Energy source emits water instead of greenhouse gases — and Michigan may be a hub for it

• Emerging science shows geologic hydrogen, created under the Earth’s crust naturally, may exist in pools that can be extracted for clean energy.
• A U.S. Geological Survey study of where geologic hydrogen could potentially be found shows Michigan as a particularly promising site.

Imagine an abundant form of energy that’s so clean, when you burn it, it doesn’t create carbon or greenhouse gases; it creates water. Imagine that unlike oil and gas, where when you take it out of the ground it’s gone, this underground energy source can be stimulated to keep reproducing itself, creating wells that never run out.

Now imagine that energy source being abundant beneath the surface of the U.S. — and that Michigan in particular is teeming with it.

Emerging science is showing all of the above appears true, but there is a lot more work to do before this potentially revolutionary energy source can be unlocked on a large scale.

It’s not some exotic, newly discovered element, but the most ubiquitous one in the universe: hydrogen. It’s been used for years in producing metals, in hydrogenating cooking oils for better shelf life, and in the creation of ammonia for nitrogen-based fertilizers used on farm fields across the globe. But that hydrogen comes at a cost, from applying electricity to water — H₂O, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom — to separate the two elements and retain the hydrogen. Natural gas is often used to provide the energy for that process, but that’s expensive and, while better than coal or oil, still pollutes the atmosphere. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are also being applied to this hydrogen extraction process, but it’s difficult and costly to do at scale.

Hydrogen is created naturally underground through a reaction between water and certain iron-rich rocks, a process known as serpentinization, or through radiolysis, where natural radiation deep in the Earth breaks down water molecules to produce hydrogen. But scientists for generations — to the extent they thought about geologic hydrogen at all — considered it so diffusive and reactive they believed most was dissipated or converted to some other compound. Historically, when hydrogen pockets were discovered in drilling or mining, it wasn’t identified or quantified.. Rather, it was often considered a nuisance to remove so that miners and drillers could get what they really were after: oil, gas, and minerals.

Scientists only recently discovered that geologic hydrogen potentially remains trapped in rock layers in pools that could be tapped, maybe even on a commercial scale.

In a study published earlier this year, geologists with U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed a multi-faceted map of the prospectivity of geologic hydrogen in the continental U.S. They looked for areas with all the right ingredients: a source of sufficient hydrogen generation — iron-rich rock is an important catalyst; porous underground reservoirs for storage; and a sufficient layer of sealing cap rock to contain the hydrogen pools and prevent leaking.

The study found that a large swath through the middle of the country has great potential to contain collected pools of geologic hydrogen — and Michigan in particular was one of the areas that really showed promise.

“The source of the hydrogen, the reservoir and the seal, Michigan in particular happens to have all of these ingredients all overlaid with one another, plus a handful of other things that we mapped out,” said Jane Hearon, a USGS geologist and co-author of the study.

“It was kind of interesting and fun to see Michigan light up that way because you don’t think of it as like a Texas, one of these states that has a longstanding tradition of energy production.”

And while one path of research is looking into where geologic hydrogen may be naturally occurring, another is looking into places with the right rock formations and other ingredients where the gas may be stimulated into existence and produced, through injection of water into rock and perhaps with some catalysts such as other elements and microbes, said USGS geologist Sarah Gelman, a co-author on the prospectivity mapping study.

Then-President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy in February 2024 announced $20 million in grants to 16 institutions looking into geologic hydrogen’s energy potential, including 10 institutions working on stimulated hydrogen projects.

“It’s a bit simpler versus finding the accumulations, because you just go where the right rocks are,” Gelman said. “But it’s got a lot of engineering challenges, and that’s where that body of research (is needed).”

Stimulated hydrogen holds promise for iron-rich regions without natural underground reservoirs for accumulating naturally created hydrogen, such as “the Upper Peninsula and into Minnesota,” she said.

“It doesn’t mean all hope is lost there,” Gelman said. “There is some good, good potential (for stimulated hydrogen production).”

170,000 years’ worth of energy, created by the Earth

The Earth has produced enough hydrogen under its crust to meet the entire planet’s energy needs for 170,000 years — but most of it is lost or inaccessible, said Christopher Ballentine, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Oxford in England.

“But what it does mean is we only need to find a small amount of it for it to be useful societally,” he said.

Ballentine pointed to USGS studies showing there’s potentially enough geologic hydrogen which “has the potential to be found and discovered and produced” to meet society’s increasing hydrogen demands for the next 200 years.

That has piqued the interest of the oil, gas and mineral extraction world.

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“The industry is following the money,” Ballentine said. “About five years ago, there were zero companies in this space. Two years ago, there were 40. There are probably double that today.”

But prospectivity means places where stored, naturally occurring underground hydrogen may be, where the conditions are ripe for it. But it’s not a certainty, and searching for it is a costly process that oil and gas production companies approach carefully.

