The Race to Unlock the World’s Hidden Hydrogen Reserves

Haley Zaremba

Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…

More Info

Premium Content

• China’s Sichuan Basin and the Philippines have emerged as prominent targets in the accelerating global search for commercially viable natural hydrogen.
• Modeling suggests Earth may contain enormous quantities of geologic hydrogen, although only a small and still-unknown fraction is likely to be technically and economically recoverable.
• If commercial extraction approaches projected costs near or below $1 per kilogram, natural hydrogen could compete strongly with conventional and electrolytic hydrogen production.

Countries around the globe are racing to become the world’s first geologic hydrogen hotspot. A few years ago, the United States Department of Energy released a bombshell report that estimated that there are trillions of metric tons of natural hydrogen deposits sitting in underground pockets around the world – and that a considerable amount of that could be extracted for industrial use. Energy companies around the world have been eagerly exploring for the most ideal locations to put that theory to the test – and they’re zeroing in on some promising potential goldmines.

Just this week, a new study out of China reported that scientists have measured record-breaking levels of hydrogen seepage in the Sichuan Basin, indicating that there could be enormous and easily tapped reserves below the surface of the Earth. Samples taken from the area had hydrogen purity levels ranging between 97.33 percent and 98.24 percent, the highest ever recorded in China. “This not only broke the record for natural hydrogen concentration in China but also became one of the few discoveries globally exceeding 98.00% purity,” the researchers reported.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, private interests are starting to swarm around similar hydrogen seeps. Billionaire-backed energy startup Koloma thinks that the Southeast Asian nation could likely be ground zero for what is destined to be a geologic hydrogen revolution. “The Philippines has the largest natural hydrogen seeps anywhere on the planet,” Koloma CEO Pete Johnson recently told Forbes. “We have reason to believe that these seeps are connected to very large accumulations.”

The potential impact of commercially scalable geologic hydrogen operations is difficult to overstate. Recent modelling estimates that underground natural hydrogen reserves could total approximately 5.6 x 106 Mt (metric megatons). “If the energy industry can extract just 2% of that total volume, it would yield twice the energy found in all proven global natural gas reserves,” Interesting Engineering underlined in a recent report.

Such a development would be transformative in several critical ways. First off, it would totally transform the geopolitics of the global energy industry, granting newfound and enormous leverage to nations that are sitting atop these natural deposits. For a nation like the Philippines, a developing country with constrained cash flow and which has historically been a net energy importer, such a development stands to change everything.

Second, geologic hydrogen could supercharge the global decarbonization movement overnight. Hydrogen has long been buzzed about as a silver bullet for cleaning up hard-to-abate sectors like steelmaking, shipping, and transportation because it can be combusted at high temperatures like coking coal or heavy fuel oil, but leaves behind nothing but water vapor when it burns. The issue is that most hydrogen is made using fossil fuels, negating its potential impact on a given sector’s carbon footprint. And while green hydrogen – hydrogen produced using clean and renewable energies – has received a lot of research and development funding over the years, it remains pricey and inefficient. In most use cases, it makes more sense to consume clean energy directly than it does to convert it into green hydrogen.

This is where geologic hydrogen comes in. The emergent approach could sidestep the issues that have left green hydrogen floundering by harvesting natural hydrogen directly from the Earth instead of using energy to produce it. While the technology is still in its infancy, and projects like those in China and the Philippines are still in exploratory phases, experts believe that someday soon geologic hydrogen can be produced at scale and at a very low cost.

Geologic hydrogen could potentially be produced for less than $1 per kilogram according to estimates from the United States Department of Energy. That’s a stunning figure – today, green hydrogen costs approximately 3.50-6.00 per kilogram. In fact, if the DoE is right, geologic hydrogen would be even cheaper than gray hydrogen made using fossil fuels, completely disrupting the economics underlying the sizable global hydrogen sector.

The technology still has a long way to go before these projections come to fruition, but advances are being made all the time, and nations like the United States, China, and the Philippines are at the vanguard of the geologic hydrogen revolution. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com

• Iraq-Syria Oil Pipeline to Bypass Hormuz Is 4 Years and $15 Billion Away
• China’s Renewables Boom Faces Record Clean Power Curtailments
• $100 Diesel Cracks Signal a Much Tighter Oil Market Than Brent Suggests

Download The Free Oilprice App Today