Scientists said on Tuesday they have developed a way of extracting hydrogen from oil without releasing greenhouse gases - a breakthrough they hailed as a "silver bullet" for cleaner energy and the climate. Unlike petrol and diesel, hydrogen produces no pollution when burned. It is already used by some car manufacturers to power vehicles and may also be burned to generate electricity. But until now the wide-scale roll-out of hydrogen technology has been prohibited by the high cost of separating it from hydrocarbons. Currently the vast majority of hydrogen used for vehicles is derived from natural gas, the extraction process of which produces planet-warming methane.

Now a group of Canadian engineers say they have come up with a method of getting hydrogen directly from oil sands and oil fields, while leaving carbon dioxide and methane in the ground. The team behind the research, which was unveiled at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona, said the technology had the potential to supply Canada's entire electricity requirement for the next 330 years - all without releasing any greenhouse gases.

"Low-cost hydrogen from oil fields with no emissions can power the whole world using mostly existing infrastructure," Grant Stem, CEO of Proton Technologies, which is commercialising the extraction method, told AFP. "This is the silver bullet for clean energy and clean climate." With global energy demand rising in lockstep with emissions, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change says the world needs to work rapidly to curb greenhouse gases or risk dangerous temperature increases.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019