The Albanian mine: "The researchers found that the gas bubbling from the pool was more than 80 per cent hydrogen, with methane and a small amount of nitrogen mixed in. It was flowing at a rate of 11 tonnes per year, almost an order of magnitude greater than any other flows of hydrogen gas measured from single-point sources elsewhere on Earth’s surface. To determine the source of the gas, the researchers also modelled different geological scenarios that could produce such a flow. They found the most likely scenario was that the gas was coming from a deeper reservoir of hydrogen accumulated in a fault beneath the mine. Based on the geometry of the fault, they estimate this reservoir contains at least 5000 to 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen. “It’s one of the largest volumes of natural hydrogen that has ever been measured,” says Eric Gaucher, an independent geochemist focused on natural hydrogen. But it still isn’t a huge amount, says Geoffrey Ellis at the US Geological Survey."
This is the second or third time someone found modest amounts of hydrogen underground, and then started making claims of vast quantities being available. There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now. The "gold hydrogen" enthusiasts claim well depths of a few kilometers are enough. Oil and natural gas wells routinely go that deep.
So far, nobody has a "natural hydrogen" well producing. Even though this startup [1] said they would have one by the end of 2024. Their "news" releases are all about going to meetings, making deals, and such. Not much mention of drilling, unlike the statements they made a few years ago.
There's one well in Mali which yields enough hydrogen to run an auto engine driving a generator. That's it for actual output. That deposit been known since the late 1980s, and invested in since 2012.
Exploratory wells were drilled in 2018. Results from that are, somehow, hazy.[2] Not finding followups since 2018.
> There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now.
I'd believe it because geologists are thorough. I'd also not be that shocked if nobody was testing for hydrogen because it is a gas. I'd imagine it is possible to drill through a hydrogen deposit and not even notice it is there. Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
I suppose if they found a real lode of the stuff it might accidentally blow up the drilling crew. That'd make headlines.
> Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
Yep .. checking for everything really - the costs for drilling bore samples are high enough that it's commonplace to log bores to have the data to store or onsell even if specific targets aren't found.
The major explorers have petabytes of surface chemisty, seismic, EM, borehole samples and logs, radiometrics, magnetics, gravity, etc. in primary archives scattered across the globe and routinely digitised and merged into private reserve estimations.
Yeah I've sat on an exploration drill rig and I have a vague grasp of the physics and chemistry. That is why I'm a little sceptical - what exactly would the process be for identifying a hydrogen resource?
We're dealing with a light gas that would probably escape from core samples very quickly; especially under normal conditions. They'd need to get an accurate read during core drilling or be able to identify specific a non-magnetic gas with density of 0 underground which sounds pretty challenging - especially since it seems to have no special commercial interest for most of history. Is there a standard that you have to have a gas monitor attached to the drill hole? I don't remember anyone pointing one out to me or complaining that theirs was broken but stranger things have happened. Can hydrogen even be detected with magnets or surface chemistry analysis?
The way sound waves bounce around underground makes it quite challenging to pick things up. The geologists have put a lot of effort into this exact problem but prospecting for hydrogen sounds damn difficult and I'd be surprised if we had global coverage for it.
In the drill core, even after gas escapes, there'd be specific types of capping material that can trap hydrogen under pressure, below that there'd be a reduced density of more porous material.
Hydrogen prospectors looking backwards at drill core logs would be looking for signature transitions and retesting fields, looking again at the seismic results to find ROI's in historic results.
Des FitzGerald on geophysical exploration for naturally occurring hydrogen. Des outlines the current state of exploration for natural hydrogen and discusses geological mechanisms for hydrogen generation.
If they have to theorycraft a resource based on traces of where the hydrogen used to be, but no longer is then it is entirely possible that big hydrogen deposits have just been missed. That seems to be literally what the article today is about. For 90% of minerals they can just say what is in the drill sample is what is underground, exploration geologists aren't generally in the business of imagining what might have been in the core independently of what was directly measured.
