't reconcile with the full-sized T-Rex, and according to them, that means that this is actually a separate and distinct species. Yeah, that is cool. Your next story is a potential treatment for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We know that this is a really big issue because the bacteria can be very dangerous, especially

if we don't have any running out of effective antibiotics. Right. One of the biggest public health concerns is that the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, more than a million people a year die from these infections. And if they're left unchecked, the CDC estimated that 10 million people a year could die by 2050. So we need all the tools that we can get. And this week, scientists reported that they developed a new drug that can target this bacterial infection. Hang on, it has a very long name. Carbampanem resistant acinobacter bamini. Fortunately, it's abbreviated as crab. But this is an

infection that's found oftentimes in hospitals that affects vulnerable people on immunosolum. suppressant drugs like people on ventilators or people who just received organ transplants. This is a priority one infection for the World Health Organization. But this new drug is called Zosurabalpin, and it actually uses a mechanism that scientists have never really used before when it comes to treating bacteria. Rather than interfering with the bacteria's genetic reproduction with how it replicates DNA, it actually interferes with how it transports a molecule called the lipopolysaccharide. And by using this category of mechanism, they think that this could actually be a whole new class of antibiotics that could be powerful at addressing these historically resistant infections. Oh, not just for this one infection, but a whole bunch of them.

Exactly. So this is going to be a whole new category that we can actually try leveraging to try with other infections and maybe some of the other ones that the bacteria that are resistant to some of the existing drugs that we have now. I'm still waiting for phage to be the rage again. So those phage therapies. We'll see what happens. Here's an interesting story you have about researchers learning that apes can recognize each other after decades. Who knew? Well, yeah, just like us, you know, apes have friends and they can actually keep track of them over a long time. There was a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that just came out last month. Researchers looked at 26 captive chimpanzees and bonobos at zoos around the world, and they showed them pictures of apes that they previously interacted with versus strangers. and they monitored their eyes using an infrared laser tracker. And basically what they did was try to see which apes that they looked at longer. The scientists found that the apes looked at the pictures of apes that they recognized.

So basically, apes that they shared enclosures with or that they were actually related to. In one case, there was a Bonnebo that recognized her sister, who she hadn't seen in more than 26 years. Wow. And so that shows that there's this powerful mechanism in apes that is devoted a lot of mental real estate to memory of other apes. And it shows that social cues are actually something that's a very ancient evolutionary mechanism that a lot of organisms, including, you know, hominids, are using for our survival. That is interesting. I have to stick with biology one more moment because we have a really,

this is a Science Friday only story. I'm kind of figuring scientists have finally figured out one of the great mysteries of life, and that is why is our P yellow? I'll leave it there for you to pick Sure. So the chemical that generally turns P. Yellow is called Eurolibin, but scientists for a long time weren't exactly sure how it was produced. They know it's a byproduct of how red blood cells get broken down. Our red blood cells basically cycle through every six months. But what it turned out was what scientists realized is that it's not actually being converted to this byproduct by our own cells, but rather with our gut microbiome. Basically, there are bacteria that live in our urinary tract that are doing this conversion for us and then turn it. this into a molecule that turns our urine yellow. Now, beyond just, you know, revealing something that maybe all kids are wondering, this is actually something that could be potentially used to treat illnesses. You know, we've been hearing a lot about the gut microbiome being used to treat digestive illnesses. Potentially learning more about the urinary tract microbiome could lead to cures and treatments for problems that we have with our urinary tracts. We love the microbiome

on this program. Thank you, Amer. Great stuff as always. My pleasure, Ira. Thanks for having me back. Umarifan, staff writer at Vox. Last year, scientists discovered a potentially massive deposit of hydrogen gas in Lorraine, France. Now, why is this important? Because hydrogen is one of the cleanest burning fuels in nature. It produces no, I mean zero greenhouse gases when it burns. I mean, when you add hydrogen to oxygen, what do you get? H2O, water, and heat. That's it, pure and simple. Hydrogen is the main ingredient in fuel cells which produce clean green electricity. You may have heard of hydrogen as a potential clean energy fuel, but here's the rub. Its normal production process is expensive.

