Professor Dave Waltham,  Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway, University London has contributed his research insight to an article published by the Energy Institute's New Energy World magazine, titled 'High hopes: Could south-west Europe be the Saudi Arabia of natural hydrogen?'

The article considers current natural hydrogen exploration and where – or even whether – a significant number of rich hydrogen accumulations really do lie under our feet just waiting to be found.

There’s a big effort to find new, commercially exploitable deposits of hydrogen. Ongoing exploration stretches across more than 20 countries, from Australia to Spain and on to Canada, calling for a science-based approach.

Dave Waltham, a Professor in Geophysics with extensive experience in numerical and mathematical modelling of Earth-processes, writes,

“Hydrogen is an increasingly important component of the energy transition. But where will we get it? The cheapest, cleanest source may turn out to be natural accumulations of hydrogen underground. One small village in Mali burns ‘natural hydrogen’ to generate its electricity. But, so far, that’s the sole example of real-world exploitation. For now, we don’t know whether natural hydrogen fields are large enough, or common enough, to make a significant impact on the developing hydrogen economy, “

To read the full article please click here for New Energy World (external link)

 Dave Waltham and his team at Royal Holloway's Centre for Energy and Resources (CERES) research centre are currently developing basin models of hydrogen energy systems, although this work remains at an early stage.