Natural hydrogen trapped in the Earth’s crust could power humanity for millennia, and without emissions. A new strategy maps out how to find it.
- Scientists from the University of Oxford, Durham University, and the University of Toronto have identified the key geological ingredients needed to find natural clean hydrogen beneath the Earth’s surface.
- This natural hydrogen is produced by the Earth over millions of years and can accumulate underground in the right rock formations.
- The study shows that the conditions for trapping hydrogen exist in many parts of the world, making this a truly global opportunity.
- Hydrogen is already a $135 billion global industry, used to produce fertilizer and other essential chemicals that support modern life.
- It is also a cornerstone for future clean energy systems, with the market expected to grow to as much as $1 trillion by 2050.
- This new research could help industries discover and tap into natural hydrogen reserves, offering a cleaner alternative to current hydrogen production methods that rely on fossil fuels.
- The findings were published on May 13 in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
Hydrogen’s Critical Role in Modern Life
Hydrogen is more than just a clean fuel option; it helps feed half the world by powering the production of fertilizer, and sits at the heart of most plans for a carbon-neutral future.
Yet almost all hydrogen today comes from hydrocarbons, releasing about 2.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Demand is expected to soar from 90 million metric tons in 2022 to about 540 million metric tons by 2050, so finding a way to make hydrogen without adding more CO2 is critical. Carbon sequestration and renewable-powered electrolysis can help, but they are not yet cost-competitive.
A Natural Hydrogen Solution Beneath Our Feet
A research team from the University of Oxford, Durham University, and the University of Toronto points to an overlooked answer: Earth’s own crust. Over the past billion years, the continental crust has generated enough hydrogen to meet human energy needs for roughly 170,000 years. Much of that gas remains locked underground, untouched and emission-free.
Until now, scientists had only scattered measurements of where natural hydrogen collects. The new study outlines a clear “exploration recipe”—the rock types, temperatures, fluids, and geological histories that allow hydrogen to form, migrate, and become trapped in reservoirs we can reach. With that blueprint in hand, industry can start hunting for clean hydrogen reserves worldwide, offering a potential game-changer for energy and climate goals.
First Principles and the Hydrogen System Blueprint
Study co-author Professor Jon Gluyas (Durham University) notes: “We have successfully developed an exploration strategy for helium, and a similar ‘first principles’ approach can be taken for hydrogen.”
This research outlines the key ingredients needed to inform an exploration strategy to find different ‘hydrogen systems.’ This includes how much hydrogen is produced and the rock types and conditions these occur in, how the hydrogen migrates underground from these rocks, the conditions that allow a gas field to form, and the conditions that destroy the hydrogen.
Microbes, Rocks, and Hydrogen’s Hidden Challenges
Study co-author Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar (University of Toronto) said: “We know, for example, that underground microbes readily feast on hydrogen. Avoiding environments that bring them into contact with the hydrogen is important in preserving hydrogen in economic accumulations.”
The authors outline where understanding of these ingredients is strong, and highlight areas that need more work, such as rock reaction efficiencies and how geological histories can bring the right rocks together with the water that reacts with it.
Crust-Based Hydrogen: Young, Old, and Everywhere
Some sources of hydrogen gas, such as from the Earth’s mantle, have fueled much speculation and hyperbole, but this research shows that these are not viable sources. Instead, the authors showed that the ingredients for a complete hydrogen system can be found in a range of common geological settings within the crust. Some of these can be geologically quite young, forming hydrogen ‘recently’ (millions to tens of millions of years), others truly ancient (hundreds of millions of years old) – but critically are found globally.
Cooking Up Hydrogen: The Exploration Recipe
Lead author Professor Chris Ballentine (University of Oxford, Department of Earth Sciences) said: “Combining the ingredients to find accumulated hydrogen in any of these settings can be likened to cooking a soufflé – get any one of the ingredients, amounts, timing, or temperature wrong and you will be disappointed. One successful exploration recipe that is repeatable will unlock a commercially competitive, low-carbon hydrogen source that would significantly contribute to the energy transition – we have the right experience to combine these ingredients and find that recipe.”
The potential for natural geological hydrogen has motivated the authors to form Snowfox Discovery Ltd., an exploration company with a mission to find societally significant natural hydrogen accumulations.
