A global gold rush for buried hydrogen is underway — as hype builds over its clean energy potential

Published

1 year ago

March 26, 2024

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The team from the Geological Agency of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM) took samples of natural hydrogen gas found in One Pute Jaya Village, Morowali Regency, Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, 23 October 2023.

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A global gold rush is underway for a long-overlooked resource that advocates say could play a significant role in the shift away from fossil fuels.

Geologic hydrogen, sometimes referred to as white, gold or natural hydrogen, refers to hydrogen gas that is found in its natural form beneath Earth’s surface. It is thought to be produced by high-temperature reactions between water and iron-ich minerals.

Hydrogen has long been billed as one of many potential energy sources that could play a pivotal role in the energy transition, but most of it is produced using fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, a process that generates significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Green hydrogen, a process that involves splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity, is one exception from what’s known as the hydrogen color rainbow. However, its development has been held back by soaring costs and a challenging economic environment.

It’s within this context that momentum has been building around geologic hydrogen. Exploratory efforts are now underway in countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Colombia, South Korea and others.

A photo taken on April 27, 2023 shows gauges that are part of the electrolysis plant of the geological hydrogen H2 storage facility ‘Underground Sun Storage’ in Gampern, Upper Austria.

Alex Halada | Afp | Getty Images

Research published earlier this month by Rystad Energy showed that 40 companies were actively searching for geologic hydrogen deposits by the end of last year — up from just 10 in 2020.

The consulting firm, which described the pursuit of geologic hydrogen as a “white gold rush,” said the hype stems from hopes that the untapped resource could be a “gamechanger” in the clean energy transition.

“I would say this is something relatively old and new in a way,” Minh Khoi Le, head of hydrogen research at Rystad Energy, told CNBC via videoconference. “The first project that found hydrogen was a while ago, but it never picked up from there, right? People never seriously tried to go for exploration.”

An accidental discovery

The initial discovery of geologic hydrogen occurred in 1987 in a small village roughly 60 kilometers (37.3 miles) from Mali’s capital of Bamako. A failed attempt to drill for water by Canada’s Hydroma hit upon an abundance of odorless gas that was inadvertently found to be highly flammable. The well was soon plugged and forgotten.

Almost two decades later, subsequent exploration at the site found geologic reservoirs containing nearly pure hydrogen gas. Today, the resource is being used to provide power to the Malian village of Bourakébougou.

Last year, researchers found what may be the world’s largest geologic hydrogen deposit to date in France’s eastern Lorraine region. The unexpected discovery further boosted interest in its clean energy potential.

A man is seen in a pirogue on the Niger River in Bamako, Mali on January 26, 2024.

Ousmane Makaveli | Afp | Getty Images

Geoffrey Ellis, a research geologist at the Energy Resources Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), told CNBC that there could be a vast amount of naturally occurring hydrogen buried in underground reservoirs around the world.

Based on current understanding, Ellis said there is likely to be about 5 trillion metric tons of geologic hydrogen in Earth’s interior, although most of this is likely to be too deep or too far offshore to be economically recovered.

Nonetheless, Ellis said that just a few percent of geologic hydrogen recovery might well be enough to supply all projected demand for 200 years.

“The potential is there but we’ve got to do the work,” Ellis said via videoconference, adding that more investment is necessary to accelerate early-stage research and development.

The U.S. Department of Energy last month announced $20 million to support 16 projects nationwide to advance the natural subsurface generation of hydrogen. It said the energy resource could potentially produce zero carbon emissions when burned or used in a fuel cell.

If some of these numbers that certain institutes, like the USGS, about the potential volume that you can extract … come true, it can actually play quite a significant role.

Minh Khoi Le

Head of hydrogen research at Rystad Energy

“Natural hydrogen has created a lot of excitement at the moment but in terms of potential I think it is still a little bit uncertain because none of these projects have actually started producing or extracting hydrogen — except for that one in Mali,” Rystad Energy’s Le told CNBC.

