Letter to Editor: Hydrogen, in its pure form, can replace fossil fuels for combustion engines without flushing “dirty” emissions into our atmosphere that add to the greenhouse umbrella. Pure hydrogen produces no emissions, except for a small amount of water.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element on our planet’s surface, but most of hydrogen is combined with other elements such as oxygen that produces water. Water has hydrogen that can be extracted by electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. The separation process that generates the pure hydrogen is not only costly, but often uses polluting fuels such as natural gas to generate the separation. Some hydrogen separation processing is fueled by renewable resources such as solar or wind. Nevertheless, the facilities used to isolate and separate the hydrogen are costly to construct and maintain.
Recently, it has become apparent that there are natural (white) hydrogen reservoirs of pure hydrogen in the Earth. Heretofore, most of the scientific world thought hydrogen was always combined with another element which meant costly separation methods were needed to generate pure hydrogen. The “hunt” is on now to find reservoirs of pure hydrogen using technology similar to what is used in the oil and gas industry, i.e., seismic mapping, satellite imaging and no doubt AI recently.
