People have started looking for hydrogen in the unlikeliest of places—in the Earth’s rocky depths of depleted mines and dead volcanoes. It has been known for a long time that these sub surfaces hold hydrogen, but it was believed that only a smattering of the gas lurked in the pores.

Recent researches have upended such an erroneous impression. It turns out that there are great quantities of hydrogen, dubbed ‘gold hydrogen’, locked deep inside the earth, formed both by microbial activity as well as by abiotic processes such as decomposition of methane into graphite. 

It only requires human ingenuity to get it out.

On February 17, a US company called Cemvita said it would employ “cutting-edge microbiology” to mine the hydrogen—which means injecting microbes that can ‘eat’ the hydrogen and be brought back to the surface. 

The company says microbiology shows “incredible potential” for unlocking it.

While in some places you would need microbes to fetch you hydrogen from deep below, in some others, it can be naturally extracted, the way you would do natural gas.

A Spanish company called Helios Aragon has set itself upon the task of sucking out such naturally occurring hydrogen from oil and gas basins. Australia’s Financial Review magazine has reported that an area equal to a third of South Australia has been taken up by entrepreneurs who are on to the ‘hydrogen gold rush’. H2EX is one such company, which re-entered a well drilled unsuccessfully for oil some 70 years ago and came up with copious quantities of highly pure hydrogen. 

As geologists are grappling with estimates of how much hydrogen is present beneath the earth’s crust, entrepreneurs are licking their paws in anticipation of pay dirt. The rationale behind this is best summed up in the words of Greschen Brecker, CFO, H2EX: Why manufacture what Mother Nature has in abundance? 

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