About a billion years ago, the United States was nearly ripped in half. Magma bubbled up as the Earth’s crust stretched thin somewhere around Michigan, nearly creating a new sea. Evidence of that scar, called the Midcontinent Rift, now curls around the upper Midwest, stretching from Ontario all the way down to Wichita, Kansas. Today, it’s the deepest failed rift in the world — and a 1,200-mile mining hotspot, known for its stores of copper and nickel.
Researchers believe the area may also be home to large hydrogen deposits. That matters because, even though hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it’s also one of the most difficult to capture in its pure form. Hydrogen is tiny, with an atomic radius of about 53 trillionths of a meter, and as the lightest element it’s able to slip through even the smallest cracks.
These qualities make hydrogen expensive to produce and difficult to transport, which is a shame because the clean-burning fuel could be key for decarbonizing heavy industries like trucking, shipping, and aviation, where batteries are unlikely to provide the necessary power. If we want to continue to feed the world’s growing population, we probably need a lot more hydrogen at the ready as well. Ammonia, which is used to make fertilizer, requires an enormous amount of the element.
The U.S. currently produces about 10 million metric tons of hydrogen a year, almost all of which is created with fossil fuels and then used in refineries and ammonia plants. Most efforts to change that so far have revolved around so-called green hydrogen, in which hydrogen is ripped from water molecules in an extremely energy-intensive process called electrolysis. (The “green” in green hydrogen means that the electrolysis is powered by renewable energy.)
The Biden administration set out to make the green hydrogen industry more lucrative by getting Congress to pass tax credits that would pay producers $3 per kilogram of hydrogen. But when Republicans took control of Congress this year, they arranged for a phaseout of those tax credits by 2028, rather than 2033, part of a broader assault on funding for renewable energy. It’s unclear if green hydrogen producers will find a path to profitable operation anytime soon.
“If you look at the wind and solar industry, it took decades for the cost to come down,” Aaron Bergman, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit focused on energy and the environment, told the Financial Times. “The hydrogen industry has not had that time.”
But that may all be rendered moot if it turns out that, after all, places like the Midcontinent Rift can provide the world with enough naturally-occurring hydrogen to decarbonize the technologies that rely on the element. For the first time, researchers are starting to think that might be possible.
For years, scientists believed it was impossible for hydrogen to accumulate in significant deposits. “It tends to leak through almost everything, and it’s very reactive,” said Arnout Everts, a geoscientist with the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a volunteer group of scientists, academics, and engineers who formed to provide resources about hydrogen’s role in the energy transition. “And microbes love it. Therefore, the thought was always that it was virtually impossible to trap and preserve hydrogen in the crust of the Earth.”
In 2007, a Malian businessman and oil magnate named Aliou Diallo discovered an enormous reservoir of nearly pure hydrogen, which now powers the village of Bourakebougou. When Diallo and his team reported the discovery in the International Journal of Hydrogen in 2018, it kicked off a rush to identify and exploit the resource. At this point, roughly 40 companies are searching for what’s now being called natural or “white” hydrogen. Within the past year, major corporations like Rio Tinto and BP have joined the crush; in January, the U.S. Geological Service, or USGS, released the first map of potential hydrogen deposits across the United States.
Natural hydrogen is created when water reacts with iron-rich rock like olivine; a process called serpentization releases hydrogen gas as a byproduct. Assuming the surrounding rock is well sealed enough to serve as a reservoir, a large deposit of hydrogen begins to accumulate. All along the Midcontinent Rift, startups are beginning to drill for the gas, hoping to unleash a functionally endless source of clean energy. (While oil and gas take millions of years to form, hydrogen is created constantly by water and rock.) In a 2024 paper, USGS scientists Geoff Ellis and Sarah Gelman estimate that if even a small portion of the global hydrogen reserve is extracted, it could meet projected clean hydrogen needs for roughly 200 years.
“I definitely think that the potential is there,” said Ellis. “We just don’t know whether we can economically find it and produce it, but the potential is absolutely there. … I’ve been surprised at how quickly this has really taken up on the commercial side, just the number of companies that have jumped into this [field] that, to me, is still very much a research kind of question.” Pure, or close to pure, hydrogen deposits like the one in Mali could be rare, and the energy required to separate the gas from other gases could increase costs precipitously.
A recent report from the Royal Society, a U.K.-based research institute, echoed Ellis’ caution, stating that although natural hydrogen deposits could be “a game changer,” it’s still too soon to bank on them.
For now, at least, that isn’t stopping dozens of companies from trying.