Natural hydrogen sits in an unusual position in the energy transition: geologically documented across multiple continents, commercially attractive in principle, and almost entirely unmapped as a resource at any scale relevant to policy or investment. The European Commission’s decision to commission a continent-wide assessment of natural hydrogen potential across all EU member states, awarded to a consortium led by Trinomics with Getech as the principal geological delivery partner, is the first attempt by any major regulatory body to produce a systematic, evidence-based view of what subsurface natural hydrogen actually exists within a defined jurisdiction and under what conditions it might be commercially extracted.
The 12-month study, commissioned by DG GROW and titled “Mapping underground reservoirs of natural hydrogen in Europe and developing the necessary legislation for sustainable production,” is structured to deliver three outputs: a geological map of settings favourable for natural hydrogen accumulations across all EU member states; a feasibility assessment of commercial extraction at selected locations; and recommendations for the regulatory and market design framework that would govern any future production. The contract value to Getech exceeds €1 million, spanning FY2026 and FY2027. That is a modest investment for a study of continental scope, which reflects both the desk-study and remote sensing character of a first-pass geological assessment and the fact that this is a knowledge-generation exercise rather than an exploration programme.
What Natural Hydrogen Mapping Actually Involves
Locating geological settings favourable for natural hydrogen accumulations requires a different approach to conventional hydrocarbon prospecting, though it draws on some of the same subsurface datasets. Natural hydrogen is generated through multiple geological processes, the most well-characterised being the serpentinisation of ultramafic rocks, where olivine reacts with water at elevated temperatures to produce hydrogen gas that can migrate upward through fractures and accumulate in permeable reservoir rock beneath an impermeable seal. The Precambrian cratons and ophiolite complexes of Europe, including structures in Scandinavia, the Baltic, and parts of southern Europe, have geological characteristics consistent with this process.
Gravity and magnetic datasets are particularly valuable for this type of prospecting because serpentinisation alters the density and magnetic properties of rocks in ways detectable at the surface, even when the relevant geology is buried at depth. Getech’s proprietary global gravity and magnetic datasets, and its Globe geoscience platform, represent exactly the type of continental-scale consistent data infrastructure that a first-pass mapping exercise of this type requires. National geological surveys hold relevant data within their respective jurisdictions, but data quality, format, depth of interpretation, and coordinate systems differ across the EU’s 27 member states in ways that make cross-border synthesis difficult without a common analytical framework. The competitive procurement process that led to Getech’s selection was partly assessing this specific capability: the ability to deliver a consistent evaluation across all member states from a unified dataset and methodology rather than assembling a patchwork of national studies.
The Commercial Context and Why Europe Is Conducting This Now
The timing of the EC study reflects a convergence of pressures in European energy policy. Domestic green hydrogen production has not scaled at the pace that the REPowerEU targets assumed when they were set in 2022, and the electrolyser manufacturing and renewable electricity deployment required to meet the 10 million tonne domestic green hydrogen production target by 2030 remains far behind schedule. Natural hydrogen, if present in commercially accessible quantities, would bypass the entire electrolysis pathway and the renewable electricity cost it requires, delivering hydrogen to market at potentially very different cost structures.
The cost advantage of natural hydrogen over electrolytic green hydrogen is theoretically significant. Green hydrogen produced from renewable electricity in Europe currently costs between €5 and €8 per kilogram. Natural hydrogen, if extractable from underground reservoirs using drilling and production techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry, could in principle be produced at costs comparable to natural gas extraction, potentially below €2 per kilogram, depending on reservoir depth, pressure, flow rate, and purity. Mali’s Bourakébougou field, the only commercially producing natural hydrogen site in the world, has supplied a local power plant at low cost since 2012, though its scale is far below what industrial energy applications require. The Ramsay Project in South Australia, referenced earlier in this context, is testing whether geological settings outside the African craton context can replicate comparable production characteristics.
What the Regulatory Gap Actually Looks Like
Natural hydrogen currently occupies an undefined position in European energy regulation. It is not classified under the existing EU hydrogen regulatory framework, which was designed around electrolytic production and distinguishes between green, low-carbon, and fossil hydrogen based on the carbon intensity of the production process. Naturally occurring geological hydrogen has no carbon intensity in the electrolytic sense because no energy is consumed to produce it, but it is also not a renewable fuel in the conventional sense. The regulatory uncertainty affects how natural hydrogen would be classified, taxed, certificated, and integrated into the Renewable Fuels of Non-Biological Origin framework that governs hydrogen’s eligibility for subsidy and mandate-driven demand.
The study’s remit to develop recommendations for legislation alongside the geological mapping reflects the EC’s recognition that even if the mapping produces encouraging results, a production framework does not exist that would allow companies to permit, finance, and operate natural hydrogen extraction projects within the EU. Permitting frameworks for subsurface resource extraction in Europe are administered at the national level under different legislative traditions for mining, oil and gas, geothermal, and groundwater, none of which is directly applicable to natural hydrogen. Creating a fit-for-purpose framework across all member states simultaneously, or harmonising national approaches toward a common EU standard, is a multi-year regulatory process, and the study is designed to provide the evidence base that initiates rather than completes that work.
The Global Context and Getech’s Positioning
The EC study is the highest-profile institutional acknowledgment to date that natural hydrogen deserves systematic evaluation as an energy resource, but it is not the only one. The US Geological Survey published a preliminary assessment of natural hydrogen potential in the United States in 2024, the Australian government has funded exploration licensing, and France’s Bureau of Geological and Mining Research has been conducting targeted geological surveys. The International Energy Agency’s most recent Hydrogen Supply Report of 2025 included natural hydrogen in its resource taxonomy for the first time.
Large parts of Africa, South America, and Central Asia remain without systematic natural hydrogen assessment despite geological characteristics that indicate potential. Cratons in West Africa, the basement structures of the Brazilian shield, and the ophiolite sequences of Central Asia share geological attributes that, in the European context, would trigger targeted assessment. For Getech, the EC mandate provides both the methodological validation and the reference project that would support equivalent assessments in those regions. A company that can demonstrate it has delivered the official continent-wide geological assessment for the European Commission is in a structurally different commercial position when approaching African development banks, South American resource ministries, or Asian national oil companies about equivalent studies than a company that can only reference proprietary exploration work done for private clients.
Whether the European assessment ultimately identifies commercially viable natural hydrogen accumulations is a geological question that 12 months of desk study and remote data analysis cannot definitively answer. The most likely output is a risk-ranked map of prospective geological terranes that would justify targeted follow-on exploration by drilling, analogous to what basin-scale assessments produce in conventional hydrocarbon prospecting. If even one or two of those terranes translate into confirmed flows at commercial rates, the investment case for natural hydrogen exploration across Europe will shift from speculative to evidenced, and the regulatory framework that the study also aims to produce will need to be operational before that shift occurs.
