In 2024, there are few TED-style talks on climate tech innovation that have much in the way of surprises. The talking points are clear and common — we need to move faster, activate more capital, and keep investing in the long shots while aggressively deploying what we have.
But at last month’s Breakthrough Energy Summit in London, Eric Toone, CTO of the Breakthrough Energy and former Duke University professor, took a different, more history-focused tack.
Humans have always found more energy, he said, and from that energy flowed prosperity. But the imperative of decarbonization changes the calculus like never before: today, roughly 85% of all energy comes from burning fossil fuels, and demand for energy is on pace to double by the end of the century. With just renewable energy as a solution, one thing quickly becomes clear: it’s not enough. Not enough power to supply the grid, not enough fuel for aviation, and not enough feedstock for petrochemicals and plastics.
Where others on the stage talked fusion power, advanced geothermal, and long-duration batteries as options for clean firm additions to the energy mix, Toone talked instead about hydrogen. And he didn’t just rely upon the typical talking points of electrolyzing green hydrogen and bringing it to industry. His vision for hydrogen is much, much bigger, and involves tapping into hydrogen that already exists deep underground, rather than making it ourselves.
Geologic hydrogen, he said, “offers the possibility of limitless zero-carbon reactive chemical energy.”
Solving the oil barrel problem
In person, Dr. Toone has the jocularity of a college professor who enjoys his office hours, and on stage he speaks rapidly, nearly breaking a sweat as he paces. His point here is about oil, specifically how we replace the whole barrel with zero carbon alternatives.
“A 42-gallon barrel of oil yields roughly 20 gallons of gasoline,” Toone said. “Diesel, jet and heavy fuel make up another 15 gallons. But every bit of that barrel is utilized, in every single aspect of our lives.”
Seven critical chemicals that come from the rest of the barrel such as ethylene and propylene underpin the plastics, materials, and coatings that are a part of nearly every aspect of the global economy.
“So if we’re going to ‘end oil’ we’d better start thinking about how we’re going to replace those seven chemical building blocks, at cost and at scale,” he added.
And this is where he comes to hydrogen. Not only can it be used for traditional industrial applications, but it can also be the feedstock for the seven compounds he identified. Zero-carbon hydrogen could be a way to end oil and gas as we know it.
“Hydrogen is an incredibly versatile material — the Swiss army knife of energy” says Toone. The problem, though, is cost.
We typically think of hydrogen as something we make, either from natural gas (roughly $2 per kilogram) or via electrolyzers (roughly $5 per kilogram), among other approaches. The former, though, emits carbon, while the latter is expensive — and in short supply. Both capital and labor is currently being devoted to bringing down the costs of green hydrogen, but the process is slow and complicated.
But what if you could find hydrogen rather than make it? Your costs would be limited to extraction, storage, and transport — and not production. Early estimates are around 50 to 70 cents per kilogram in this form.
“If you have enough hydrogen, you can do anything,” said Toone. “And there is a lot of it.”
The origin of most geologic hydrogen is either through a process called radiolysis, where the radioactivity of deep, ancient rocks splits hydrogen from water; or “serpentinization,” where hot iron-rich rocks effectively oxidize hydrogen out from water and trap it. According to the American Gas Association’s read of an upcoming report from the United States Geological Survey, the country has as much as 5 trillion metric tons of geologic hydrogen.
At that quantity, Toone said, the so-called “gold” hydrogen could be “enough to power the entire planet for thousands of years.”
And he thinks we can find enough — we just need to start looking in the right places. Geologic, or natural, hydrogen was first found in the 1980s by accident in Mali, but it’s being discovered on every continent now. Importantly, it’s not where oil and gas are found, so the fracking revolution of the past decade didn’t yield any discoveries on its own, but scientists are getting better at predicting where it might be found. He was building to a proper sweat at this point, clearly excited.
“But make no mistake,” he said. “The discovery of geologic hydrogen could be one of the single most important events in our lifetimes, and perhaps the lifetimes of our children.”
I looked around the room. He had the attention of nearly 1,400 investors, entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, and media from across the globe, many of whom seemed genuinely surprised. Finding natural hydrogen doesn’t have the same “breakthrough” ring that nuclear fusion or carbon-free steel do, but you say “lifetime” and people take notice.
The moment for geologic hydrogen
After the talk closed, I met Dr. Toone for a conversation that was meant to be about Breakthrough Energy Ventures strategy, but my questions inevitably came back to geologic hydrogen.
My first question: why now? What has changed between the 1980s and today that makes gold hydrogen suddenly have real promise?
A key element of Toone’s answer is the arrival of a startup he perceives as having real promise. In 2014, his team first went to Mali to investigate the possibility of finding and extracting hydrogen there. It was on that trip where he met Tom Darrah, who had “spent 20 years crawling all over the face of the earth measuring the composition of gasses that were out of the ground.”
That encounter led to the creation of Koloma, a startup focused on finding and extracting natural hydrogen. The company was initially incubated inside of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Darrah was joined by now-CEO Pete Johnson and Paul Harraka, now the company’s chief business officer, his co-founders. Since then, Koloma has raised over $300 million.
Nevertheless, the company operates somewhat beneath the radar of the larger hydrogen market, where other BEV investments like Electric Hydrogen get the most attention. In fact, there are barely enough geologic hydrogen companies to make a climate tech investment category. In Europe, there are Helios Aragon and Natural Hydrogen Energy, and Australia has Hyterra, but there are few others.
Koloma, which recently raised a $245 million Series B round with the likes of Khosla Ventures, United Airlines Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Piva, and Energy Impact Partners, currently has the highest profile.
Toone thinks Koloma has a promising approach, aided heavily by the proprietary database that Darrah brought to the table. That’s key for simply knowing where to look. Then there’s the matter of both extraction and transport.
“Is there some fraction of the deployed infrastructure today that you can put gas in?” he asked, rhetorically. The answer to that is probably yes, because it turns out this embrittlement issue — hydrogen can weaken certain materials as it passes through them —is a function of the type of steel that the pipeline was built with. I don’t think anybody’s ever really cataloged what fraction of the pipeline infrastructure could actually carry hydrogen [but] much more has to be built.”
That said, Toone believes the economics are extremely compelling, given that the fuel itself is free — it’s found, not made. The combined costs of extraction, transport, and storage, he said, are lower than electrolyzing hydrogen that uses curtailed renewables.
This comes back to the goal of replacing that full barrel of oil. If hydrogen is cheap enough, and plentiful, Toone believes we would have the building blocks of a zero-carbon replacement for everything oil can do, from liquid fuels and gas, to chemicals and materials. Hydrogen alone isn’t enough, to be clear — it would need to be combined with carbon to form a syngas that can be used as the input to all these products.
But if we use a cheap enough source of carbon — and Toone believes there are plenty of solutions in development — it seems a real breakthrough may be at hand.
