A British company is prospecting for vast deposits of hydrogen buried in ancient rocks around the world including at potential sites in Cornwall, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Getech, a London-listed tech company, is collating data from across Britain and has pinpointed potential hydrogen-bearing rocks in parts of the British Isles too.
The deposits lie in a belt across Scotland stretching roughly from Greenock in the west to Aberdeen on the north east coast. There are others on Shetland, the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall and near Omagh in Northern Ireland.
Chris Jepps, chief operating officer of Getech, said: “This is an embryonic industry right now. So it’s too early to say much but it’s also very exciting. There’s some evidence it could be as big a market as oil and gas.”
If confirmed, the hydrogen could provide a rich resource for generating clean energy because it burns to produce nothing but water.
The gas is locked within rocks called ophiolites and is already confirmed in various places around the world such as the mountains of Oman, Australia and the central southern US.
The best known resource of white hydrogen is beneath the village of Bourakébougou in Mali where the 98pc purity gas was discovered in the 1980s when a man drilling for water lit a cigarette and triggered a small explosion.
Another prospector, Gold Hydrogen, has found accumulations with 80pc hydrogen at 500 metres in the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia.
Another deposit found in France last year could yield high-purity hydrogen at a depth of only 3,000 metres.
And last month Koloma, a US company based on extracting white hydrogen, won a US Energy Department grant and raised $246m (£195m) in a financing round, adding to the $50m already pledged by investors including Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Venture.
The company is commercialising research by Ohio State University geologist Tom Darrah, its cofounder, who has spent years studying natural hydrogen deposits and how to extract them.
Hydrogen is the universe’s most abundant element but is mostly found in compounds, joined to other elements, for example forming water when joined with oxygen or creating hydrocarbons when linked to carbon.
Splitting it out from those compounds is difficult. So-called green hydrogen is made by splitting water molecules using renewable electricity, which is expensive, while “blue hydrogen” made by splitting methane molecules and storing the carbon dioxide, is energy intensive.
However, its ability to burn at high temperatures and release a lot of energy makes it ideal as a fuel for powering heavy vehicles and as an industrial fuel.