“There are a lot of smaller startups, a lot of independent new companies that are interested in this,” Gelman said. “The oil majors are often interested and sitting back and watching a little bit, but they will be the fast followers.”

“We want to get to the wells − that’s the exciting part; they actually call it the rotary lie detector, where you figure out what’s down there. But there is a lot of groundwork and geology that we’re trying to provide to American industry and American policy makers to try and help ease this initial stage.”

Interest, but not much activity so far in Michigan

Current U.S. exploration and drilling for geologic hydrogen occurs most intensely in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, along the Midcontinent Rift, a geologic formation in the middle U.S. where the Earth’s crust began to pull apart millions of years ago. That activity hasn’t occurred in Michigan — yet.

“We’ve been following the increased attention on geologic hydrogen, and the prospectivity map certainly shows Michigan in the darkest blues for prospectivity,” said Adam Wygant, director of the Geologic Resources Management Division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

“Our sense is there is a fair amount of research going on and companies looking at potential in Michigan,” both for naturally occurring underground pools and for stimulated hydrogen production.

State officials are encouraging any companies doing geologic testing to include hydrogen in their tests, to better learn where it’s found and help zero in on those more costly exploration methods, Wygant said.

Michigan is prepared to regulate any hydrogen production activities through its existing laws, and is monitoring other states where geologic hydrogen exploration is farther along to help identify administrative rules and procedures, he said. The actual extraction process would not be remarkably different from an oil or natural gas well.

“But the hydrogen molecule is a little different from a methane molecule — it’s pesky; it doesn’t like to be contained,” Wygant said.

“There are specialty products that would be used in well construction, in cements, in surface infrastructure, to properly maintain it.”

Finding the recipe for reproducing hydrogen underground

Multiple avenues of geologic hydrogen research are under pursuit at Sandia National Laboratories, a federally owned facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, operated by a subsidiary of Honeywell International that works on advancing science on energy, national security and other issues.

The lab is participating in a research project experimenting with certain rock types and characterizing how much hydrogen they produce under different conditions, the keys to producing stimulated hydrogen.

“They’re doing microbes, catalysts, different chemicals, steam, working at different temperatures,” said Sandia geologist Franek Hasiuk. “Right now, the race is to find the right recipe, and there have been early positive results with some of these techniques.”

“We can either do those chemical reactions down in a well deep underground, or we can even do it at a mine, and it’s actually a way we could use old mine tailings and mine waste to produce new energy and new revenue streams that can help clean up those mine wastes.”

Sandia is also funding an internal research and development project on the molecular and atomic processes involved in geologic production of hydrogen.

“There is a long way to go; there is still a lot to discover,” said Donald Conley, acting senior manager of the Geosciences Research and Applications Group at Sandia.

“We are guiding the conversation to what’s next for geologic hydrogen. Once we find all these discoveries, how do we make it a viable part of the U.S. energy economy?”

An accidental find helps an African village meet its power needs

Workers drilling a water well in the village of Bourakėbougou in the African nation of Mali in 1987 accidentally hit a vein of geologic hydrogen — a discovery confirmed after a worker lit a cigarette and the gas exploded. The well hole was capped with cement for safety reasons and forgotten until 2012, when Hydroma, a company based in Canada, began a pilot project combusting the hydrogen from the well to produce electricity for the village.

“For more than 7 years, the village of Bourakébougou benefited from free electricity without CO₂ emissions,” the company states on its website. The company has since proven the existence of other nearby pools of geologic hydrogen, has expanded its footprint in other parts of Africa, and has opened a U.S. division.

A reservoir of geologic hydrogen discovered at an abandoned chromium mine in Albania, and reserves discovered in France’s Lorraine region, have also sparked development interest.

While geologic hydrogen discoveries and their benefits may be at first localized, that’s not a new story, Hasiuk said.

“When the oil and gas industry started, it was also just like that, very localized pockets where you had oil seeping out of the ground,” he said. “In one place, they would use it to line the outside of ships to make them waterproof, or they’d use it in making patent medicines and things like that. It was really when we started moving from collecting it from places where it seeped out of the ground to drilling nearby that we were able to unlock these larger volumes.”

Drilling is very expensive, and companies today generally do it only when they have really good information, he said.

‘So until we see more exploration successes (with geologic hydrogen) it’s going to be a very small process. But just like with the start of the oil industry, once people started being very successful, then the exploration activities spread rapidly across the country and across the world.”

The cautions and tempered expectations are repeatedly cited, but the excitement about geologic hydrogen’s possibilities is undeniable.

“If we can prove this concept and reproducibly find natural hydrogen, it will be a game-changer,” Ballentine said. “It will potentially provide a transition of green energy from wind, from solar to a hydrogen economy.”

Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.