'It’s on every continent' | Bill Gates-backed start-up drilling for natural hydrogen in the US
Secretive Koloma backed with $91m from investors, including Breakthrough Energy
A secretive company backed with funding from billionaire investor Bill Gates is mining for natural hydrogen in the US Midwest — and plans to apply for subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) production tax credit.
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Koloma believes that it can tap into a continuously regenerating supply of underground hydrogen, sometimes called white or gold hydrogen, brought about by a process called serpentinisation.
During this process, subterranean iron- and magnesium-based minerals break down in water to produce hydrogen-rich fluids and other minerals — a process which Kolomo believe amounts to around 23 million tonnes of natural hydrogen production per year, globally, equivalent to nearly a quarter of all of today’s hydrogen demand.
“It’s on every continent,” Tom Darrah, Koloma’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told the magazine. “The scale of how much there is, is profound.”
Darrah, who is also a professor of Earth sciences at Ohio State University (OSU), has 16 patents to his name related to hydrogen extraction.
One of these patents involves using satellites and AI-assisted laser imaging to analyse sites that could contain underground stores of natural hydrogen or helium.
“That’s captured a lot of people's imagination, that you could have two resources in the same place,” Darrah told the magazine.
Koloma is using Darrah’s lab at OSU to analyse rock and mineral samples from its Midwestern wells — although it won’t reveal the location of the wells or when it expects commercial operations to begin.
“We're focusing on the places where we not only think that there’s the right kind of gas, the right kind of rock, but places that can become commercial producers,” Johnson told the magazine.
Koloma also said it plans to apply for subsidies under the US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as well as the flagship hydrogen production tax credit (PTC), introduced in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Access to the PTC, under which there is a maximum $3/kg available, is determined on carbon intensity grounds and on a range of sustainability and labour criteria, rather than production method.
“The only big users of hydrogen are refineries and ammonia plants,” Johnson said. “So if I know where there’s a lot of hydrogen, I need to wait for markets to develop. We’re building our capabilities and going to try to time commerciality around the time hydrogen demand is really peaking.”