US scientists say there may be 5.6 trillion tons of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. And only two percent of this volume would be enough to supply humanity with energy for the next two hundred years. This is also the case with increasing energy consumption. According to scientists from the US Geological Survey, hydrogen could free us from dependence on fossil fuels.
While the study, published in the journal Science, acknowledges that most of these hydrogen reserves may be unavailable, he estimates that only two percent would last humanity for two centuries. Hydrogen is predicted to make up almost a third of energy supplies in many industries in the future, and its global demand will increase fivefold.
Geologists have recently discovered vast natural reserves of hydrogen gas in Albania and West Africa. Now scientists are using a model that takes into account the rate at which hydrogen is produced underground by natural processes to estimate the volume of gas that would could have been trapped underground.
Geologists estimate that a billion to ten trillion tons of hydrogen can be trapped in the subsurface layers. According to them, the energy released by such a quantity of hydrogen would be almost twice as large as all the known reserves of natural gas on the planet.
“Extracting just two percent of the estimated most likely reserves at the site would meet all of the projected global hydrogen demand for about 200 years,” reports a new study.
