Repurposing Oil and Gas Reservoirs for Blue Hydrogen Production

Hydrogen is critical to achieving the NetZero Target set by the UK government in 2050. There have been concerted efforts to produce more hydrogen from renewable sources (green hydrogen) to reduce the impact on the environment. The arguments have been that hydrogen produced from hydrocarbon sources contribute largely to CO ₂ emission in the atmosphere causing global warming. While this is true, the reality however is that the increasing demand projections for hydrogen have not been met by green hydrogen. At present, nearly all industrial hydrogen are produced from hydrocarbon sources (Muradov 2017). CO ₂emission is a major by-product of blue hydrogen production. However, there is a need to reverse engineer the hydrogen process from hydrocarbons, explore hydrogen production directly from the reservoir and retain the accompanying CO ₂from being released into the surface. Using a depleted reservoir as feedstock, one method of doing this is by in-situ hydrogen production through thermal combustion of the hydrocarbon reservoirs.