Red Desert Rocks Found to Make Their Own Clean Fuel; Industry Asks 'Can We Make It Do More'

PERTH — Researchers at Edith Cowan University have reported that the iron-rich rocks under the Western Australian outback are, by and large, making hydrogen on their own, and that the process can be nudged along to make rather more of it, a discovery that has the region’s mining industry in a state of, by the account of people who have been calling the industry all week, “productive optimism.”

The finding, published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, is that magnetite — an iron oxide that, in the region’s banded iron formations, has been sitting around for billions of years in a state of mild geological patience — can react with hot water at depth to produce natural hydrogen, and that a particular form of the mineral produces, by the count of the researchers, about five times as much as the solid rock around it. The process, in other words, is not new; it has been running underground in the Pilbara for roughly the same length of time that the region’s rocks have existed, which is the kind of timeline that tends to make a geologist stop talking and start looking at the ground with a different set of assumptions.

The part of the finding that has done the most work in the last few days is not the hydrogen so much as the “nudge.” The researchers, per ScienceDaily’s account of the work, suggest that the natural process “may be boosted to produce much larger amounts,” which is, in the language of the industry, the difference between a resource that is a curiosity and a resource that is a balance-sheet line, and it is the difference that has, in the space of a single weekend, turned a peer-reviewed paper into a conference call, a press release, and, in at least one state government, a meeting that was described, in the minutes, as “exploratory.”

The scale of the opportunity, by the account of the people now doing the scaling, is not in the hydrogen per se but in the geography of it. The Pilbara is already, by any available measure, one of the most heavily resourced mining regions on the planet, and it is, as a matter of logistics, wired for exactly the kind of thing a natural hydrogen play would require: ports, rail, power, and a regulatory history long enough to have opinions about almost everything. A resource that is already underground, already in a region built to move heavy things to the sea, and already the subject of a multi-billion-dollar hydrogen strategy is the kind of resource that, in the industry’s own vocabulary, is not a discovery so much as a confirmation, and a confirmation that arrives, in this case, with a five-times multiplier attached.

The caveats are the standard ones, and they are real. “Natural hydrogen” is, in the peer-reviewed literature, a phrase that has been applied, at various times and places, to resources that turned out to be, on further drilling, smaller, thinner, or less consistently present than the first well suggested, and the gap between a laboratory finding and a commercial field is, in the energy industry, a distance that has, on the record, been measured in decades rather than quarters. None of this has, in the last 48 hours, slowed the pace of the calls, the meetings, or, in at least one case, the drafting of a document whose title, as of this morning, was still, in the version that was circulated, “Hydrogen — Opportunities: A Preliminary Note.”

At press time, the researchers had not commented on a timeline, the industry had not commented on a price, and the rocks, by the account of everyone who has been in the Pilbara this week, had not, so far as anyone could tell, commented on anything at all, which, given the length of time they have been doing this, is, in the view of at least one geologist, about what you’d expect.