In our recent webinar, industry expert Allegra Hosford Scheirer discussed the potential of white hydrogen and advancements in geological hydrogen discovery.
Allegra, a key figure in the energy sector and founder of Geomodeling Solutions, highlighted the growing interest in geological hydrogen as a clean energy source. The discussion covered regulatory differences, transportation methods, and the economic viability of geologic hydrogen.
Watch the webinar to learn more about natural hydrogen's promising future as a viable energy resource and an innovative path toward a more sustainable energy future.
Watch the Webinar:
Transcript:
Jason Assir
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to Le Mans and everyone in the world. We're excited to have you here on this month's October's webinar Energy Gains webinar. My name is Jason Assir. We have an esteemed guest, Allegra Hosford Scheirer. She's a research scientist at Stanford University, also the principal consultant of Geomodeling Solutions and also your expert on everything with related to geologic hydrogen. Allegra, thank you so much for joining us today. We're excited to have you on. We know we have lots of people joining ready to learn more about this topic and have lots of questions for you.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Thank you. I'm so glad. Great to be here. So I'm hearing a lot of feedback from you, Jason. I'm hearing everything you're saying twice.
Jason Assir
Okay. We'll just see if we can fix it as we go along. So I'm really excited to have you on. Allegra, thank you so much for sharing your time. You are actually at a geologic hydrogen conference in Alaska as we're talking. So real quick, for those people that are new to Energy Gigs, new to these webinar series, just do a quick plug about what Energy Gigs is and then we'll jump right into the topic on hand. So Energy Gigs is a work and talent platform that connects energy companies to talent over hourly fixed fee tempted perm projects. For experts on our platform, it's really a lead source. It's the source of new projects for you for companies. It's a quick way to find experts on various topics including geologic hydrogen and other areas of the energy industry. So super excited. Allegra, thank you again for joining. If you don't mind, share a little bit about your background and how you got into geologic hydrogen, because I know you have a kind of a unique story of how you got into it.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yes, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited to learn about Energy Gigs. So this hopefully is the beginning of a fruitful partnership. What's kind of cool about natural hydrogen for me is that it makes me feel about 20 plus years younger because these are the types of rocks, the rocks that generate hydrogen that I did my PhD on and the types of sensing tools, potential field data, gravity and magnetics that I use to study these types of rocks, ultramafic rocks. And so I'm just thrilled to bring back my career now after 22 years of working in oil and gas petroleum systems as an academic to this, you know, nascent field of natural hydrogen.
Jason Assir
Well, how like when you were in Your. So we'll kind of maybe start with the industry topic as a whole for people that don't know what, what I mean, what is geologic hydro. What is natural hydrogen?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
I think, yeah, natural hydrogen is potentially a whole new energy source. It is hydrogen that's produced within the earth and accumulates, although we don't know much about hydrogen accumulations. And then the idea is that we can produce these hydrogen accumulations to use hydrogen as a fuel, as an electricity source, as a new, perhaps a new source for making ammonia. So any of the things that we use hydrogen for now, it would be a much cleaner way to obtain hydrogen than the way we currently manufacture hydrogen.
Jason Assir
That's. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, we all, I think, have heard about the hydrogen rainbow of various, you know, various colors of creating hydrogen. And this would be the purest form because it's, it's not created from methane. It's not created from.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
That's right. That's right. Yeah. So the way we produce hydrogen now produces over a thousand megatons of carbon dioxide per kilogram. And the only carbon dioxide you would generate by producing natural hydrogen would be associated with the actual, perhaps drilling, et cetera. So it's a very clean energy source.
Jason Assir
And is like when was sort of natural hydrogen first discovered, like what cued people into this industry.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
So everyone points to Mali, Africa. So in 1987, a water well was being drilled near a local village and some worker lit up a cigarette and it exploded. Turns out that essentially pure hydrogen gas was coming out of this shallow well. And that was when it really just lit up on people's radar screens. Fast forward to about 2012. That well was put on production for natural hydrogen and at first was used for internal combustion engine to generate free power for the local community. And then as of a couple of years ago, then that's now being used for a fuel cell.
Jason Assir
Oh, okay. Wow. Okay.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah. Which is extremely cool. But that is the only thing we know about producing and using natural hydrogen.
