Countries around the world are racing to become the globe's first geologic hydrogen hotspot. A few years ago, the United States Department of Energy released a bombshell report estimating that trillions of metric tons of natural hydrogen deposits sit in underground pockets around the world — and that a considerable amount of that hydrogen could be extracted for industrial use. Energy companies across the globe have been eagerly exploring for the most ideal locations to put that theory to the test, and they are now zeroing in on a number of promising potential goldmines. Two regions in particular — China and the Philippines — have moved to the forefront of that search.

Natural hydrogen — also known as geologic, or "white," hydrogen — forms underground when water reacts with iron-rich minerals in the Earth's crust and mantle, a process called serpentinization, or when natural radiation splits water molecules apart. For decades, geologists assumed that hydrogen, as the lightest element, would simply seep away rather than accumulate, and conventional oil and gas exploration tools were never designed to hunt for it. That assumption began to unravel after a water well drilled in Mali in the 1980s was found, decades later, to contain roughly 98 percent hydrogen — a discovery widely credited with kickstarting the modern natural hydrogen rush.

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 — which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures — 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 10^6 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, it would completely 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 that has historically been a net energy importer — such a development stands to change everything.

Second, geologic hydrogen could supercharge the global decarbonization movement. Hydrogen has long been buzzed about as a silver bullet for cleaning up hard-to-abate sectors such as 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 great deal 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 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 is 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. No geologic hydrogen is currently produced at commercial scale anywhere in the world, and researchers are still working to determine whether underground accumulations can sustain the flow rates that commercial drilling would require, given that surface seeps represent gas that has already escaped. But advances are being made all the time: in 2024, the DoE's advanced research agency, ARPA-E, awarded $20 million to accelerate natural hydrogen exploration and production, and exploratory drilling is already underway from the U.S. Midwest to Australia. Nations like the United States, China, and the Philippines are at the vanguard of the geologic hydrogen revolution.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com