What Happened

Startup wields subterranean lightning strikes to conjure the gas

Paris Smalls, founder of Eden GeoPower, breaks subterranean rocks with electricity. His precision fracturing technique stimulate hydrogen production.

In a tranquil Boston suburb, a horse farm, where pasture , a crane lowers an enormous electrode into a borehole. The electrode, a half-meter-long cylinder with copper-tipped arms to ensure good contact with the borehole walls, descends—deeper, deeper—through layers of spongy sandstone , marbled ancient mountain range hundreds of meters below ground. ; cracks . But that’s about to change.

A stone’s throw away, a second electrode—a — another borehole . From above ground, a -voltage generators cabled electrodes fires a series of pulses.

Why It Matters

Each discharge, heard faintly at the surface, is like a miniature, subterranean lightning strike. The rock between the electrodes heats. Pressure builds. Then, suddenly, the rock splits into a spiderweb of fractures.

On a horse farm outside of Boston, a worker ’s electrode will be lowered with a winch.Bob O’Connor

Eden GeoPower, the Massachusetts-based startup performing this peculiar field test, calls the technology electrical reservoir stimulation. The company’s tagline: “ electricity.”

Eden’s researchers -breaking technique will someday aid mineral mining, tap geothermal heat, or create geologic storage areas for carbon. But there’s intriguing create a whole new category of energy production: generating hydrogen underground.

What Comes Next

a hydrogen-powered economy 1970s, when petroleum shortages and rising concerns about pollution from fossil fuels sparked visions of cars, ships, planes, and industrial machines running on hydrogen instead of carbon. Hydrogen is often touted as a clean fuel because when it’s burned or consumed , . However, it currently takes more energy yields, and the cheapest and most common reacting steam with methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Electricity , subterranean rock, Eden lowers large electrodes into the ground -voltage electric pulses between them. The method creates a fracture network that’s more permeable possible using traditional hydraulic fracturing. The strategy access iron- hydrogen stimulation.

It’s possible -carbon hydrogen by splitting water with electrolyzers powered by renewable energy. , the process is too expensive to be economical—a reality hydrogen-hype bubble 2020s. Global demand for hydrogen in 2024 reached approximately 100 million tonnes, containing energy 3 percent ’s annual energy consumption. chemical feedstock for petroleum refining and for making fertilizers and plastics.

The frustrations of manufacturing clean hydrogen have convinced many entrepreneurs and scientists to instead seek the element underground. -decade, dozens of companies around hunting for buried stores of hydrogen, called natural or geologic hydrogen. But with a commercial-scale operation proved, Eden and a handful of other startups and research groups are chasing the more audacious scheme of producing geologic hydrogen artificially.

This approach, known as stimulated geologic hydrogen or engineered hydrogen, turns subterranean rock formations into giant hydrogen factories. It typically involves injecting -rich rock, which oxidizes releases hydrogen as a by-product. Fracturing the rock, , creates a network of conduits -bearing minerals.

The concept of stimulated hydrogen a chance . Proponents —which is a big “if”—it could provide almost unlimited energy for the indefinite future. There’s : Start breaking rocks.

Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, galaxies. Geologists generates hydrogen gas through natural water-rock reactions, but until recently, the occurrence was regarded as a curiosity. experts assumed it all escaped through pores and cracks in Earth’s subsurface and didn’t accumulate in useful quantities.

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