Jason Assir
But yeah, that's, that's, that's amazing. And I guess now like coming from, I guess 2012, is that when you said it was found to. Now are we finding that you can use similar skills and technologies that we used in oil and gas for decades? You know, is it similar skill sets that you can use to find geologic hydrogen or natural hydrogen?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
It is. It's not similar environments. So we're not looking sedimentary basins with an organic rich source rock that requires millions of, of years of thermal stress in order to create petroleum, but it is not a coincidence that the principles in some of the main firms, let's say Hytera and Coloma and others, many others, come from the oil and gas industries because there's just a lot of natural overlap between how you look for, let's say, petroleum and natural hydrogen, different environments, but as I like to call it, the same rock fluid network principles. Yeah.
Jason Assir
And so what does that, what does that look like from a, from a geography perspective? Curious. Like, does it reshape the global energy map if hydrogen ends up being like a big source of. Well, I'm guessing it would be continuously renewing resource. Like.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Indeed, indeed. I mean it is. It could reshape the global energy map. Every week, I feel like on LinkedIn there's a new location that's announced where natural hydrogen has been detected either by soil sampling or is being investigated with other technologies. So last week alone, South Korea, West Virginia, here in the United States. But literally I keep lists of where hydrogen is being explored for and it is worldwide, Jason. And that is a product, I think, of natural hydrogen being produced by dozens of geologic mechanisms.
Jason Assir
Wow. And just thinking about, you know, other extractive. Right. Oil and gas, I mean we're in Houston, Texas. So many family members, relatives are in the oil and gas space heavy industry drilling. Right. Like, and a lot of geoscientists, like, so it sounds like that, that the labor similar skill sets could be used to. For geologic hydrating, extracting. Would you, in terms of, as a geoscientist, would you. What would you be looking for to know if there is a reservoir, if that's the right word for it, like underneath you and like. And then from a drilling perspective, what. How would one even drill? Like for. For it, I guess.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
I mean, to start off with, we will be looking for porous and permeas reservoirs similar to oil and gas. The reservoir rocks in Mali are principally carbonates and a little bit of some sandstones. The porosity I think is about 12% in terms of producing it. We just don't know yet, Jason. We know that the engineering is going to have to be looked at very precisely because hydrogen is corrosive to steel. And so some of those technologies will need to be adapted. But for now, what we know for from Mali is that the reservoir rocks seem to be porous rocks and the steel rocks in that case are dolerites that are continuous across the area tend to be low permeability units.
Jason Assir
Okay, so you would maybe drill through that rock to get to the reservoir and then would it almost be like venting would you have to worry about other fluids that accompany it, like other gases, like in oil and gas? Or is it like, has there been any. What is that? What is that like? I guess.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
I think so. Worrying about other gases, I think that's not a concern. What I would actually be hopeful about other gases is that hydrogen and helium are often found together.
Jason Assir
Oh, cool.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
And there's a huge market for helium right now. And in fact, Gold Hydrogen announced yesterday that from their Ramsey wells down in the York Peninsula in Australia, southern Australia, that their helium is actually helium three, not the more abundant helium four. And helium three is so rare, in fact, that there have been talks of mining it from the moon. And helium. Exactly. Helium three cells for orders of magnitude more money than helium four does. So the coincidence of natural helium or of helium with natural hydrogen is a game changer because that's the way that you're going to generate cash in order to then prosecute a technical work program for exploring for hydrogen.
Jason Assir
Wow. Okay, that's fantastic. So when you look at the landscape with companies in the space, is there any company or any set of companies, I think you mentioned a couple that are sort of market leaders that our listeners should be focusing in on or paying attention to. And what's the state of maybe even startups in the space?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
So what I do, I try to follow everybody, but There are probably 60 to 70 startups in natural hydrogen right now. What I try to do to learn is to follow closely those companies that are publicly traded. So for example, Quebec Innovative Materials. Sorry, it's qimc. I can't remember exactly what it stands for in Quebec. They're publicly traded, they release information. In fact, last week they had a webinar about their recent source samples and their geophysical surveys. Gold Hydrogen again, they announce information about their wells and then Hiterra, they just put out an investor presentation yesterday. And so those companies that are publicly traded, they have to put out information about their exploration programs. And so it helps people like me who are following the space very closely to learn a little bit about ideas of what explorer exploration activities ideas are being pursued. Other companies understand they are quite quiet.