Reference: “Natural hydrogen resource accumulation in the continental crust” by Chris J. Ballentine, Rūta Karolytė, Anran Cheng, Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Jon G. Gluyas and Michael C. Daly, 13 May 2025, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
DOI: 10.1038/s43017-025-00670-1
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32 Comments
This is awesome news!
There’s something wrong with this picture. We have enough hydrogen to power everything around us for the next 170,000 years, and yet we have not even started to tap it — nor have we started to build the pipelines and ships to deliver the hydrogen to those that need it.
Yes….As we see very darkly…..Still trying to figure out , how to drill to gas/oil pockets , much less the easily escaped gasses of hydrogen….Also , that our 55 years chase for Fusion power , is still very elusive at least 10 years , before we can control that as well….
But there is more help soon , with a much smarter collective , with Ai/Quantum computers and knowledge….Will it save us from ourselves , is the questions ? Who will control it ?
Extraction and distribution at what cost, I wonder? Meanwhile, we can all wait for the eco-zealots to start denigrating the use of hydrogen as burning it results in water vapour, a volatile with roughly double the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.
Is reality denigration? Water vapor not only acts as a greenhouse gas, but it will precipitate out as water that didn’t previously exist, contributing to the rise of sea level, one of the common complaints about anthropogenic warming. If there is concern about methane, why should water vapor get a pass?
A hydrogen energy economy will create additional problems. What do you do with the water vapor produced in cars? If it is dumped into the atmosphere in densely populated urban areas it not only will act as a greenhouse gas, exacerbating the Urban Heat Island problem, but it will increase the humidity and increase the Heat Index. Higher humidity will not only make Summers more uncomfortable, but will promote corrosion and the growth of mold. In the Winter, it will encourage rime when it condenses out onto the pavement, making driving more dangerous.
Another approach would be to condense the water and store it on board the car, resulting in an incremental decrease in gas mileage and performance as the holding tank gets filled. Then there is an issue of maintenance with the holding tank needing to be drained regularly where it doesn’t result in the roads being made slick or the dumping spots into swamps.
I could go on about the issues. None of which are insurmountable engineering problems. However, the point is actually that there ARE problems and not addressing them before society invests in a change over will be expensive and disruptive. We need to consider the tradeoffs between hydrocarbons and pure hydrogen, such as more water from hydrogen and changes in the microclimate from the humidity. Hydrogen is not a ‘silver bullet.’ It is just a set of new and different problems that may or may not be worth the compromises and changes.
I suggest that you stop breathing as you, and the rest of us, to be honest, are breathing out water vapour and CO2 (not to mention farting methane) for the purpose of which we are are significantly altering “Mother” Nature’s green and wonderful eco-system with which some people allege they live in harmony. Irony alert, for folk in the USA.
Excellent points and conclusion. Exactly: it’s not that using trapped hydrogen (assuming it can be located and extracted economically) is a net good or net bad… it’s that we don’t even know at this point and all the pros and cons need to be analyzed and calculated as best we can. Assuming that it will be a net positive simply because it doesn’t produce CO2 is a really foolish idea, and a repetition of the mistake of any past technological approach that was assumed a net positive without really knowing, and turned out not to be. But it’s not easy to get people to see this truth as they so often become myopic over single issues and don’t bother stepping back to try to see the total, big picture.
I wouldn’t worry about hydrogen in cars. Batteries have won that battle.
Hydrogen would be useful in electrolysers to provide heat and electricity in the winter at small scale (i.e. domestic). I suppose in that case we easily condense the vapour to add heat and water to the home.
Fine article. I never understood the mad dash towards an electric future, lets hope this solution becomes practical soon.
Much easier solutions…..Just have humans and large animals , to cease breathing . As that will eliminate huge amounts of games, and water vapor 3scaping from us humans….
Then the bugs and rats , can have earth , but will it be pristine then , or much less orderly…Since mother nature is not exactly the most ordered thing ?
Water vapor isn’t a volatile; and unlike CO₂ and methane it is not a forcing GHG.
If you will pardon the pun, what you are offering up as factual is intellectual dribble.
From the American Heritage Dictionary (online), “volatile” is defined as:
1) Evaporating readily at normal temperatures and pressures.
2) Capable of being readily vaporized.
Water vapor meets that definition. Where did you get the idea that it isn’t volatile?