Le said there were still “a lot of question marks around the whole story about natural hydrogen,” but there appeared to be “some substance” behind the hype.

“If some of these numbers that certain institutes, like the USGS, about the potential volume that you can extract … come true, it can actually play quite a significant role,” he added.

‘Sometimes we want to run before we can walk’

Not everyone’s convinced. Some have expressed skepticism about the clean energy potential of natural hydrogen.

“Sometimes we want to run before we can walk,” Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told CNBC via videoconference.

The first near-term priority for hydrogen, Jaller-Makarewicz said, should be looking for ways to replace so-called grey hydrogen with green hydrogen.

Grey hydrogen — produced using natural gas and the most common form of hydrogen production — leads to large greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the Carbon Trust has estimated that less than 1% of current global hydrogen production is emission-free.

“Don’t confuse the idea of ‘we need to find the solution’ with the reality,” Jaller-Makarewicz said.

This photograph shows Lhyfe floating hydrogen production unit (R) past the Floatgen floating wind turbine (L), at the SEM-REV experimentation site off Le Croisic, western France, on June 26, 2023.

Sebastien Salom-gomis | Afp | Getty Images

Separately, the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a group of academics, scientists and engineers seeking to bring an evidence-based view to hydrogen’s role in the energy transition, said in a recent blog post that geologic hydrogen discoveries currently supply the world with less daily energy than a single wind turbine.

What’s more, the coalition says there are environmental concerns about the extraction process, and transportation and distribution challenges mean geologic hydrogen is not likely to be found where it is needed most.

“Considering findings to date, what we know about geologic hydrogen systems, and the fact that favourable settings appear rare, the odds of finding geologic hydrogen that can be extracted at the scale of large natural gas developments looks relatively slim,” the coalition said on March 14.

Environment

China cracks down on automated driving features after Tesla’s FSD launch

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2 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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China cracks down on automated driving features after Tesla's FSD launch

Just after Tesla launched its ‘Full Self-Driving’ package, in China, the country announced that it cracking down on automated driving features with new limitations.

In February, Tesla launched a first version of its “Full Self-Driving” FSD package in China for owners with the latest “Hardware 4.0”, or “HW4”, vehicles.

Most of the features under Tesla’s FSD package have been limited to North America due to Tesla training its system for this market first and due to regulatory limitations in other markets.

Shortly after Tesla launched FSD in China, the American automaker had to pause its rollout due to updated requirements from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

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Now, MIIT has confirmed that it held a meeting with automotive industry stakeholders yesterday, and it has further clarified the rollout of advanced driver assistance (ADAS) features.

CNEV reported on the meeting:

Car companies were asked to refrain from using words like “self-driving,” “autonomous driving,” “smart driving,” “advanced smart driving,” and instead use the term “combined assisted driving” to avoid misleading consumers, according to the minutes of the meeting.

Tesla had already changed the name from ‘Full Self-Driving’ to “Intelligent Assisted Driving” following the launch in China.

Based on a statement from MIIT, the meeting focused on enforcing the previously announced updated requirements that launched right after Tesla introduced FSD in China (translated from Chinese):

The meeting emphasized that automobile manufacturers must deeply understand the requirements of the “Notice”, fully carry out combined driving assistance testing and verification, clarify the system functional boundaries and safety response measures, and must not make exaggerations or false propaganda. They must strictly fulfill their obligation to inform, and truly assume the main responsibility for production consistency and quality safety, and truly improve the safety level of intelligent connected vehicle products.

Regulators want automakers to reduce the frequency of new software updates and instead focus on extended testing before releasing new updates.

The last few months have been quite chaotic for ADAS systems in China. Along with Tesla’s FSD release, several Chinese companies released their systems, including BYD, Xiaomi, and Huawei.

Xiaomi reported a fatal accident in which its ADAS system was active just seconds before the crash, and Tesla owners using FSD racked up thousands of dollars in fines due to FSD making mistakes.