If we need to apply specific theories to the exploration samples then the "There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now" logic doesn't hold. Since the evidence has to be interpreted before we can know if there is a deposit it is quite possible that it was interpreted wrongly on a mass scale. You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on.
I'm not saying geologists are ignorant, just that Animats' logic doesn't hold for hydrogen. There could be massive deposits that we technically already have the data for except nobody ever bothered to look for it.
The number of holes made to probe the dimensions of oil and gas fields greatly exceeds the number of holes made to get oil out .. and the number of holes drilled to estimate mineral reserves (copper, gold, kimberlite (diamonds), bauxite, etc. etc. etc) is large in comparision to oil wells.
The point of all those holes is to log layers, horizons, sediments, etc and to map out the geology of very large areas .. much much much larger than the combined bore hole diameter areas.
Of course boreholes are the final step in "proofing" siesmic results that map out many layers across large areas and allow geologists to rule out many areas as not having the structures required to trap gases.
> stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [10^3 to 10^10 million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10^6 Mt.
As a former physicist, I find it hard to take anyone who dares to give two significant figures on such a terrible estimate seriously. At the very least tells me they don’t know shit about statistics. And whoever is clueless enough to repeat the figure in such a misleading title should be banned from scientific publishing.
When I started doing math seriously, I also feel strongly in love with "existence proof", where you were asked to prove that "something" existed, and any logical reasoning was considered fair game, even if you never found the "something".
Then, I started doing applied maths, where proving the existence of a solution is a nice bonus, but finding an approximate solution is the goal.
Here, we have an example of a funny proof of existence that does not tell you where to drill.
Some carbon was emitted during the publishing of this model - that will be so much more carbon to offset if we ever end up actually finding some real hydrogen.
This article the crux, is this about extractable hydrogen or some proxy about it (vs just "interesting number"), to the last sentence.
The abstract is again the best summary:
"[...] Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [103 to 1010 million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 106 Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction (e.g., 1 × 105 Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years."
• I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction. I'd expect to be pretty much evenly spread in all directions, so any effects on the orbit of what remains caused by the hydrogen leaving in any particular direction would be cancelled out by the effects of hydrogen leaving in the opposite direction.
• We are talking about 5.6 x 10^12 tons of hydrogen. The mass of the Earth is 5.972 x 10^21 tons. The mass of the hydrogen is about 1 billionth the mass of Earth. That's about the ratio of the mass of a grain of rice to the mass of the International Space Station.
Tossing that small of mass away, even if it was all in one direction, is not going to do anything significant to your orbit unless you tossed it away with very very very high velocity. A naive calculation just using Newtonian mechanics suggests it would have to be much faster than the speed of light to carry enough momentum away to matter. I'll leave it to others to figure out what fraction of the speed of light it would have to be going to have equivalent momentum.
This is one of those comments where I'm not sure what the downvotes meant. Do people think a downvote signifies a 'no' answer to a yes/no question, or are they trying to say "I don't appreciate it when people ask questions"?
> Hydrogen escape on Earth occurs at ~500 km altitude at the exobase (the lower border of the exosphere) where gases are collisionless. Hydrogen atoms at the exobase exceeding the escape velocity escape to space without colliding into another gas particle.
> For a hydrogen atom to escape from the exobase, it must first travel upward through the atmosphere from the troposphere. Near ground level, hydrogen in the form of H2O, H2, and CH4 travels upward in the homosphere through turbulent mixing, which dominates up to the homopause. At about 17 km altitude, the cold tropopause (known as the "cold trap") freezes out most of the H2O vapor that travels through it, preventing the upward mixing of some hydrogen. In the upper homosphere, hydrogen bearing molecules are split by ultraviolet photons leaving only H and H2 behind. The H and H2 diffuse upward through the heterosphere to the exobase where they escape the atmosphere by Jeans thermal escape and/or a number of suprathermal mechanisms.
I can’t decide if it is a good point, or an irrelevant point! Hah.