Jason Assir
Makes sense. Like maybe they're in stealth mode, I guess is the common term. Well, I'll pause for just a minute and just. We do allow questions, so from any of our attendees, please do. If you have questions for Allegra, please do ask them and we'll be happy to answer them or talk about them in our call.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Great.
Jason Assir
I think looking at it globally, is there a market leader Is there a country that's sort of leading the pack, so to speak, in terms of support or government support or even talent?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, I mean the thing I love about natural hydrogen is that there are companies active in it worldwide. So Australia definitely first movers, but Hyterra is Australian company, but they're exploring in the mid continental rift here in this country. A lot of startups here in this country mostly exploring in the mid continental rift, but we're aware of exploration taking place in other places. New Mexico, Rio Grande rift, that's another place people are looking. Spoke with Nativo Energy a couple of weeks ago. They're looking in Uruguay. We know that there are natural hydrogen examples probably in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. And then of course the drilling and sampling and surveying that has been done in Europe. So in the foothills of the Pyrenees, so France and Spain. So there it's just worldwide. Jason. And so that's another reason why it's just so exciting to be a natural hydrogen right now.
Jason Assir
That's awesome.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Awesome.
Jason Assir
We do have a couple of questions. So one is from Rick. What is the mechanism for H2 generation and migration.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
About hydrogen migration? Yeah. So I posted about this on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. That migration of fluids, specifically natural hydrogen, keeps me up at night. I literally lie in bed and think about migration. It probably is. So hydrogen has an interesting solubility in water relationship. There's a lot that depends on pbt, but it probably is dissolved in water until about possibly 800 meters and then it probably comes out of solution and exists as a free gas. We know that it probably also advects like on clay particles. And then there's, you know, probably follows Darcy's law, perhaps Fick's law. There's a lot of physics that we still really need to understand about the migration of natural hydrogen. What we know on a larger scale, so if we get beyond the molecular scale, is that natural hydrogen is probably taking advantage of faults and fractures in the subsurface to migrate along. In fact, my research group at Stanford did some soil sampling in the vicinity of the San Andreas fault because we wanted to see if that was a pathway for natural hydrogen migration. And for sure we think that's a viable mechanism for one, because that's actually been looked at for decades. For two, because the serpentinization process that actually generates hydrogen in the subsurface is a volume increasing reaction. And so it naturally fractures the rocks in the subsurface because of that volume expansion. And so we know that hydrogen is taking advantage of faults and fractures in the subsurface.
Jason Assir
That's really interesting. Next question. Over the past three to four months, has your confidence in the economic viability of geologic hydrogen gone up or down, and why?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Way to get right to the point there. Let's talk money.
Jason Assir
Yeah, okay.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Economic viability. I am, I am bullish on geologic hydrogen because of, I think it exists worldwide. So I think we will find signs of it worldwide. What, what gives me pause, and I think all of the other explorers pause is that the only accumulation of natural hydrogen that we have as an example is the case in Mali.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
And that is not a commercial accumulation that's being fed to a grid or being, you know, taken off for transportation as ammonia, et cetera, et cetera. So it is not the case study that we all need to make hydrogen a clean energy source for our world.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
That said, there are a lot of really smart people working on this problem. I have no doubt that the future is very bright for natural hydrogen in the 5 to 10 year timeframe.
Jason Assir
Gotcha. Oh, that's great. Next question. So I told you there's going to be lots of questions. So is there any need to further stimulate these formations in some manner to increase reaction and production?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah. Stimulated hydrogen is a huge part of the conversation. And there's one reason why is because ARPA E, the arm of the doe, put millions of dollars into funding research on stimulated hydrogen. And in fact, the director of that program, Doug Wicks, is here at this conference that I'm at in Alaska right now. I think that stimulated hydrogen is a viable way to make this an economic resource. So, you know, seeking out iron rich formations, banded iron formations, et cetera, and then generating hydrogen in situ as a renewable process I think is super promising.
Jason Assir
Yep. Very, very, very neat. I guess, I guess the question I might have, because I have family members that are land in the land business, right. And you know, they do research on mineral rights, existing sort of framework of, you know, mineral rights and state by state. Are there any gaps associated with like this new sort of source of energy that, I mean, particularly if it might like that, we have to consider.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
I think the regulatory piece is it differs all over the world. So France adopted legislation about this in 2022. And I think that partly that's because some of the main researchers say, Isabel Moretti, she's in France, they've been able to push for that in California. It's unclear how hydrogen and helium wells might be permitted. There are many states in this country that the permitting is very friendly. So Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska it's very straightforward how to do that. I think Canada is probably pretty straightforward as well.
