The Emergence of Natural Hydrogen: Genesis and Current Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, natural hydrogen has emerged as a promising source in the future energy mix. Since its accidental discovery in Mali in 2012, global interest in this form of hydrogen—often called geological, white, or gold hydrogen—has surged. Generated primarily through serpentinization, a process where water reacts with iron-rich minerals, natural hydrogen can become trapped in reservoirs beneath impermeable rocks. Other natural processes also contribute to its formation. A recent study by French geologists and Albanian scientists found hydrogen with 85% purity in a chromium mine, with minimal methane contamination, resulting in a low carbon intensity of around 0.4 kg CO2e per kg of hydrogen produced. According to Rystad Energy, white hydrogen could potentially transform the clean hydrogen sector, shifting it from an energy carrier to a primary energy source. Interest in natural hydrogen is growing rapidly, with the number of companies involved, increasing from 10 in 2020 to 40 by the end of last year. Exploration is underway in countries like Australia, the U.S., Spain, France, Albania, and Canada. Canada-based Hydroma, for instance, extracts white hydrogen at just $0.50 per kg, while projects in Spain and Australia aim for around $1 per kg. This suggests that natural hydrogen could offer a cost-effective, low-carbon energy alternative. This article examines the potential of natural hydrogen to play a key role in achieving a net-zero carbon future by exploring its science, economics, and ongoing global exploration efforts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".