No free/unbound hydrogen from the surface is going to escape directly that way. It will bind with oxygen or the like long beforehand and become water.
But yes, a small portion of those molecules may later be broken down and may escape the planet that way. But statistically, very few of them are likely to do so.
If two mass separated, it will affect their velocity.
But does this hydrogen escapee like a rocket gas. Or it is just a restructure or a bit move of CoG.
One also note if it not too fast escape as earth rotate the overall effect depend upon the uniformity of the “escape” as the net effect can be zero or more depends upon its location on earth. Mostly as it is not align with the tangent of travel, it will affect.
How much as point out relates also the mass. But even the minor variations make the polar star changes. It will have affect.
If extracted and fully oxidized, the water would raise ocean levels maybe 4 cm.
The Earth also includes vast quantities of reduced metals like iron, more than enough to react with all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Perhaps some way could be found to exploit that, at least a little bit.
All it would take would be for photosynthesis to be terminated, and then wait a few million years for erosion and volcanism to expose enough reduced material to soak up the atmosphere's oxygen.
What's weird is that, as far as I know, there's no feedback mechanism that's been identified that keeps the atmosphere's O2 level stable. It may have been stable since the Cambrian just because if it hadn't been, we wouldn't have evolved, an anthropic argument.
I went with what you wrote since it has been a while since I took general chemistry, but upon doing a simple lookup, I found that your terminology is wrong. In redox reactions, the oxidizing agent is reduced while the reducing agent is oxidized:
Here, the metal is the reducing agent. If it were somehow reduced in redox reactions, there not much chance of it being oxidized as that would make the metal an oxidizing agent that wants electrons, not a reducing agent that gives electrons.
That said, these things have already been oxidized (not reduced) and thus there is no chance to have them consume oxygen. You need the pre-oxidized material in order to be able to consume oxygen.
Finally, you failed to answer my question regarding the relevance of these metals to atmospheric oxygen. They should be inert having been oxidized long ago. That is why rocks are full of oxides, such as silicon dioxide and aluminum oxide, despite being composed of metal.
I think there's confusion here between "is reduced" meaning "has been reduced" vs. "and is then reduced".
Iron in the Earth is mostly in a reduced state (either Fe(+2) or even elemental iron). Upon exposure to the atmosphere it is oxidized to Fe(+3), changing from a more reduced to a more oxidized state (and similarly for other things in reduced states, such as manganese and sulfur and organics).
The Albanian mine: "The researchers found that the gas bubbling from the pool was more than 80 per cent hydrogen, with methane and a small amount of nitrogen mixed in. It was flowing at a rate of 11 tonnes per year, almost an order of magnitude greater than any other flows of hydrogen gas measured from single-point sources elsewhere on Earth’s surface. To determine the source of the gas, the researchers also modelled different geological scenarios that could produce such a flow. They found the most likely scenario was that the gas was coming from a deeper reservoir of hydrogen accumulated in a fault beneath the mine. Based on the geometry of the fault, they estimate this reservoir contains at least 5000 to 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen. “It’s one of the largest volumes of natural hydrogen that has ever been measured,” says Eric Gaucher, an independent geochemist focused on natural hydrogen. But it still isn’t a huge amount, says Geoffrey Ellis at the US Geological Survey."
This is the second or third time someone found modest amounts of hydrogen underground, and then started making claims of vast quantities being available. There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now. The "gold hydrogen" enthusiasts claim well depths of a few kilometers are enough. Oil and natural gas wells routinely go that deep.
So far, nobody has a "natural hydrogen" well producing. Even though this startup [1] said they would have one by the end of 2024. Their "news" releases are all about going to meetings, making deals, and such. Not much mention of drilling, unlike the statements they made a few years ago.
There's one well in Mali which yields enough hydrogen to run an auto engine driving a generator. That's it for actual output. That deposit been known since the late 1980s, and invested in since 2012. Exploratory wells were drilled in 2018. Results from that are, somehow, hazy.[2] Not finding followups since 2018.
