Believe it or not, drilling for a certain type of gas could open up a new world of clean energy.
Trillions of tons of lightweight, energy-dense hydrogen gas may be hidden deep underground. Those natural reservoirs, known as geologic hydrogen, could be a fruitful carbon-free fuel source.
Geologic hydrogen is so promising that Bill Gates, Amazon, and United Airlines are just some of the funders behind a startup called Koloma, which thinks it can tap into those reserves. Oil and gas giants BP and Chevron have joined a consortium to study geologic hydrogen. Even the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is interested. It held a hearing on the subject last week.
“The vast majority of the in-place hydrogen is likely to be in accumulations that are too deep, too far offshore, or too small to ever be economically recovered,” Geoffrey Ellis, a USGS geologist, said in the February 28 hearing. …