White Hydrogen’s Vast Energy Promise Faces a Test Underground

The hydrogen generated in Earth’s continental crust over geological time holds energy equivalent to roughly 170,000 years of today’s global oil consumption. That estimate, from researchers at Oxford, Durham and Toronto universities, points to an extraordinary energy opportunity. It is not, however, a measure of fuel ready to be pumped: nobody yet knows how much has collected in deposits that can be recovered.

According to OilPrice (direct), startups are pursuing this naturally occurring resource, known as geologic or “white” hydrogen, as an alternative to hydrogen made with renewable electricity. The attraction is straightforward. Finding usable hydrogen underground could potentially avoid some of the costs that have held back green hydrogen, without greatly increasing the sector’s carbon footprint. Turning that possibility into a dependable industrial fuel is the challenge.

Green hydrogen’s delivery gap

The competing green hydrogen industry has struggled to turn ambitious plans into operating capacity. A Nature Energy paper, “The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap,” found that only 7% of announced global capacity had been completed on schedule as of 2023. The figure captures a central problem for the sector: enthusiasm for a cleaner fuel has run ahead of the economics needed to deliver it.

Hydrogen has potential uses in steelmaking and transport, where it can supply the high heat associated with fuels such as coking coal and heavy fuel oil. But most hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels, undermining its value as a way to cut emissions. Green hydrogen instead uses clean, renewable energy. It remains expensive and struggles to compete with other fuels, OilPrice reported. In many cases, using that clean energy directly would also be more efficient than using it to make hydrogen.

Finding a workable underground recipe

White hydrogen offers a different route: sourcing gas that occurs naturally in rocks and other deposits in the crust. Pierre Levin, chief executive of Canadian geologic hydrogen startup Vema, told The New York Times that suitable rocks exist around the world and could yield billions of tons of hydrogen. His assessment reflects the scale of the opportunity attracting companies to a technology that remains at an early stage.

“The potential is massive,” Vema chief executive Pierre Levin told The New York Times.

The research does not remove the practical hurdles. Chris Ballentine, the Oxford study’s lead author, compared the search for accumulated hydrogen to making a soufflé: ingredients, quantities, timing and temperature must all align. He said a repeatable exploration approach could unlock a commercially competitive, low-carbon source of hydrogen. That is a conditional promise, rather than evidence that large-scale production is already within reach.

A report from Futura sets out what explorers need to understand: where hydrogen is generated, how it moves through rock, where reservoirs form and whether geological structures can trap substantial quantities over long periods. These are the elements of an underground system, not merely signs that hydrogen exists. The system resembles an oil system in some respects, but also has fundamental differences.

Startups from Europe to the Philippines are working to make the resource commercially viable, according to OilPrice. The next development to watch is a repeatable way to locate accumulated hydrogen and then extract and purify it economically, with limited environmental impact. Until that happens, the enormous geological estimate remains a guide to potential—not a tally of commercially available fuel.