The hype is strong here.[3]
[1] https://helios-aragon.com/news/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
[3] https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-8518695...
> There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now.
I'd believe it because geologists are thorough. I'd also not be that shocked if nobody was testing for hydrogen because it is a gas. I'd imagine it is possible to drill through a hydrogen deposit and not even notice it is there. Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
I suppose if they found a real lode of the stuff it might accidentally blow up the drilling crew. That'd make headlines.
> Are we sure that the prospectors were checking for hydrogen? All over the globe?
Yep .. checking for everything really - the costs for drilling bore samples are high enough that it's commonplace to log bores to have the data to store or onsell even if specific targets aren't found.
The major explorers have petabytes of surface chemisty, seismic, EM, borehole samples and logs, radiometrics, magnetics, gravity, etc. in primary archives scattered across the globe and routinely digitised and merged into private reserve estimations.
There are many drill hole logging and interp software packages kicking about, eg: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/industries/mining-resou...
Yeah I've sat on an exploration drill rig and I have a vague grasp of the physics and chemistry. That is why I'm a little sceptical - what exactly would the process be for identifying a hydrogen resource?
We're dealing with a light gas that would probably escape from core samples very quickly; especially under normal conditions. They'd need to get an accurate read during core drilling or be able to identify specific a non-magnetic gas with density of 0 underground which sounds pretty challenging - especially since it seems to have no special commercial interest for most of history. Is there a standard that you have to have a gas monitor attached to the drill hole? I don't remember anyone pointing one out to me or complaining that theirs was broken but stranger things have happened. Can hydrogen even be detected with magnets or surface chemistry analysis?
The way sound waves bounce around underground makes it quite challenging to pick things up. The geologists have put a lot of effort into this exact problem but prospecting for hydrogen sounds damn difficult and I'd be surprised if we had global coverage for it.
In the drill core, even after gas escapes, there'd be specific types of capping material that can trap hydrogen under pressure, below that there'd be a reduced density of more porous material.
Hydrogen prospectors looking backwards at drill core logs would be looking for signature transitions and retesting fields, looking again at the seismic results to find ROI's in historic results.
Hence:
Geological signatures: https://academic.oup.com/jge/article/21/4/1242/7676857
Same authors, restricted access (for now): Geologic hydrogen: An emerging role of mining geophysics in new energy exploration - https://library.seg.org/doi/10.1190/image2024-4100417.1
Old people rambling:
~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14432471.2024.2...etc.
If they have to theorycraft a resource based on traces of where the hydrogen used to be, but no longer is then it is entirely possible that big hydrogen deposits have just been missed. That seems to be literally what the article today is about. For 90% of minerals they can just say what is in the drill sample is what is underground, exploration geologists aren't generally in the business of imagining what might have been in the core independently of what was directly measured.
If we need to apply specific theories to the exploration samples then the "There's been so much well-drilling worldwide for other materials that if hydrogen was anywhere near the surface, it would have been found by now" logic doesn't hold. Since the evidence has to be interpreted before we can know if there is a deposit it is quite possible that it was interpreted wrongly on a mass scale. You're linking to papers suggesting innovative novel methods for finding the stuff or talking about rechecking based on the latest theoretical understanding, suggesting we don't actually have a big historic archive to draw on.
I'm not saying geologists are ignorant, just that Animats' logic doesn't hold for hydrogen. There could be massive deposits that we technically already have the data for except nobody ever bothered to look for it.
We don't discover gold or diamond mines when drilling for oil but that's not to suggest we don't believe they don't exist.
The number of holes made to get oil out is quite small in comparison to the surface area of the globe.
The number of holes made to probe the dimensions of oil and gas fields greatly exceeds the number of holes made to get oil out .. and the number of holes drilled to estimate mineral reserves (copper, gold, kimberlite (diamonds), bauxite, etc. etc. etc) is large in comparision to oil wells.