It usually requires fossil fuels to make it, ultimately making it a not so clean fuel. That's why there is excitement in the world of hydrogen these days because of the discovery of underground, naturally occurring reservoirs of hydrogen like the one found in France. Historically ignored by the oil industry, these reservoirs have seen increased interest from hydrogen fuel startups as a sustainable alternative energy source. But despite its potential to replace fossil fuels, logistical challenges remain. But could this new method of acquiring the clean gas help elevate hydrogen fuel into the mainstream? Here to tell us all about the current. state of what is called white hydrogen, natural hydrogen, and the hurdles its industry faces is my

guest, like to Jeffrey Ellis Research Geologist at the famous U.S. Geological Survey. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here with you. I mean, why have I never heard about large deposits of hydrogen before? Yeah, it's really a curious thing. And in fact, if you would ask me about this four years ago, I would have told you that natural hydrogen accumulations don't exist in the subsurface. And I think that one reason for it is that we rarely find natural hydrogen in association with natural gas when we explore for oil and gas. And hydrogen leaks out very easily, and so you can't just trap it in places for very long. But there was an accidental discovery of an accumulation of natural hydrogen in the country

of Mali in West Africa about 10 years ago. And then as news of this discovery got out, people started looking back at old records and realizing that actually hydrogen. had been found in a lot of places where we previously really just hadn't taken notice of it. Really? And part of the reason I think also is that there really wasn't a market for it. So when oil and gas companies drilled a well and if they found hydrogen, it wasn't something that they were targeting and it wasn't something they could sell.

And so they walked away from that. And so now people are looking back through old company records and recognizing that, oh, they found this in a number of places. And in fact, just late last year, a company in Australia, I drilled two wells in the state of South Australia on site. that historically 100 years ago companies had found hydrogen in the subsurface. And again, they found high concentrations more than 70% hydrogen gas in these reservoirs. No kidding. Yeah. How, so, okay, tell me how hydrogen is produced underground. I don't understand that.

Yeah. So, in fact, there are dozens of natural processes that are capable of generating hydrogen in nature. But in order to form economic accumulations of hydrogen, you need a process that can generate fairly large volumes. And so there's really only a handful of processes that we think would be able to do that. The first one involves the reduction of water by iron-rich minerals. And we see high concentrations of hydrogen being generated there naturally. And this process actually occurs in many other places in the subsurface in the Earth's crust. Wow. And the advantage of this is that it's made naturally, right? It's not made from fossil fuel. as hydrogen is done industrially.

No, absolutely. That's totally correct. In some ways, it's so much analogous to geothermal energy because you have hot water that has all this energy in it. But in this case, that energy is then converted into hydrogen, essentially, which is that a gas that we could use as an energy resource. Is it possible to actually have an impact on our use as a green fuel? I mean, is there enough of it? Yeah, that's a great question.

and certainly one that we all would like the answer to. And I've done some work with a colleague of mine trying to put together a global model of what we think the in-place resource might be. And what's most likely to be there comes out to the order of about 5 million megatons. And so a megaton is a million metric tons. Is that a lot when we talk about where it stays in relations to oil or natural gas? Yeah, great question. So to give you some context, today in the world, we generate. about 100 megatons per year of hydrogen from fossil fuels, as you noted.

And it's thought that going forward that most of that hydrogen is actually used to upgrade petroleum in the petroleum refining process. But as we go forward, as we move away from fossil fuels, we'll be using less hydrogen for petroleum processing, but actually more for energy things, things like aviation and perhaps marine shipping and things like that. And it's thought that to get to net zero, we'll probably need about 500. megatons per year of hydrogen to meet the demand for these hard-to-abate emissions. And so, as I said, we think there may be as much as 5 million megatons of hydrogen in the

Earth's crust, but we'll need maybe 500 megatons per year. But there's a really important consideration when we think about this global model. This is for the entire Earth's crust. And so most of that hydrogen is going to be inaccessible. It's just going to be in accumulations that are much too deep or too far offshore or much too small that they would never be economic to actually to drill and produce. But if we think for a second, if maybe just 2% of that 5 million megatons were actually shallow enough and big enough accumulations that could be economic, that would actually

supply all of that 500 megatons per year for 200 years. Wow. And so it seems that actually, in fact, it's very, very likely that there is a potential for a significant contribution there. But so far, it's just startups, small little companies that are looking for these underground stores of hydrogen. The big companies are staying on the sidelines, right? Are they waiting for it to become mainstream and then they'll buy it out? Yeah, that's fairly accurate assessment. Yeah, they're taking a wait and see attitude.