One of the reasons that water vapor is commonly dismissed as being a greenhouse gas is that it is condensible (precipitates out) and therefore doesn’t accumulate over time, increasing its concentration, assuming that nothing changes. However, water vapor is continually replenished, reaching an equilibrium limited by the availability of water. However, when humans create reservoirs, tap ground water for irrigation, and facilitate the conversion of hydrogen into water, the availability is increased, particularly in arid and semiarid regions — think Phoenix and even Nebraska and Kansas. Therefore, water vapor DOES contribute to warming because it is a potential greenhouse gas and its concentration is increasing even now. The situation WILL be exacerbated if we start withdrawing hydrogen from stratigraphic traps and use it as a power source.
The paper referenced does not say there is 170,000 years worth underground , it says over a billion years the earth would have produced that much HOWEVER most of it has escaped to the atmosphere or turned into water.
The headline is a lie vs the actual paper.
This is utter nonsense. Water vapor is clouds. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Methane is worse.
Water vapor precipitates when there is more than the temperature of the air will support. It’s called dew or rain.
Ideally, engines burning hydrogen could condense vapor and offload it to water your garden when you get home. Or a power plant could send it to a nearby farm.
No, clouds are not made of water vapor. They a droplets of liquid water that have condensed out. In the vapor phase, water is essentially invisible, albeit it may reduce the range of visibility because of scattering.
Have you ever closely observed the condensation trails left by aircraft? Initially, as the exhaust leaves the jet engine, there is nothing that can be seen. Then, as the air cools, liquid water condenses out and the contrails appear because the water droplets scatter light strongly. Then, the trail starts to fade as the water droplets evaporate and turn back into vapor. Precipitation (rain/snow) occurs when droplets coalesce and become too large to be supported by the Brownian Motion of the air.
What you are missing is that, today, handling water vapor from combustion is not something that drivers have to worry about. It will become a daily chore with internal combustion engines or even fuel cells running on hydrogen. Are you prepared to carry buckets of water to you garden — in the middle of Winter? Not everyone has gardens. Especially those living in urban apartments. Distribution of water from large sources such as power plants will require the infrastructure to be modified to transport the water, which costs money. In places that already have adequate water, additional water will not be welcome and there is the question of what to do with the water in the Winter, even in the places that could use water in the Summer. You haven’t thought it through. Which is the point of my posts.
“Methane is worse.”
If you have your assumptions wrong, you can’t be expected to come to the correct conclusions. Read this:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions/
It is you who is spewing utter nonsense. You must have slept through your high school chemistry classes.
The Earth is in a 2.5 million ice age that will end when all natural ice melts, with around 10 to 20 times as many people dying from cold-related causes than from heat-related causes.
This study says that around 4.6 million people die each year from cooler weather compared to around 500,000 that die each from warmer weather. Where temperature is concerned, cold weather is the big killer of humans.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
This study from 2015 says that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather and that moderately warm or cool weather kills far more people than extreme weather. ‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
When it is cold our bodies constrict blood vessels to conserve heat. That causes our blood pressure to rises and that causes increased deaths in the colder months compared to the warmer months.
The winter months are associated commonly with coughs, sneezes, and other such irritants to one’s lungs such as smoke from coal fires and wood fires. Living at -30 to -5 degree C doesn’t kill people as long as they eat well and have decent clothing. And the Yaghan indians of Patagonia didn’t die out because of cold weather.
The lifestyles required in freezing temperatures mean spending the vast majority of time indoors, often in close quarters with others, getting insufficient sunlight exposure and therefore insufficient vitamin D, and not eating enough or any fresh fruit and vegetables, which are known to promote health. These factors do indeed lead to lower levels of health and increased mortality. Sure, people have been living in cold or even frigid climates for thousands of years, but they never really prospered in them nor developed large population densities. Only in modern times with modern technology has this changed to some degree. There are ways of counteracting these limitations of cold climates, as has happened in modern times, especially with many technologies that are highly dependent on fossil fuel use (notably long-distance transport), but the limitations are never fully overcome. Homo sapiens is a warm-weather species by nature that has managed to colonize sub-optimal climactic environments by way of culturally-transmitted technologies, but it doesn’t change the fact those climates remain sub-optimal for human thriving, including for human health, whether you want to admit it or not.
