Comment by c22
13 hours ago
The article acknowledges:
> Hydrogen ... currently takes more energy to make than it yields, and the cheapest and most common way is by reacting steam with methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
> It’s possible to make zero-carbon hydrogen by splitting water with electrolyzers powered by renewable energy. But in most cases, the process is too expensive to be economical...
and also says,
> A back-of-the-envelope calculation convinced him that the cost of stimulated geologic hydrogen could easily compete with hydrogen made from methane. “If we get the technology right,” he concludes, “this could be huge.”
It's pretty clear from reading the article that actual yields will be highly dependent on discovering ideal mining sites, but the fact that people are building startups to research and develop this kind of implies someone ran some numbers and thought it was worthwhile enough to be "newsworthy".
thank you for actually reading the article and realizing that the team of energy scientists + engineers doing this have thought more carefully about the viability of the process than a HN commenter that learned about it this morning