This is viewed as high risks, certainly at this point. And so the venture capitalists and the startup companies are the ones that are willing to take those kind of risk. The big companies are waiting, watching, and then they'll move in later, I think, when they see that the risk has reached a lower level. But there are other challenges, right? Once you get it up and out of the ground, how you store it and move it is also a challenge. Yeah, so hydrogen does have some important limitations. As you noted, it is a very clean fuel. It's very attractive from that standpoint, but it has a fairly low energy density per unit volume. And so in order to efficiently transport it, you need to either compress it or liquefy it, then you can more efficiently

transport it. And of course, that requires more energy input, so that reduces the value of the product. Now, one important consideration about natural hydrogen is you mentioned that you'd have to store the hydrogen, but in the case of natural hydrogen, it's already stored in the ground. And so this has the advantage that you can simply open a valve when you need it and then close the valve and leave it underground. So it has the built-in storage aspect. Do we know how to search for it? You mean, you said it was discovered accidentally, right? Yes. Yeah, in fact, all of the discoveries to date have been accidental. There's only been one well that was drilled explicitly targeting natural hydrogen exploration. And they did find natural hydrogen, but we still don't know exactly what amount

there. The company is still working on testing that well. And so, yeah, so far, we've only really had these accidental discoveries. And so the short answer is no, we don't really know how to explore for it yet. That's something that we're working on now. We have groups in France and Australia and now here in the U.S. The U.S.GS, in fact, has a big program now working on trying to understand how can we better understand the resource potential and then also develop tools and techniques and strategies for exploring for natural hydrogen. So is it being taken seriously now? I think it absolutely is.

Yeah, just in the last couple of years, it's really moved from a fringe topic where a very small group of researchers working on this to it seems to have moved more into the mainstream and gotten wider acceptance among geoscientists as they learn about it and understand the potential here. So you're optimistic about this. I am optimistic.

I think there's a lot we need to learn. There's a lot of work that we need to do, but there's great potential here, and we just have barely scratched the surface yet. And so we need to do the work to really realize what that potential is, but there's a lot of potential. Yeah, you've barely scratched the underground, so to speak. That's, I guess, a geology bad joke. Yeah.

And when you're talking about using this hydrogen, are you thinking about burning it or using it to make electricity in, like, fuel cells? Yeah, so I think most people think that applications that can easily, be electrified things like we now have efficient battery-powered cars that can run out electricity. And so we probably won't use hydrogen for running our cars anytime soon. But there are sectors like aviation that from what I understand, nobody thinks that we're really going to be able to have 747s that are battery-powered that can fly across the Atlantic Ocean. And so they're looking at hydrogen for fueling things like that, aviation, long-distance marine shipping. And so in those

applications, it would likely be just directly burning hydrogen or running it through a fuel cell and then running electric motors that way. But if we found significant resources underground, I think that then that would broaden the application, especially if there are resources that are close by to places where we need to use the energy. What country is way ahead in hydrogen development? Yeah. So I would say really Australia is probably the leader right now where we see the most activity going on. There's a number of research groups that are working actively. And as I mentioned, we had a couple wells that were just drilled late last year that made new discoveries. So yeah, Australia is certainly very active. But there's also exploration going on in France. As you noted,

the discovery in Lorraine. And they recently permitted exploration license in the Pyrenees in south of France. And Brazil is also another area that's quite active. And in the U.S., actually. We've been kind of late to the game, actually. The French and the Australians have been doing research in this area much longer than we have. But companies have moved into the U.S. because it's a good climate. We have a lot of infrastructure for drilling wells, companies that are capable of doing this kind of work and a lot of experience in working in the subsurface, as well as a relatively immuneable regulatory environment. So the companies are interested in working here. So we've had this one well drilled in Nebraska and then there'd be a couple more wells drilled in Kansas sometime later this

this year. Wow. Jeffrey, this is exciting stuff. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Oh, you're very welcome. I'm really happy to share it. Dr. Jeffrey Ellis, research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. That's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Full of Samirs, Daniel Johnson. Beth Rami. Nehima Ahmed. Next time we're taking a special look at the years of the Endangered Species Act, the plants and animals, its help save, and what's next for the law? I'm side fry producer, D. Peter Schmidt. Have a great weekend.