Jason Assir
Okay. No, that's great. Yeah. So another good question. What hidden geological microbial dynamics might we discover by pursuing natural hydrogen? And could these insights lead to new breakthroughs in sustainable energy?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Wow. Yeah. So another person who's here is a microbiologist, Alexis Templeton from UC Boulder. You know, and she and I were talking yesterday, and it's not. It's likely that producing geologic hydrogen from the subsurface will alter microbial communities. Microbes depend on hydrogen for generating energy, that they then generate methane from those reactions. And so that's just something that we need to study and understand a lot in a lot more detail. Could it lead to breakthroughs? Sure. I mean, there are ideas that we can somehow have these microbial communities, simulate them to then generate hydrogen. That those ideas are in a very early stage.
Jason Assir
Very, very cool. Well, all, please do keep the questions coming. Allegra is knocking them out the park. I do have a couple of questions, like thinking about, you know, careers and people that are wanting to get into, you know, the careers. Like, what would you recommend for someone, yeah, what's the best way to get started in geologic hydrogen?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Would you say so for oil and gas professionals, I think a really helpful framework for this is to consider it as just another rock fluid network, similar to ccus. You know, we inject carbon dioxide in the subsurface and then we think about how it moves both as a molecule and on a larger scale. For oil and gas professionals, then they may need to then branch out and go back and retool about hard rock environments. So learn about mafic and ultramafic rocks, learn about the serpentinization reaction, learn about radiologists and how that works. So I think the retooling, it's not a heavy lift for people just coming out of school. I think natural hydrogen is a natural fit for them to think about in terms of just another clean energy source soon. I don't know if you said at the beginning, but I'm leaving my Stanford job. Tomorrow is my last day. I'll be a consultant full time on Friday, and I'll soon be offering my classes in natural hydrogen. I hope that that is a resource that folks can use who want to get into natural hydrogen exploration.
Jason Assir
That's. That's fantastic. We will, if you're okay with it, provide your contact information to all the attendees at the end of the. The webinar so people can reach out to you directly, either for consulting or just for mentorship or questions that they might have. I do remember you mentioned that there was a Bible out there and I think you had sent it to me. What was that again? And yeah, yeah.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
So the canonical paper I did refer to it as the Bible is by Villa vs Gone. It was published in 2020 and it goes through pretty much all of the habitats of geologic hydrogen, all of the sources, lots of maps about where it's been detected. And so that is a wonderful place for folks to start. There's also a wonderful article in Science that was published in 2023 by Eric Hand, which is a really nice introduction to natural hydrogen. So those are the two people papers that I would recommend for folks that want to get involved.
Jason Assir
Okay, perfect. Yeah, yeah. So what have you found is missing in the research literature right now from Erin?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, I think probably migration. Migration and migration physics. You know, the other, the other topic that I'm super passionate about as a rock fluid scientist is steel capacity, capillary entry pressure seal processes, column heights of hydrogen. That's another thing that just isn't out there yet. And it's just because we don't know enough, we don't have enough information in order to really explore those topics. Yeah.
Jason Assir
So for another question from Sean, do you think multispectral or Hyperspectral imagery data, 5 to 10 millimeter resolution would give direct approximation of surface concentrations of hydrogen?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, it's definitely in the conversation. There's someone on LinkedIn that posts about that on a regular basis. At this natural hydrogen conference in Alaska that I'm at, that topic came up and is of interest because so much of Alaska is remote. And so having that kind of remote sensing in order to get at least in the ballpark of where nitro hydrogen might be is, is going to be critical in remote regions such as Alaska.
Jason Assir
Just thinking about how it could transform sort of the energy mix is proximity to the grid and the drilling costs. I guess those are the factors to consider when you're looking at maybe.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, offtake is a huge question mark. Of course it's excellent if it's located. Next, a whole power fired, you know, power plant that you want to shut down and transfer it over to hydrogen. The ideas for transporting hydrogen are everything through pipelines, which if you, if you blend it in with natural gas into a natural gas pipeline, then you're not getting the bang for the buck that you would from using hydrogen natively. So you would need new hydrogen pipelines. You could liquefy it and transport it in trucks. You could also Combine it with nitrogen and transport it across oceans as ammonia.
Jason Assir
Yeah. Oh, so that kind of tracks along the lines of the existing industrial complex interests.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Exactly. Right.
Jason Assir
Yeah. And also the challenges, right, I guess with being such a small molecule caustic to pipes, like all of that transportation is still.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
That's right. And it's leaky. It's at least tiny.
Jason Assir
Yeah. Okay. Is natural hydrogen mostly focused on serpentinization reactions or. I can't even say it properly.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, yeah. I went hazard to say that nearly all I know, not all, but almost all explorers for natural hydrogen are focusing on ultramafic and mafic rocks where serpentinization can happen and then produce hydrogen.
Jason Assir
Gotcha. And yeah, and for like a wildcatter that would. That would be like certain, certain geologies are primed to more likely have. That is that. Would that be a fair sort of way to think of it or.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, that's right. So you would look at surface geologic map. So for example, all along the west coast here of like California, Oregon, Washington, Canada and then up into Alaska, where I am right now, you just look at these subduction margins where you have ophiolites that have been scraped onto land and are probably also in the subsurface. And then that is one environment of many types where you would look for natural hydrogen.
Jason Assir
Do you like with. Oh, more questions. What is the replenish time for natural hydrogen compared to oil and gas?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, yeah. So we think it's vastly different of course for oil and gas. We know that it's millions of years. And then you could also have preservation for millions of years before you even, you know, millions of years for you to find the trap that didn't come out quite right. But for natural hydrogen it's different. We think it could be replenishing in near real time. And one of the pieces of evidence that's use to substantiate that is that in Mali it appears that the pressure hasn't been declining over the last 12 years of that well being on production. So the idea is that it's being continually generated and replenished in the subsurface. Of course. That's the holy grail. Right. That's what we would like. And that's one of the reasons why stimulated hydrogen is so promising.
Jason Assir
Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, I guess with maybe some of the oil and gas clients, are you seeing companies, are you seeing any of them taking a look at it and thinking of their sort of energy mix as a portfolio now, including maybe hydrogen?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
I'd say yes. And No, I was at a conference in 2023 and all the majors are still on the sidelines. I talked to all of them as a Stanford scientist. So Shell BP and Exxon Mobil and Saudi Aramco and on and on and on and on and on. I talked to all of them and they're all watching. And so, and I think that's fair. I think when they're ready to go, they will be able to put into place incredibly detailed workplace programs because they have the capital, both human and monetary, to do so.
Jason Assir
So I know we're almost at time, or right about time. I guess the last sort of question for me from just a career standpoint, you know, if you're just coming into, you're just about to leave the workforce and you want to get into energy and you're thinking about geologic, hydro, natural hydrogen, what would you recommend someone do? Like what, like would they study geology? What, what sort of, what are your parting sort of thoughts and recommendations?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Yeah, I think the geology background is key, obviously. But I will say that the person I work the most with on a daily basis is Aaron Matson. And he's an MBA type, so he's a business type who has educated himself extensively in natural hydrogen. He knows that he still needs geology experts like me, but he has tooled up in this field. And so I think that it's going to take all of us to make this nascent exploration opportunity a success.
Jason Assir
Well, that's fantastic. So there are multiple ways to get into the space.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Agreed? Yes.
Jason Assir
Fantastic.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Absolutely.
Jason Assir
Well, Allegra, thank you so much for being our guest on this month's webinar. My pleasure flew by. Apologies for the audience issue issues. We're recording the session, so we'll make this recording available to you and also to all our guests. And is it okay if we provide your contact information to everyone?
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Please do. That would be lovely. As of Friday, I am a full time consultant in natural hydrogen. So I'm leaving the ivory tower.
Jason Assir
So for all you companies out there participating, listening in, please do reach out to Allegra and hire her for a consulting project on natural hydrogen. Well, thank you so much. Safe travel.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Thank you so much, Jason, for reaching out. This has been a blast.
Jason Assir
Okay, well everyone have a great rest of your day. Our next webinar next month will be on carbon credits, so and so we look forward to seeing you there. And again, thank you, Allegra, and thanks a lot.
Allegra Hosford Scheirer
Take care everyone.
Jason Assir
Bye all.
