This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element gets a lot of hype: hydrogen. “If you burn it, it produces only water, with no impact on the environment,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, a professor in the Department of Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna in Italy. Hydrogen’s supporters believe it can be a solution for cleaning up everything from transport to agriculture to heavy industry.
But its green credentials only stack up if you can produce it without emitting carbon. And this is why some are getting very excited about geological or “gold”