Rocks that were formed under the ocean floor through fast spreading tectonic plates may be a good source of hydrogen gas, discover Duke University researchers in the US.
Scientists believe that hydrogen gas (H2) has led to the creation of life on our planet. The hydrogen under the oceans can prove to be a wealth of clean energy as well as substitute fossil fuels, as it releases energy when burned, releasing water, not carbon.
Stacey L Worman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, led the study as a doctoral student at Duke. She said that massive amounts of hydrogen gas may be getting formed inside the tectonic plates, "regions that collectively underlie roughly half of the Mid-Ocean Ridge."
Her model assesses a number of parameters, such as "the ratio of a site's tectonic spreading rate to the thickness of serpentinized rocks" even while it calculates the hydrogen gas that has been created and stored under the seafloor.
"A major benefit of this work is that it provides a testable, tectonic-based model for not only identifying where free hydrogen gas may be forming beneath the seafloor, but also at what rate, and what the total scale of this formation may be, which on a global basis is massive," professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke and co-author of the study, Lincoln F. Pratson, said in a press release.
After the tectonic plates lift the serpentinized rocks, they get chemically altered by water and create molecules of free hydrogen gas as a by-product.
However, after the gas is produced inside the ocean, it is not clear where the gas goes.
"Maybe microbes are eating it, or maybe it's accumulating in reservoirs under the seafloor. We still don't know. Of course, such accumulations would have to be quite significant to make hydrogen gas produced by serpentinization a viable fuel source," Worman added.
