Governments and industry players alike are furiously investing billions in cleaning up the production of hydrogen gas to create an alternative to fossil fuels. But startup Koloma is taking a different path: searching for underground reservoirs of naturally occurring hydrogen that have been largely ignored or lain undetected until now.

It’s called geologic (or ​“white”) hydrogen, and Koloma just raised an eye-popping, gobsmacking $245 million round of venture funding to develop tools and technologies to locate and eventually extract the now-coveted gas from the earth.

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This naturally occurring hydrogen mostly originates from a process called serpentinization. When subterranean water comes in contact with iron-rich rock such as olivine, it essentially rusts, creating iron oxides — and leaving behind hydrogen. The gas can then make its way up through permeable rock and soil to be released into Earth’s atmosphere, or contained in impermeable underground domes.

Koloma and other startups such as Natural Hydrogen Energy, which drilled the first U.S. well to search for hydrogen in 2019, aim to be among the first to intentionally locate — and exploit — such deposits.

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