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Environment

Global Payments shares plunge 17% after company announces $24 billion Worldpay deal

Published

4 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Global Payments shares plunge 17% after company announces billion Worldpay deal

The Global Payments Company logo seen displayed on a smartphone.

Igor Golovniov | LightRocket | Getty Images

Global Payments shares tumbled 17% on Thursday after the company said it’s buying Worldpay for more than $24 billion while simultaneously selling its Issuer Solutions business to Fidelity National Information Services.

The company said that in acquiring Worldpay, which FIS had purchased in 2019 before later selling a majority stake, it’s expanding its reach and will be able to serve over 6 million customers across more than 175 countries, enabling $3.7 trillion in annual payment volume.

In selling its Issuer Solutions unit to FIS for $13.5 billion, Global Payments is divesting a unit for back-end financial processing that’s long been viewed as a stable provider of growth. In the end, Global Payments is going bigger in providing payments services to merchants, while FIS is focusing on issuer processing.

FIS bought Worldpay for about $35 billion in 2019 and sold most of its stake last year to GTCR.

Global Payments said on Thursday that it obtained committed bridge financing and plans to issue $7.7 billion of debt “to replace the bridge commitment and refinance Worldpay’s outstanding debt.”

Tesla Cybertruck is in crisis: new discounts and throttling down production

Published

6 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Tesla Cybertruck is in crisis: new discounts and throttling down production

The Tesla Cybertruck is in crisis. The automaker is still sitting on a ton of old inventory, which it is now heavily discounting, and it is throttling down production to try to avoid building up the inventory again.

When launching the production version of the Cybertruck in late 2023, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the vehicle program would reach 250,000 units a year in 2025:

“I think we’ll end up with roughly a quarter million Cybertrucks a year, but I don’t think we’re going to reach that output rate next year. I think we’ll probably reach it sometime in 2025.”

We are now in 2025, and Tesla is expected to currently be selling the Cybertruck at a rate of about 25,000 units a year – a tenth of what Musk predicted.

Earlier this month, we reported that Tesla began the second quarter with 2,400 Cybertrucks in inventory, valued at over $200 million.

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This is a real problem for Tesla as many of those Cybertrucks are older 2024 model year units not eligible for the federal tax credit, and even some ‘Foundation Series’, which Tesla stopped building in October 2024 – meaning that Tesla is sitting on some 6-month-old trucks in some cases.

Tesla is now offering deeper discounts on the new inventory of Cybertrucks. The discounts can go as high as $10,000, but the average one is closer to $8,000, which is more than the tax credit:

Despite Tesla’s efforts, the automaker has only reduced its Cybertruck inventory by about 100 units since the beginning of the month.

Tesla is now further throttling down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas, according to a new report from Business Insider.

According to two Tesla workers speaking with BI, the automaker has reduced its Cybertruck production teams and now operates at a fraction of its original capacity. It also moved some Cybertruck production workers to Model Y production at the plant.

One of the workers said:

“It feels a lot like they’re filtering people out. The parking lot keeps getting emptier.”

As we previously reported, Tesla has been operating all its factories at approximately 60% capacity to avoid building up excessive inventory amid lower demand.

When it comes to the Cybertruck program, it sounds like Tesla is lowering production even further.

Last week, Tesla launched a new version of the Cybertruck in an attempt to boost demand, but it has been poorly received due to the automaker’s removal of many essential features.

Electrek’s Take

There are a lot of other automakers that would have already given up on the Cybertruck ith these results, but not Tesla. Musk is not one to admit defeat easily.

However, Tesla is running out of options.

The new Cybertruck RWD was a desperate attempt, and I doubt it will work. Now, it sounds like Tesla is further throttling down production – virtually confirming that the new trim didn’t help.

The next step would be a complete production pause.

Again, I don’t think Musk wants to admit defeat, but at some point, it’s inevitable.

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