Pete Johnson says that geologic hydrogen could be as revolutionary for the energy transition as nuclear fusion — and comes with the perk of being much closer to definitive answers about its viability. The CEO of geologic hydrogen startup Koloma said the industry may be less than a decade away from answering its most central question: are there large, economically viable reservoirs out there?
“I don’t think there’s anything in clean energy right now that we’re working on that could be as impactful as this — if it works out that there’s a lot of large reservoirs,” Johnson said on the Catalyst podcast. “[The industry] is not 30 years away; it’s six years away, or five years away from really answering the most critical questions.”
Investors are betting that companies like Koloma, which has raised $300 million, can begin to track down answers. (Editor’s note: The host of Catalyst, Shayle Kann, invests in Koloma and serves on its board. Prelude Ventures, which led Latitude Media’s fundraising round, also invests in Koloma.)
A plentiful supply of affordable low-carbon hydrogen could decarbonize heavy transport, industry, and power plants, and replace the oil in plastics and chemicals. But the leading contenders for low-carbon hydrogen production — like electrolysis using zero-carbon power and methane pyrolysis — just haven’t cut it yet. The price points are too high and the scale of production is too low to spur a hydrogen revolution.
That’s where geologic hydrogen comes in. Naturally occurring hydrogen could be far cheaper than hydrogen produced by current methods, because the energy inputs would be so low, Johnson said: “on par with the kind of energy it takes to pull gas or coal or oil [out of the ground].”
A metric ton of hydrogen contains about 33 megawatt hours of energy, but other low-carbon methods of production, like electrolysis, can require more than 50 megawatt hours of electricity to produce one metric ton of hydrogen, according to the International Energy Agency. Johnson believes geologic hydrogen could require far less energy to produce.
“Our best estimates for a natural hydrogen field is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one to three megawatt-hours of energy in, to pull a ton of hydrogen out,” Johnson said.
Those energy inputs would power compressors, pumps, and other equipment — and lower inputs may yield overall lower costs of production.
“It makes it so you can produce ammonia for cheaper than fossil-fuel ammonia,” he predicted. “You could make kerosene for sustainable aviation fuel pretty darn close to cost parity to the kerosene that just comes out of oil refineries. So, just from a cost standpoint, that’s just world changing.”
An abundant resource?
No startup has announced the discovery of a large naturally occurring hydrogen reservoir so far, but Johnson is cautiously optimistic, and early estimates suggest there could be a lot of it. A 2023 U.S. Geological Survey model found that global reserves could be enough to meet projected demand for thousands of years.
Johnson believes the most common naturally occurring process for producing hydrogen is serpentinization, when water interacts with iron-rich mafic rock. For years, scientists assumed that the resulting hydrogen escaped into the atmosphere because the molecules are so small — and also have to contend with underground microbes that eat it.
But recent research has spurred scientists to update their models in light of evidence that hydrogen may accumulate in reservoirs under certain types of rocks. The theory supported by the discovery of hydrogen “seeps” found in recent years in places like Mali, Australia, Turkey, and France.
And unlike fossil fuels, which take millions of years to form from pressurized organic materials, geologic hydrogen generates continuously, albeit at low rates, said Johnson. But some — including Koloma, the U.S. Department of Energy, and researchers at MIT — are exploring the possibility of stimulating the production of underground hydrogen by injecting water, chemicals, and heat into the right kinds of rock.
For naturally occurring geologic hydrogen, Koloma and its peers are on the hunt for large, commercially viable reservoirs. To bring the resource from a theoretical game-changer to reality, Johnson predicted that a “watershed moment” would occur in a series of steps. A company would first find a reservoir, and then drill multiple test wells. Finally, a third-party auditor would then need to verify the quantity of proven reserves — ideally in volumes that justify building out the needed production infrastructure.
“If you want to produce liquid hydrogen, you got to be producing 10,000 tons per year, give or take. If you want to be producing ammonia, you’re probably in the neighborhood of like 50,000 tons per year,” said Johnson. “So I would think if you could prove out reserves that would allow you to produce those kinds of volumes of hydrogen over a 15-, 20-, 30-year lifetime, that is like the watershed moment of a commercially relevant, large reservoir discovery.”
At that point, producers will be ready to start dealing with the next major challenge.
The infrastructure hurdle
Geologic hydrogen production will require expensive pipelines, pumps, refineries, and other infrastructure. And the construction process will potentially be complicated by the fact that naturally occurring productive wells may be far from existing pipeline and refining infrastructure. (And that infrastructure would likely need to be retrofitted to handle hydrogen anyway.)
But Johnson argues that the economics could be appealing enough to attract greenfield infrastructure to new locations, in much the same way that Houston’s oil wells attracted pipelines and Quebec’s cheap hydroelectric power attracted aluminum smelters.
“Our view…is [that] if we can find large, price-advantaged geologic hydrogen reserves, the infrastructure will come to the hydrogen,” Johnson said. “That doesn’t mean it’ll come to the hydrogen if you’re in the middle of Greenland, obviously, but I’d say most places inside the United States are attractive enough for investment that the infrastructure will likely come locate close to the point of production.”
He’s betting on the fact that today hydrogen is the largest cost in the production of key fuels like ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel, so the industry is incentivized to seek out cheaper sources.
Listen to the full episode of Catalyst:
