Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- Earth is believed to have high enough concentrations of white hydrogen (the naturally-occurring form of the gas) to fuel humanity’s energy needs for 170,000 years.
- A new study measured hydrogen escaping from boreholes drilled in the Canadian Shield, tracking how the gas builds up and where it’s concentrated.
- Tapping natural reserves of hydrogen could not only unleash a new, reliable form of green energy, but could clean up industries that rely on the gas.
Hydrogen comes in many colors.
While the gas itself is actually odorless and colorless, science and industry experts have developed a color scale to quickly identify how hydrogen is produced. For example, brown and grey hydrogen make up the vast majority of produced hydrogen on the planet. Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing, as the processes of creating these versions of the element requires the use of coal and methane respectively, making the resulting hydrogen far from a clean energy source. A step up in cleanliness is blue hydrogen, which stores greenhouse gas emissions underground. And even better still is green hydrogen, made exclusively with renewable energy. According to MIT, less than one percent of hydrogen production in the U.S. is green.
However, there is a fifth type of hydrogen, and it’s arguably even better than making the stuff using wind and solar. White hydrogen—also sometimes referred to as “gold” or “geologic” hydrogen—comes straight from the Earth itself, with no human intervention required. According to a study in May 2025, the planet might contain enough white hydrogen reserves to fuel humanity’s energy needs for 170,000 years, but finding that hydrogen and understanding how its produced underground is far from easy.
Now, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa, details the examination of a geologic formation known as the Canadian Shield—exposed continent crust made of precambrian bedrock that forms roughly half of the Great White North’s landmass and contains some of the oldest rocks on the planet. For the first time, scientists directly measured hydrogen escaping boreholes in these rocks at a rate of 0.008 tonnes (roughly 8 kilograms) of hydrogen each year. The study, in addition to estimating that gas will continue flowing from these boreholes for about a decade, tracked how the gas builds up and mapped where it’s concentrated.
“The data from this study suggests there are critical untapped opportunities to access a domestic source of cost-effective energy produced from the rocks beneath our feet,” Barbara Sherwood Lollar, the lead author of the new study and co-author of the 2025 study, said in a press statement. “What’s more, this provides […] support [to] local and regional industry hubs and reduces their dependence on importing hydrocarbon-based fuels.”
Hydrogen is often touted as a future technology that will eventually power cars and (if countries like Japan have their way) entire societies. In the meantime, however, the gas is already central to producing ammonia (used in fertilizer), petroleum refining, and steelmaking. As a result, finding clean sources of hydrogen can significantly help clean up these already dirty industries while we work our way towards a greener future. One of the key advantages white hydrogen holds over green hydrogen is it requires no energy to make—clean or otherwise—and is therefore much cheaper to produce. The biggest challenges thus far have been finding lucrative pockets of hydrogen and creating the infrastructure needed to affordably extract it.
“Canada is blessed that vast amounts of its territories, especially on the Canadian Shield, contain the right rocks and minerals to create this natural hydrogen,” Sherwood Lollar said, but the authors note that similar hydrogen-producing rocks can be found throughout the world.
Another key benefit of white hydrogen is that it is naturally located near existing mining locations, as the rocks that produce it are also vital for the formation of nickel, copper, and diamond deposits. This could theoretically help lower the cost of hydrogen production infrastructure, storage, and transportation.
“There is a global race to increase hydrogen availability in order to decarbonize and reduce the costs of the existing hydrogen economy,” Sherwood Lollar said. “We now have a better understanding of the economic viability of this resource that can be mapped to hydrogen deposits around the world that are both already known and yet to be discovered.”
The dirty ways humans make hydrogen have severely limited its potential as a truly green energy source. But if scientists and engineers could find a way to tap Earth’s natural reserves of the colorless—yet oh-so-colorful—gas, humanity could gain a major ally in the fight against climate change.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
