Can we mine Earth's hydrogen?

Could huge reservoirs of clean hydrogen help us solve climate change? Hydrogen is a clean source of energy that could one day replace fossil fuels. Combined with oxygen in fuel cells, hydrogen can produce electricity. But the problem is that most of the hydrogen today is made from natural gas, so it has a huge carbon footprint. Every year, the hydrogen industry accounts for 2.4% of global carbon emissions, pumping 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Hydrogen is used in fertilisers and rocket fuel. It's also a key component in microelectronics, and it could one day power vehicles and buildings. But how do we get more hydrogen without cooking the planet? The answer may be hiding in Earth's crust. It turns out hydrogen can form huge reservoirs underground, and scientists are looking into whether and how we can extract it. The potential that's down there is quite, quite large, and really the question is just is it in accumulations that we could actually economically recover? That's Jeffrey Ellis from the U.S. Geological Survey. He and his colleagues estimate there are 6.2 trillion tonnes of hydrogen buried in the crust worldwide. Earlier this year, they made a map showing where we could potentially find hydrogen reservoirs in the U.S. It's definitely not anything about what the resource potential might be. This is just saying this place is probably better to look than that place. Companies have already drilled several wells to find hydrogen in the U.S., and some have shown encouraging results. I am optimistic that we will find some kind of accumulation and that there will be companies producing hydrogen at some point. You know, what that timeline looks like is really impossible to predict. Natural hydrogen could revolutionize some industries and slash CO2 emissions, but it won't solve the climate crisis by itself. It's never going to be a kind of a silver boot situation. The needs of society are so complex and diverse that we wouldn't ever be able to fix it with just one finding. But I think it is a promising way to take the edge off, or at least mitigate a considerable amount.