What if, instead of extracting oil and gas from the ground, we could extract hydrogen, and tap into what was likely the original energy source for life on Earth to solve the net-zero problem for the future?
Geologic hydrogen is naturally occurring hydrogen that exists in subsurface deposits and has all the net-zero properties of the green hydrogen the clean fuels industry is laboring to produce. Also known as white hydrogen or natural hydrogen, it was discovered with a flare of it caught fire in Mali, in 1987. But only recently, amid the hunt for as many renewable resources as possible, have money movers started paying attention.
In February, Koloma, a geologic hydrogen start-up, announced it had raised over $245m in Series B funding from investors such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, United, and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. And the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $20m to 16 projects exploring the topic through ARPA-E, the agency that supports the research and development of high-risk, high-reward energy technologies.
The same month, Pete Johnson, Koloma’s CEO, testified at a dedicated Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing. “Geologic hydrogen is domestic primary energy,” he said. “All other forms of hydrogen require more energy to produce than the hydrogen itself holds. But geologic hydrogen is a source of energy.”
High risk, high reward
Given the amount of resources going into establishing myriad types of hydrogen production around the world, it could be more convenient to drill and extract hydrogen from the ground – a resource that is plentiful, if hard to estimate, according to scientists.
“If we look at the most probable value, it’s maybe 5 million megatons” said Geoffrey Ellis, who leads the U.S. Geological Survey’s research on geologic hydrogen resources, referring to the unit for one million metric tons. “Just a small fraction of that, one or two percent, could actually provide all of the hydrogen that we would need to get to net zero for hundreds of years.”
The related technology and research is in its early stages – something that was reiterated multiple times during the February Senate hearing – but it could be prime time for investors with an appetite for high risk-high reward investments.
The first exploratory well was drilled in Nebraska in 2019 by the start-up Natural Hydrogen Energy, and since then the number of companies active in the space has grown from two to around 50, according to data collected by Viacheslav Zgonnik, a geochemist and CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy.
“Most of the areas where we estimate there is hydrogen are available,” said Zgonnik. “So right now it's a good moment to invest for cheap.”
By the end of the year, the U.S. Geological Survey plans to release an initial map with the best locations to start doing more detailed geologic hydrogen exploration in the United States, and ARPA-E plans to have a completed GREET model for GHG life cycle analysis, which is expected to confirm geologic hydrogen’s low GHG emissions and qualify it for 45V tax credits.
According to sources active in the space, the tax credits are essential to kickstart a new geologic hydrogen industry that, like most new industries, is bound to have some uneconomical moments in its early stages. Indeed, a group of geological hydrogen producers co-signed a comment letter to the US Treasury as part of the 45V rulemaking process, urging the adoption of geologic hydrogen within the 45VH2-GREET model and a “predictable and speedy” process for determining provisional emissions rates for hydrogen production technologies that are not represented in the model.
Dig deeper
Preliminary data by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that hydrogen could be in some areas along the East coast of the United States, as well as on the mid-continental rift (Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota up into Canada and then down into Michigan) and much of the Pacific Northwest, according to Ellis.
That’s where iron rich rocks known as ultramafic can be found, which, when hit with water, produce hydrogen gas.
“Ultramafic rocks are currently known to produce significant hydrogen,” said Tucker Ely at 39 Alpha Research, one of the teams that received ARPA-E funding. “But the Earth's surface maintains a large diversity of other rocks with hydrogen-producing potential, and we will be exploring many of these in this project.”
Ultramafic rocks, however, are, for the most part, on ocean floors, which are hard and expensive to access. 39 Alpha Research specializes in mathematical techniques that determine how much hydrogen is contained in different compositions of rock and water, hoping to find the most economical system and provide guidance to companies on where to drill their wells.
The nonprofit’s interest in geologic hydrogen was spurred by projects for producing hydrogen funded by NASA.
“It's wild that NASA was funding research to understand the solar system and other worlds, and that the tools we made along the way are going to help us understand an alternative fuel source and really drive a clean energy transition,” said Cole Mathis at 39 Alpha Research.
Which rocks, which fluids, where, the presence of geologic hydrogen accumulations large enough to be commercial, and what the production rates will look like are some of the many unknowns that make geologic hydrogen a risky scenario for investors.
“The only way to answer those questions is to drill,” said Zgonnik. “And the only way to drill the wells is for investors to fund the drilling. We don't have much time and natural hydrogen can give us speed, because we can leverage existing infrastructure from oil and gas industries.”
In addition to Natural Energy Hydrogen’s exploratory well in Nebraska, companies like Koloma and HyTerra have also started drilling in the Midwest the past couple of years, the latter through its Project Nemaha, in Kansas, which could produce between 111,738 and 565,390 tonnes of hydrogen, according to a prospective resource assessment released in December 2023.
For the project, the assessment also estimated between 37 and 1,629 million metric cubic feet of recoverable helium, a gas that can be found with hydrogen, and is 25 times more expensive by unit of volume, a strong economic incentive for hydrogen exploration.
Even if it all ends up not working out in the end, scientists say its potential is enough to dig deeper.
“Last time we developed a new source of energy was 100 years ago with nuclear energy,” said Zgonnik. “This is something else, it’s something new, an additional source of primary energy, of which there are a very limited number.”
