Somebody asked if hydrogen wells are a thing. Yes, they are a real thing and have been known for some time. The reaction that produces the hydrogen has been known even longer.
4046. For Obtaining Hydrogen in Quantities
Place iron wire in a gun-barrel, or a porcelain tube, open at both ends, to one of which attach a retort containing water, and to the other a bent tube, connecting with a pneumatic trough. The gun-barrel must now be heated to redness, and the water in the retort brought into a state of brisk ebullition, when the vapor will be decomposed, the oxygen being absorbed by the iron, and the hydrogen escaping into the gas receiver. The gas evolved may be purified, if desired, by passing it through alcohol, &c.
—Dick’s Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1872
So where do you find iron? Underground. Where do you find water? Underground. Where do you find searing heat? Underground. So there you have it. You can think of the gun-barrel as all the stupid worthless rocks layered on top of the good and useful iron-bearing rocks, the iron wire as the iron-bearing ( Fe[II]) rocks, the water in the retort as water seeping down from the surface, and good old mother earth as the heat source. Result, hydrogen and further oxidized rocks. (Another path to hydrogen production is radiolysis of water by natural radioactivity, but that is a lesser source.)
Petroleum seeps have been known since ancient times, mainly as a source of pitch. Hydrogen seeps have been known since ancient times, too, as at Mount Chimaera in Turkey, which “breathes out fire on summer nights,” as Isidore of Seville said. Not that people knew the exhalation was hydrogen, of course. But we know.
So why has the abundance of natural hydrogen been doubted, and what exists so little known? Mainly because the petroleum industry doesn’t drill deep wells in strata where native hydrogen is generated. So it’s a classic example of thinking something doesn’t exist because you’ve been looking in the wrong places. Like when you leave your cell phone in your girlfriend’s shoe.
What are the right places? Precambrian continental shield rocks, mainly. Mid-oceanic ridges. Places where nobody but a lunatic would or could drill for oil.
Anyway, my secret process accelerates hydrogen production by impeding the buffering effect of hematite and magnetite and accelerating the reaction by other means. This is the stuff Jing wants to know about. But I’m not talking.
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