Legacy oil companies and highly-funded start-ups have announced a major breakthrough in the transition away from fossil fuels, confirming that the most viable path to zero-emission energy is to deploy heavy extraction machinery and drill deep holes into sedimentary basins.
The pivot to "geologic hydrogen" or "white hydrogen" comes after years of the energy sector struggling to produce green hydrogen using renewable energy and water—a process widely criticized by the oil industry for not involving a drilling rig. Now, start-ups like Koloma and HyTerra have secured hundreds of millions in venture capital to explore naturally occurring underground hydrogen reserves, a workflow that allows legacy producers to achieve net-zero targets by performing their exact current business model.
We spent a decade worrying that the energy transition would strand our assets, but it turns out the future of clean tech is just sinking a twelve-inch steel casing five thousand feet into the earth.
The Department of Energy recently awarded $20 million in ARPA-E grants to advance geologic hydrogen extraction, signaling federal support for the climate solution of deploying more rotary drill bits. Analysts at the IEA note that while white hydrogen could theoretically provide a low-carbon fuel source, the immediate environmental benefit has been the stabilization of BP and Shell’s exploration and production divisions, which can now reclassify their drilling foremen as frontline climate workers.
At the upcoming COP29 summit in Baku, industry lobbyists are expected to push for expanded geologic hydrogen subsidies under the Gold Standard registry, arguing that the only way to quickly decarbonize the global economy is to expedite extraction permits on federal lands. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's next offshore lease sale, tentatively rebranded as a clean hydrogen exploratory initiative, is scheduled for August, just as the Gulf Coast hurricane season begins its peak.