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By
Laura Paddison
October 29, 2023
They went hunting for fossil fuels.
What they found could help save the world
Drilling operations for white hydrogen by Natural
Hydrogen Energy in the US Midwest
When two scientists went looking for fossil
fuels beneath the ground of northeastern France, they did not expect
to discover something which could supercharge the effort to tackle the
climate crisis.
Jacques Pironon and Phillipe De Donato, both directors of research at
France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, were assessing the
amount of methane in the subsoils of the Lorraine mining basin using a
“world first” specialized probe, able to analyze gases dissolved in
the water of rock formations deep underground.
A couple of hundred meters down, the probe found low concentrations of
hydrogen. “This was not a real surprise for us,” Pironon told CNN;
it’s common to find small amounts near the surface of a borehole. But
as the probe went deeper, the concentration ticked up. At 1,100 meters
down it was 14%, at 1,250 meters it was 20%.
This was surprising, Pironon said. It indicated the presence of a
large reservoir of hydrogen beneath. They ran calculations and
estimated the deposit could contain between 6 million and 250 million
metric tons of hydrogen.
That could make it one of the largest deposits of “white hydrogen”
ever discovered, Pironon said. The find has helped fuel an already
feverish interest in the gas.
White hydrogen – also referred to as “natural,” “gold” or “geologic”
hydrogen – is naturally produced or present in the Earth’s crust and
has become something of a climate holy grail.st.
Hydrogen produces only water when burned, making
it very attractive as a potential clean energy source for industries
like aviation, shipping and steel-making that need so much energy it’s
almost impossible to meet through renewables such as solar and wind.
But while hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it
generally exists combined with other molecules. Currently, commercial
hydrogen is produced in an energy-intensive process almost entirely
powered by fossil fuels.
A rainbow of colors is used as a shorthand for the different types of
hydrogen. “Gray” is made from methane gas and “brown” from coal.
“Blue” hydrogen is the same as gray, but the planet-heating pollution
produced is captured before it goes into the atmosphere.
The most promising from a climate perspective is “green” hydrogen,
made using renewable energy to split water. Yet production remains
small scale and expensive.
That’s why interest in white hydrogen, a potentially abundant,
untapped source of clean-burning energy, has ratcheted up over the
last few years.
‘We haven’t been looking in the right places’
“If you had asked me four years ago what I thought about natural
hydrogen, I would have told you ‘oh, it doesn’t exist,’” said Geoffrey
Ellis, a geochemist with the US Geological Survey. “Hydrogen’s out
there, we know it’s around,” he said, but scientists thought big
accumulations weren’t possible.
Then he found out about Mali. Arguably, the catalyst for the current
interest in white hydrogen can be traced to this West African country.
In 1987, in the village of Bourakébougou, a driller was left with
burns after a water well unexpectedly exploded as he leaned over the
edge of it while smoking a cigarette.
The well was swiftly plugged and abandoned until 2011, when it was
unplugged by an oil and gas company and reportedly found to be
producing a gas that was 98% hydrogen. The hydrogen was used to power
the village, and more than a decade later, it is still producing.
When a study came out about the well in 2018, it caught the attention
of the science community, including Ellis. His initial reaction was
that there had to be something wrong with the research, “because we
just know that this can’t happen.”
Then the pandemic hit and he had time on his hands to start digging.
The more he read, the more he realized “we just haven’t been looking
for it, we haven’t been looking in the right places.”
The recent discoveries are exciting for Ellis, who has been working as
a petroleum geochemist since the 1980s. He witnessed the rapid growth
of the shale gas industry in the US, which revolutionized the energy
market. “Now,” he said, “here we are in what I think is probably a
second revolution.”
White hydrogen is “very promising,” agreed Isabelle Moretti, a
scientific researcher at the University of Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
and the University of Sorbonne and a white hydrogen expert.
“Now the question is no longer about the resource… but where to find
large economic reserves,” she told CNN.
A slew of startups
Dozens of processes generate white hydrogen but there is still some
uncertainty about how large natural deposits form.
Geologists have tended to focus on “serpentinization,” where water
reacts with iron-rich rocks to produce hydrogen, and “radiolysis,” a
radiation-driven breakdown of water molecules.
White hydrogen deposits have been found throughout the world,
including in the US, eastern Europe, Russia, Australia, Oman, as well
as France and Mali.
Some have been discovered by accident, others by
hunting for clues like features in the landscapes sometimes referred
to as “fairy circles” – shallow, elliptical depressions that can leak
hydrogen.
Ellis estimates globally there could be tens of billions of tons of
white hydrogen. This would be vastly more than the 100 million tons a
year of hydrogen that is currently produced and the 500 million tons
predicted to be produced annually by 2050, he said.
“Most of this is almost certainly going to be in very small
accumulations or very far offshore, or just too deep to actually be
economic to produce,” he said. But if just 1% can be found and
produced, it would provide 500 million tons of hydrogen for 200 years,
he added.
It’s a tantalizing prospect for a slew of startups.
Australia-based Gold Hydrogen is currently drilling in the Yorke
Peninsula in South Australia. It targeted that spot after scouring the
state’s archives and discovering that back in the 1920s, a number of
boreholes had been drilled there which had very high concentrations of
hydrogen. The prospectors, only interested in fossil fuels, abandoned
them.
“We’re very excited by what we’re seeing,” said managing director Neil
McDonald. There is more testing and drilling to do but the company
could get into early production possibly in late 2024, he told CNN.
Some startups are seeing eye-popping investments. Koloma, a
Denver-based white hydrogen start-up, has secured $91 million from
investors, including the Bill Gates-founded investment firm
Breakthrough Energy Ventures – although the company remains
tight-lipped about exactly where in the US it is drilling and when it
is aiming for commercialization.
Another Denver-based company, Natural Hydrogen Energy, founded by
geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, has completed an exploratory hydrogen
borehole in Nebraska in 2019 and has plans for new wells. The world is
“very close to the first commercial projects,” Zgonnik told CNN.
“Natural hydrogen is a solution which will allow us to get get to
speed” on climate action, he said.
Aerial view of drilling operations by Natural
Hydrogen Energy in Kansas. Natural Hydrogen Energy LLC
From hype to reality
The challenge for these businesses and for scientists will be
translating hypothetical promise into a commercial reality.
“There could be a period of decades where there’s a lot of trial and
error and false starts,” Ellis said. But speed is vital. “If it’s
going to take us 200 years to develop the resource, that’s not really
going to be of much use.”
But many of the startups are bullish. Some predict years, not decades,
to commercialization. “We have all necessary technology we need, with
some slight modifications,” Zgonnik said.
Challenges remain. In some countries, regulations are an obstacle.
Costs also need to be worked out. According to calculations based on
the Mali well, white hydrogen could cost around $1 a kilogram to
produce – compared to around $6 a kilogram for green hydrogen. But
white hydrogen could quickly become more expensive if large deposits
require deeper drilling.
Back in the Lorraine basin, Pironon and De Donato’s next steps are to
drill down to 3,000 meters to get a clearer idea of exactly how much
white hydrogen there is.
There’s a long way to go, but it would be ironic if this region – once
one of western Europe’s key coal producers – became an epicenter of a
new white hydrogen industry.
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