Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources

Geologic hydrogen could be a low-carbon primary energy resource; however, the magnitude of Earth's subsurface endowment has not yet been assessed. Knowledge of the occurrence and behavior of natural hydrogen on Earth has been combined with information from geologic analogs to construct a mass balance model to predict the resource potential. Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [10³ to 10¹⁰ million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10⁶ Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction (e.g., 1 × 10⁵ Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years. This amount of hydrogen contains more energy (~1.4 × 10¹⁶ MJ) than all proven natural gas reserves on Earth (~8.4 × 10¹⁵ MJ). Study results demonstrate that further research into understanding the potential for geologic hydrogen resources is merited.