The move to get clean, green hydrogen cars on the road will stall unless new reserves of platinum are found fast, according to an academic from The Australian National University.

Platinum is critical to the fuel cells that will drive the hydrogen economy of the future, but the metal is scarce and difficult to find, with only three big reserves known worldwide, said ANU Geochemist John Mavrogenes. Associate Professor Mavrogenes is a member of a team of geochemists at ANU simulating platinum deposition, to get hints on where to look for the metal in the future. He said the work is essential to meet future demands.

“Existing reserves would meet less than 20 per cent of the world’s platinum demand if all cars went hydrogen,” he said. “Eighty per cent of the world’s supplies come from just three deposits in South Africa, the United States and Siberia. There is one prospective, but as yet unworked, reserve in Western Australia, and geologists suspect there may be others.”

Until now, the world’s biggest deposit, a vast but thin seam in an outcrop of mafic rock in South Africa that has been mined for 100 years, has been used as a model for the formation of platinum reserves everywhere. “Geologists have relied on old-fashioned models based on the Bushveld deposit in South Africa. That model has been applied everywhere else. We’re looking at alternative models for where one might find platinum, perhaps rocks we didn’t think had platinum in them. We’re trying to find better ways.”

The ANU team is simulating the huge temperatures and pressures of crustal magma. Minerals such as olivine, common in malfic rocks, are sealed in a capsule which is put into a high pressure furnace and heated at temperatures of around 1200 degrees Celsius for up to a month to form solid rock. The team then analyses the rock on a state-of-the-art instrument housed at the University. “From that analysis we get the diffusion profile for each element. We can see where the platinum ends up. This work may help geologists find new platinum reserves around the world in places that haven’t been searched before,” he said.