The point of all those holes is to log layers, horizons, sediments, etc and to map out the geology of very large areas .. much much much larger than the combined bore hole diameter areas.
Of course boreholes are the final step in "proofing" siesmic results that map out many layers across large areas and allow geologists to rule out many areas as not having the structures required to trap gases.
The figure in the title expressed in normal units
5.6 * 10^15 kilograms
Thanks, I didn’t notice the second million and wondered why a day’s supply of energy would be scientific news.
They wasted an opportunity to get a third thing meaning "million" into the same number with 5.6 x 10^6 million megagrams.
I think you meant to say 1.1 trillion elephants
2.24 billion olympic sized swimming pools
> stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [10^3 to 10^10 million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10^6 Mt.
As a former physicist, I find it hard to take anyone who dares to give two significant figures on such a terrible estimate seriously. At the very least tells me they don’t know shit about statistics. And whoever is clueless enough to repeat the figure in such a misleading title should be banned from scientific publishing.
When I started doing math seriously, I also feel strongly in love with "existence proof", where you were asked to prove that "something" existed, and any logical reasoning was considered fair game, even if you never found the "something".
Then, I started doing applied maths, where proving the existence of a solution is a nice bonus, but finding an approximate solution is the goal.
Here, we have an example of a funny proof of existence that does not tell you where to drill.
Some carbon was emitted during the publishing of this model - that will be so much more carbon to offset if we ever end up actually finding some real hydrogen.
This article the crux, is this about extractable hydrogen or some proxy about it (vs just "interesting number"), to the last sentence.
The abstract is again the best summary:
"[...] Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource [103 to 1010 million metric tons (Mt)] with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 106 Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction (e.g., 1 × 105 Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years."
There is around 1 trillion tons of oxygen in the atmosphere, if you burned all the hydrogen you would deplete all of the oxygen on earth.
Let's not.
Although realistically we only need a tiny fraction of the hydrogen.
On the plus side if we use up all the oxygen, we’ll have solved the problem of burning fossil fuels producing CO2!
If we use up all the oxygen, we'll have solved every social or political problem that currently plagues humanity. I think it's a good strategy.
FWIW, I consider extinction avoidance also a political problem
Closer to 10^15 tonnes, so a few orders of magnitude out.
If the hydrogen gas escaped and left the atmosphere, would it affect the orbit around the sun, possibly causing the Earth to cool too much?
I'd expect not, for 2 reasons.
• I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction. I'd expect to be pretty much evenly spread in all directions, so any effects on the orbit of what remains caused by the hydrogen leaving in any particular direction would be cancelled out by the effects of hydrogen leaving in the opposite direction.
• We are talking about 5.6 x 10^12 tons of hydrogen. The mass of the Earth is 5.972 x 10^21 tons. The mass of the hydrogen is about 1 billionth the mass of Earth. That's about the ratio of the mass of a grain of rice to the mass of the International Space Station.
Tossing that small of mass away, even if it was all in one direction, is not going to do anything significant to your orbit unless you tossed it away with very very very high velocity. A naive calculation just using Newtonian mechanics suggests it would have to be much faster than the speed of light to carry enough momentum away to matter. I'll leave it to others to figure out what fraction of the speed of light it would have to be going to have equivalent momentum.
> I can't think offhand of any mechanism by which it would escape in some preferred direction.
I think the sun’s heat would give it a slight preference to escape from the sunny side of earth.
No because the escaping gas would on average have the same velocity as the (lighter) Earth does.
This is one of those comments where I'm not sure what the downvotes meant. Do people think a downvote signifies a 'no' answer to a yes/no question, or are they trying to say "I don't appreciate it when people ask questions"?
In this case it’s probably “this is a silly question”.
There is zero chance free hydrogen would exist long enough in our atmosphere for it to escape. It would convert to water long before hand.
> Hydrogen escape on Earth occurs at ~500 km altitude at the exobase (the lower border of the exosphere) where gases are collisionless. Hydrogen atoms at the exobase exceeding the escape velocity escape to space without colliding into another gas particle.
