Every kilogram of hydrogen doing useful work in America right now came out of a factory. Most of it gets cooked from natural gas in industrial plants, the cleaner kind gets split from water with electricity, and both routes share the same basic problem: somebody has to build the molecule before anybody can sell it. So the idea that you could skip all of that and simply pump hydrogen out of the ground, the way Texas pumps crude, has spent years living in the “sounds great, call me when it’s real” folder.

It now has a date on the calendar. HyTerra, an Australian-listed explorer drilling in rural Kansas, and Prometheus Hydrogen, an Illinois company that stores the gas in solid form, signed a collaboration agreement in late February to run a complete geologic hydrogen supply chain from one end to the other: out of the rock, through purification, into storage, onto a truck, and into the hands of a commercial end user. The target, according to Hydrogen Central, is completion before December 1, 2026. Nobody anywhere has ever billed a customer for purified hydrogen that came out of the ground. If these two pull it off, that sentence stops being true before New Year’s.

https://www.autonocion.com/us/kansas-hydrogen-pupmped-rock/