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Reservoirs of hydrogen gas that form naturally in Earth's crust could help humans decarbonize. The challenge now is finding these accumulations and working out how best to mine them, experts say.

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00:00Could huge reservoirs of clean hydrogen help us solve climate change?
00:03Hydrogen is a clean source of energy that could one day replace fossil fuels.
00:07Combined with oxygen in fuel cells, hydrogen can produce electricity.
00:10But the problem is that most of the hydrogen today is made from natural gas,
00:14so it has a huge carbon footprint.
00:16Every year, the hydrogen industry accounts for 2.4% of global carbon emissions,
00:21pumping 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
00:24Hydrogen is used in fertilisers and rocket fuel.
00:27It's also a key component in microelectronics, and it could one day power vehicles and buildings.
00:33But how do we get more hydrogen without cooking the planet?
00:35The answer may be hiding in Earth's crust.
00:38It turns out hydrogen can form huge reservoirs underground.
00:42And scientists are looking into whether and how we can extract it.
00:45The potential that's down there is quite, quite large.
00:47And really the question is just is it in accumulations that we could actually economically recover?
00:54That's Jeffrey Ellis from the US Geological Survey.
00:56He and his colleagues estimate there are 6.2 trillion tonnes of hydrogen buried in the crust worldwide.
01:03Earlier this year, they made a map showing where we could potentially find hydrogen reservoirs in the US.
01:08It's definitely not anything about what the resource potential might be.
01:12This is just saying this place is probably better to look than that place.
01:17Companies have already drilled several wells to find hydrogen in the US, and some have shown encouraging results.
01:22I am optimistic that we will find some kind of accumulation and that there will be companies producing hydrogen at
01:31some point.
01:32You know, what that timeline looks like is really impossible to predict.
01:36Natural hydrogen could revolutionise some industries and slash CO2 emissions, but it won't solve the climate crisis by itself.
01:43It's never going to be a kind of a silver bullet situation.
01:46The needs of society are so complex and diverse that we wouldn't ever be able to fix it with just
01:52one finding.
01:54But I think it is a promising way to take the edge off or at least mitigate a considerable amount.
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