> For a hydrogen atom to escape from the exobase, it must first travel upward through the atmosphere from the troposphere. Near ground level, hydrogen in the form of H2O, H2, and CH4 travels upward in the homosphere through turbulent mixing, which dominates up to the homopause. At about 17 km altitude, the cold tropopause (known as the "cold trap") freezes out most of the H2O vapor that travels through it, preventing the upward mixing of some hydrogen. In the upper homosphere, hydrogen bearing molecules are split by ultraviolet photons leaving only H and H2 behind. The H and H2 diffuse upward through the heterosphere to the exobase where they escape the atmosphere by Jeans thermal escape and/or a number of suprathermal mechanisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_escape
I can’t decide if it is a good point, or an irrelevant point! Hah.
No free/unbound hydrogen from the surface is going to escape directly that way. It will bind with oxygen or the like long beforehand and become water.
But yes, a small portion of those molecules may later be broken down and may escape the planet that way. But statistically, very few of them are likely to do so.
So, maybe technically correct?
If two mass separated, it will affect their velocity.
But does this hydrogen escapee like a rocket gas. Or it is just a restructure or a bit move of CoG.
One also note if it not too fast escape as earth rotate the overall effect depend upon the uniformity of the “escape” as the net effect can be zero or more depends upon its location on earth. Mostly as it is not align with the tangent of travel, it will affect.
How much as point out relates also the mass. But even the minor variations make the polar star changes. It will have affect.
If extracted and fully oxidized, the water would raise ocean levels maybe 4 cm.
The Earth also includes vast quantities of reduced metals like iron, more than enough to react with all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Perhaps some way could be found to exploit that, at least a little bit.
Well there's an idea for a sci-fi disaster book: "Rustpocalypse" (if too much of that iron were to be oxidized.)
Apocalypse (written in Rust)
*rewritten in Rust
All it would take would be for photosynthesis to be terminated, and then wait a few million years for erosion and volcanism to expose enough reduced material to soak up the atmosphere's oxygen.
What's weird is that, as far as I know, there's no feedback mechanism that's been identified that keeps the atmosphere's O2 level stable. It may have been stable since the Cambrian just because if it hadn't been, we wouldn't have evolved, an anthropic argument.
Fire must surely have a role to play there? Too much O2 and plants burn easily, too little and fires won't take hold.
And we don't know AFAIK that it's been entirely stable. There's some debate over what the level was in the Cretaceous for example.
Rust Evangelion Strike Force
Banded Iron Formation: the reunion tour.
If the metal is reduced, then it should not be reactive. How does this become relevant to all of the oxygen in the atmosphere?
What? Carbon is reduced. Hydrogen is reduced. Any fossil fuel is reduced. All can give up electrons to oxygen and so be oxidized, liberating energy.
I went with what you wrote since it has been a while since I took general chemistry, but upon doing a simple lookup, I found that your terminology is wrong. In redox reactions, the oxidizing agent is reduced while the reducing agent is oxidized:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox
Here, the metal is the reducing agent. If it were somehow reduced in redox reactions, there not much chance of it being oxidized as that would make the metal an oxidizing agent that wants electrons, not a reducing agent that gives electrons.
That said, these things have already been oxidized (not reduced) and thus there is no chance to have them consume oxygen. You need the pre-oxidized material in order to be able to consume oxygen.
Finally, you failed to answer my question regarding the relevance of these metals to atmospheric oxygen. They should be inert having been oxidized long ago. That is why rocks are full of oxides, such as silicon dioxide and aluminum oxide, despite being composed of metal.
I think there's confusion here between "is reduced" meaning "has been reduced" vs. "and is then reduced".
Iron in the Earth is mostly in a reduced state (either Fe(+2) or even elemental iron). Upon exposure to the atmosphere it is oxidized to Fe(+3), changing from a more reduced to a more oxidized state (and similarly for other things in reduced states, such as manganese and sulfur and organics).