Are you denying that the human-caused warming of our planet is a problem? What is your point?
When did the natural causes of climate change, which resulted in wide swings in temperature, cease operating and why? If they didn’t stop, then how can you be certain that they aren’t driving the relatively small changes occurring presently, which are well within the range of past changes? When crocodiles were living in the Arctic, it wasn’t a “problem” for them.
Everyone still imagines the abundant hydrogen means using it to directly power cars. Due to the complexity of storage and transport it’s far more likely to be used to generate electricity. Cars will still use battery technology which is advancing year by year.
Fantastic news if we can tap into vast hydrogen deposits, but it still has limitations that will dictate how it is applied.
Those details have yet to be worked out, which is the point I was making. Until we have all the facts, and consider such alternatives as batteries versus fuel cells, we don’t know what the future holds. Just because we are learning more about ‘natural’ hydrogen doesn’t mean it will be economic to extract, purify, transport, and store it.
Storing and and transporting H2 is very expensive. It does seem good for very large energy applications like ocean shipping and perhaps energy production. Yet for automobiles it requires an infrastructure much like gasoline yet at a much higher cost in every way. That cost also equals CO2 in the form of pipelines and storage tanks that require ultra high pressures. Many people can only see the front side of H2 as producing water vapor and so on, not the massive infrastructure required to make it work, let alone create a low carbon energy system. I think EVs will be more likely to be take over transportation when looking at the bigger picture in that EVs already use the electrical system we have now. Yes we will have to increase electricity capacity, yet we already are. Electricity has shown the cost of renewables to be going down significantly. It’s already happening. By the time H2 ever really happens, EVs will have taken over.
I’m astounded at how many people are seers and prophets who can see the future. I’m also surprised that they haven’t used their gifts to predict their way to wealth and then use their money to make self-fulfilling prophesies. But then, maybe, just maybe, the only ones they are fooling are themselves.
If all our power was produced by burning hydrogen mined from the earth, the warming of the earth would be reduced. Agreed?
NO! Water vapor is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. We would be replacing warming caused by CO2 with more powerful warming caused by H2O. There is a significant capacity for increased humidity in the arid and semiarid regions of the world with large urban areas. Warming would almost certainly be made worse.
You have already demonstrated that you have a poor grasp of physical chemistry. Perhaps that is why you hold ideas that are false.
Better than fossil fuel in terms of natural/biological preservation, so hell yeah I guess.
Give it up the hydrogen economy is the biggest thing ever.
There are reasons it hasn’t happened it’s not going to happen just stop
One of the highlights in the article points out: “Over the past billion years, the Archaean crust alone has generated volumes of hydrogen energy equivalent to ca 170,000 years of present-day societal oil use. However, it is not known how much of this hydrogen has been preserved in societally relevant accumulations.” This is very important to consider.
From the abstract, “Naturally occurring hydrogen accumulations COULD be an important source of clean hydrogen for hard-to-abate industry use and energy, BUT societally important reserves have yet to be proven.” In other words, they don’t really know how much has been retained, what the purity is, or how large each deposit will be, which are crucial determinations for geologists looking for economically mineable ore deposits.
The peer-reviewed article goes on to say, “Over the past billion years, this production is enough to supply the energy equivalent to 170,000 years of present-day societal oil use. However, MOST of this hydrogen would have been consumed in the subsurface or escaped to the atmosphere. Establishing how much hydrogen has been preserved in the crust and is accessible for economic exploitation remains HIGHLY UNCERTAIN.” This is very different from what the SciTechDaily title is implying. That “170,000 years” is an upper-bound that is clearly unavailable. I don’t know why the authors even mention it because it is as real as a unicorn.
The actual article, from which the press release (SciTechDaily) was derived, states, “In this Review, we summarize the current understanding of the processes that control natural hydrogen systems, including the principal natural H2 sources and their geological characteristics, …” In other words, this ISN’T about the probability of hydrogen replacing hydrocarbons in energy production. It is background about what we currently know about the geology of hydrogen production.
How many of you cheerleaders actually went to the link and read the Review?
Wow this is like owning a company and buying your stuff to make yourself money you slowly lose money over time until you’re broke. When you can make hydrogen fuel extremely cheap and we’re talking pennies on the dollar then this will be a viable fuel alternative until then it’s all yes