The Flint Hills are full of grass, cattle and flint. But underneath these rolling hills are various rock formations, minerals and gases. As Commentator Rex Buchanan tells us, an Australian company is currently searching for something other than gas and oil.
(Transcript)
Does Hydrogen Have a Future in Kansas?
By Rex Buchanan
Out in Wabaunsee County, in the Flint Hills south of Wamego, there’s something of a science experiment going on. A company from Australia is drilling deep holes in search of hydrogen.
This isn’t the first time hydrogen has captured attention in this part of the world. Back in the early 1980s, some wells in Geary County produced natural gas that contained larger than expected amounts of hydrogen, sometimes as much as 20% hydrogen.
That generated some excitement in geologic circles, but never really translated into much beyond that.
Until recently. An Australian company, Hytera, has drilled several wells in the area and may be looking at more. The company reported that one of those produced gas that was more than 90 percent hydrogen. This time around, the prospects for putting that hydrogen to use may be a little better.
Lots of people have forecast the creation of a hydrogen economy, mostly because hydrogen is a clean-burning fuel that doesn’t produce the greenhouse gases that come from burning most fossil fuels. Much of that conversation about hydrogen centers on manufactured hydrogen which can be produced by splitting water molecules. That is known as green hydrogen, because it’s environmentally friendly.
The hydrogen under the Flint Hills, though, is natural hydrogen, sometimes referred to as white hydrogen.
In all honesty, nobody knows the source of the Kansas hydrogen for sure. There are several theories, the simplest of which is that it comes from deep in the subsurface and has moved up through fractures in a process called outgassing. The Wabaunsee County wells sit atop a feature called the Mid-Continent Rift System where, about a billion years ago, the continent began to split apart, then stopped. The Kansas hydrogen may be related to that ancient rift.
There are other theories. Regardless of the source, the hydrogen is deep underground. More than 3000 feet. Most wells that drill for oil and gas are drilled into sedimentary rocks, like limestones and sandstones. In parts of the Flint Hills, that sedimentary cover is relatively thin, less than 2000 feet thick in places.
Beneath those sedimentary rocks are mostly igneous and metamorphic rocks, referred to as “basement rocks” because they underlie the sedimentary rocks just the way a basement lies beneath a house.
And it’s in these basement rocks that Hyterra and other companies are looking for hydrogen. If they find it in sufficient amounts, one idea is to use the hydrogen as a feedstock for, say, manufacturing ammonia for fertilizer.
Will this industry materialize or will this hydrogen boom go the way of the earlier one? Obviously Hyterra and other companies are betting that the possibilities are real Could that produce a new economic boost to the area? Maybe, but one way or another we’ll learn more about the deep subsurface, a place people have never seen and, apparently, are still trying to understand. ###
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus at the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.