Results from Kidd Creek add to the growing evidence that natural hydrogen is produced and transported through geological processes, according to geochemist Laurent Truche of the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France. In 2024, Truche’s research team reported that Albania’s Bulqizë mine releases at least 200 tons of hydrogen gas each year. “The remaining challenge is not to prove that natural hydrogen exists, but to demonstrate that it can be produced economically, reliably, and at commercial scale,” Truche said.
Researchers and startups are also investigating whether natural hydrogen production can be stimulated without directly tapping the largest underground deposits. One approach involves injecting water, heat, or catalysts into reactive rocks that naturally generate hydrogen. More than a dozen projects have received funding from ARPA-E, which aims to accelerate hydrogen-producing reactions by a factor of 10,000. Researchers estimate that this increase could make stimulated H2 production commercially viable.
Encouraging evidence emerged from Oman earlier this year. There, a research team drilled a one-kilometer-long borehole and injected 50,000 cubic meters of water into the surrounding rock. When the well was reopened several months later, gas flowed from the borehole, and approximately 90% of it was hydrogen. “Gas is bubbling,” Joe Shannon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, told attendees at the European Geosciences Union conference in May. Shannon declined to comment beyond the information provided at the conference.
Shannon cautioned that, although the result is promising, significant questions remain about stimulated natural hydrogen production. The most fundamental question is whether the hydrogen emerging from the well was created by the stimulation process or was already present in the rock.
James Dineen is a science and environmental journalist originally from Colorado and based in New York City. He is writing a book about the Earth’s deep interior.
Source: www.technologyreview.com