Globally, natural hydrogen exploration has produced exactly one commercially operating well, a small site at Bourakébougou in Mali that generates electricity for a single village. That is the entire proven commercial track record behind a category more than 100 companies now describe themselves as pursuing, and it is the backdrop against which Element One Hydrogen & Critical Minerals Corp, a Canadian Securities Exchange company with a market capitalization in the single-digit millions of dollars, has signed a non-binding letter of intent with France’s Mantle8 to explore for natural hydrogen across British Columbia and Alberta.
Element One trades under the ticker EONE with a market capitalization that has ranged between roughly 3 million and 7 million Canadian dollars over the past year, a stock that swung between 0.055 and 0.32 dollars per share across the same period with weekly price movements exceeding 60% and a beta above 2. The company operated as Buscando Resources Corp until October 2025, when it renamed itself Element One Hydrogen and Critical Minerals Corp, a rebrand that repositioned an existing portfolio of claims in British Columbia, Washington State and Alaska around the natural hydrogen and critical minerals theme less than a year before this announcement. Element One also maintains a disclosed paid consulting relationship with Streetwise Reports, an affiliate that has published favorable coverage of the company’s announcements at a monthly fee the company’s own disclosures place between 8,000 and 20,000 dollars, a detail relevant to how much of the company’s public visibility is generated through compensated financial media rather than independent reporting.
The letter of intent itself, read alongside its own risk disclosures, describes a considerably earlier stage of collaboration than the framing of a Canadian expansion into natural hydrogen exploration might suggest. Aside from specific provisions covering exclusivity, confidentiality, intellectual property, governing law and expenses, the entire agreement is explicitly non-binding. Ownership, funding commitments, exploration expenditures, governance, earn-in terms, operator designation and commercialization rights are all unagreed and subject to negotiation of a separate definitive agreement that may never be executed. The companies state plainly that there is no assurance the collaboration will result in exploration, drilling, development or commercial production of any kind. The specific area of interest the partnership intends to pursue has not even been identified yet, with the agreement providing for that determination within 30 days of execution, meaning the announcement precedes not just drilling or permitting but the selection of where exploration might eventually occur.
That structure is consistent with where natural hydrogen exploration sits as an industry, not unusual for Element One specifically. A recent overview of global natural hydrogen activity counted roughly 12 wells drilled worldwide targeting the resource in 2025, with about 30 planned for 2026, and found more than 100 companies now involved in exploration despite stating directly that “commerciality is yet to be established for current projects.” Even Gold Hydrogen, an Australian Securities Exchange-listed company frequently cited as one of the more advanced natural hydrogen explorers with a management team drawn from established mining and oil and gas backgrounds, only drilled its first wells at its Ramsey prospect in late 2023 and remains in an evaluation phase rather than production. The often-cited resource estimate behind investor interest in the category, a 2024 Science Advances study modeling as much as 5.6 trillion tons of subsurface hydrogen globally, describes a theoretical resource base derived from stochastic simulation rather than a proven or economically recoverable reserve, and independent assessments of that estimate generally note that the large majority of that hydrogen likely sits too deep or too dispersed to extract with current technology at any cost.
Mantle8 brings a more substantive existing base to the partnership than a typical early-stage counterparty. The company has raised sequential seed and Series A rounds reported at 3.4 million and 31 million euros respectively, drawing investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Bpifrance Green Ventures, and holds three natural hydrogen and helium exploration permits already secured in Western Europe alongside named technology platforms for geological modeling, subsurface imaging and hydrogen-system assessment. That combination gives Element One access to a technically credentialed partner with independent financing already in place, a genuine asset for a company of Element One’s scale entering a resource category it would otherwise lack the specialized exploration technology to pursue on its own. What the letter of intent does not yet establish, on its own terms, is anything beyond a framework to spend the coming months identifying which land in Western Canada might be worth pursuing at all, a distance from actual exploration, drilling or development that the agreement’s own extensive non-binding language acknowledges more directly than the announcement’s framing as a strategic Canadian expansion conveys.
