Power switch: Hyrdogen is buried underground all over the world

Underground hydrogen has the potential to power electrical grids, run factories, heat homes and propel vehicles when combined with a fuel cell.

Natural Hydrogen Energy’s Nebraska cornfield test well. Picture: Natural Hydrogen Energy

From Australia to the Pyrenees, geologists are hunting for underground hydrogen and predict a subterranean energy boom is only a few years away.

Unlike industrial methods of producing hydrogen that require electricity, so-called geological hydrogen occurs by natural processes deep underground, energy experts say. Underground hydrogen is the product of a chemical reaction between iron-rich minerals in the Earth’s crust and water percolating down from the surface.

The resulting hydrogen gas can be extracted by traditional drilling methods. Drilling firms and geologists say they have found underground hydrogen coming from old gas wells, seeping from unusual circular surface features known as “fairy circles” in Australia, North Carolina and Brazil, or bubbling up from cracks in the Earth known as mid-ocean ridges.

“The Earth does the production for you using pressure and temperature,” says Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas. Underground hydrogen “is a cheap, clean, abundant resource that is a game-changer for the global economy and for climate change. So it is pretty exciting”.

Geologists and energy firms involved in prospecting for hydrogen nevertheless say it is going to take some effort to find it in sufficient quantities and then transport it somewhere it can be used commercially. Hydrogen is a highly reactive element that corrodes metal and can be more difficult to move in existing gas pipelines, trucks or ships than other fuel sources, Webber said.

Hydrogen is potentially valuable as a fuel because hydrogen combustion produces only heat and water, unlike the burning of fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gases.

Hydrogen has the potential to power electrical grids, run factories, heat homes and propel vehicles when combined with a fuel cell. Today, hydrogen is most commonly used in petroleum refining and fertiliser production. The clean-burning gas is forecast to play a central role in reducing the carbon footprint of heavy industries such as steel and chemicals. However, most of today’s hydrogen production requires the use of fossil fuels. Methods of low-emission hydrogen production are small compared with where analysts believe it will need to be in the future.

In order for society to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, low-emission hydrogen production will need to be about 180 million tonnes by 2030, from just over 90 million tonnes today, the International Energy Agency says.

Though there may be some obstacles, governments and energy companies are optimistic, and there is a growing pot of both taxpayer funds and private investment chasing hydrogen.

US President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill allocated $14bn funding for hydrogen, including $12bn for “hydrogen hubs” that will use hydrogen to produce energy as well as run various industrial processes.

The industrial facilities that produce hydrogen use one of two methods. The first, known as electrolysis, uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The end product can be labelled “green hydrogen” if the energy used for electrolysis is from a renewable resource, such as solar or wind power.

Hydrogen can also be generated with energy from fossil fuels, a process known as “blue hydrogen”, but it isn’t considered clean unless the greenhouse gas emissions released when producing it are captured and stored.

Firms looking to skip industrial production want to instead drill for underground hydrogen.

In southwestern France, geologists from Engie, a French energy services firm, have deployed a network of small remotely operated sensors that sniff the gas emitted from the ground around favourable geological locations such as fault zones to detect traces of seeping hydrogen.

“There are many wells that were drilled for oil and gas or water and they found hydrogen in there,” says Olivier Lhote, hydrogen specialist at Engie.

After detecting hydrogen emissions from a geological feature or having confirmation of hydrogen from an old well, the next step is getting mineral rights to the area, and then doing seismic testing to determine how deep the hydrogen might exist below the surface.

Lhote wouldn’t say where exactly the promising site is located, just somewhere in the far southwestern corner of France. “There is already competition there,” he says.

Indeed, a Spanish firm, Helios Aragon, said it has located a reservoir of 1.1 million tonnes of hydrogen in the Monzon region of Spain and expects to begin drilling next year, according to Helios chief executive Ian Munro.

Rob Sterling is equally vague about where he’s hunting for hydrogen. Sterling, senior vice-president for geosciences at Confluence Resources, a Denver-based oil and gas company, says his firm has found a site in the Four Corners region spanning the junction of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona that might prove commercially viable.

“We’re not a public company, it isn’t on our website,” Sterling said. “But yeah, we’re working on it.”

Sterling says Confluence is looking for geological supplies of hydrogen that might exist in the same underground deposits alongside helium, which has many commercial uses including in medicine, to clean rocket fuel tanks and in the production of computer chips.

“We would use the hydrogen to generate electricity to a grid that is nearby our project area,” Sterling says. “That way we’re using the hydrogen right there and turning it into a product that is much more transportable.”

Similar to drilling for oil and natural gas, companies pursuing underground hydrogen would have to lease drilling sites from landowners and obtain mineral rights. Unlike oil or natural gas, hydrogen doesn’t pollute waterways or the environment with toxic chemicals. However, it can be dangerous and is flammable.

In Nebraska, Natural Hydrogen Energy has drilled a 3500m test well in the middle of a cornfield and is preparing to extract commercial supplies of hydrogen, according to Viacheslav Zgonnik, the Denver-based firm’s chief executive.

“Every single continent has potential hydrogen accumulations, and I think we’re at the very beginning of the process,” Zgonnik says. “There will be a lot more discoveries of hydrogen in the near future simply because no one was looking for it.”

In late May, Natural Hydrogen’s Australian joint venture partner, HyTerra, announced it was planning to raise an additional $2.5m to explore for hydrogen and helium at the Nebraska site as well as its own 3000-hectare lease holdings in northeast Kansas, where hydrogen has been observed in old oil and gas exploration wells.

The WALL STREET JOURNAL