Hydrogen From Rocks: Element One Bets Columbia University Tech Can Beat Oil On Price

Element One Hydrogen & Critical Minerals Corp. (EONE.CN) is chasing a nascent industry called natural hydrogen, betting a chemistry breakthrough out of Columbia University can pull hydrogen straight from rock at a fraction of the cost of oil and gas. CEO Brad Kitchen says the same ultramafic rock formations also carry a magnesium side business he pegs at roughly $95 million a year in revenue, all sourced onshore in the United States. Those figures, like most of the projections below, are management's own and are not audited or independently verified. The market for geologic hydrogen and carbon capture is projected to top $50 billion in revenues, and a handful of juniors are racing into it.
 

Cents on the dollar

Kitchen builds his pitch around a unit everyone understands: a gallon of gas.

"Right now in those states, that's what about $6 a gallon? And that's, you know, so that's not cheap," Kitchen said in an interview. Green hydrogen, the kind made by splitting water using hydro, wind or solar, does not solve the cost problem. "That costs roughly between 10 and $14 a gallon equivalent."

Natural hydrogen is where he thinks the math flips. "Now natural hydrogen, this is where it's a bit of a game changer. We can produce the same equivalent of a gallon of gas for about 50 cents to a dollar. So it's a fraction of the cost of what oil and gas is." That cost comparison is Kitchen's, and reflects a pre-commercial process rather than demonstrated production.

And crucially, in his telling, it is not tied to a single geography. "The key is it's not location specific." He sketched the use case around a remote mine. "You could have a community in Alaska or mine in Alaska, let's say, that has to use diesel fuel for all of its energy for the whole community. Using our technology, and if there's an ultramafic rock deposit below the community or the mine, then we'll be able to power that whole community or that whole mine... at cents on the dollar compared to what they use in diesel now."
 

Why now, and why rocks

Hydrogen has been forming underground for a very long time. The problem, in Kitchen's telling, was speed.

"It takes millions of years to produce hydrogen from rocks regularly. And what we've been able to do though is we now have the technology that we can do it in real time," Kitchen said. "So it changes everything." That "real-time" framing comes from the interview; it is not a claim found in the company's press materials or in published, peer-reviewed research.

The target is a common rock type. "To do the hydrogen from rocks, what you're looking for is, is something called an ultramafic rock... ultramafic rocks make up 7% of the globe. So it's fairly abundant."

The technology he credits sits at Columbia University, where the research is led by Dr. Greeshma Gadikota, the Lenfest Earth Institute Chair in Earth and Environmental Engineering at the Columbia Climate School. In Kitchen's words, "her solution, when it interacts with rocks again, produces the hydrogen and potentially critical minerals."

The advance he points to is temperature. "With our process, we only have to go down between 500 and a thousand meters... Grishma has reduced that temperature for the reaction from roughly 300... temperature requirements from 300 degrees to 100 degrees. So that means we don't have to go down very deep." That specific "300 degrees to 100 degrees" reduction is Kitchen's characterization in the interview, and could not be confirmed against the company's press release or any published research. He contrasted the approach with rivals: "Other companies that are trying similar things are actually going down and heating up these rocks. They're trying to heat them up with either microwaves. Or steam... But with our process, we don't need that."

Kitchen believes Element One is out ahead as a public vehicle. "I believe we're the only public company that has this technology," he said, adding the caveat, "and I'm not sure."
 

The company today

Kitchen is based in Vancouver, but the operation is spread out. "Our exploration team is in Smithers and in Nanaimo on the island. We have our research facilities in New York, the city of New York and then just outside Newark itself. We have projects in BC, Alaska and Washington state."

He describes a company that has spent the past year assembling pieces. "I said we're putting all our dominoes together. And now that they're all together, they're starting to fall... we've got our agreement with Columbia University to further technology on producing hydrogen from rocks." The company has said that sponsored-research agreement is worth $1.67 million over two years, aimed at stimulating geologic hydrogen generation and recovering critical metals. Field testing is slated for next summer, and Kitchen said Element One will also drill for trapped accumulations of hydrogen "in British Columbia... Alberta and Utah."

Element One is far from alone. Kitchen singled out a Saskatchewan peer. "Their name is MAX Power. Your trading symbol is (MAXXF) . They have one well that they're just starting to do exploration on. But because of their success, they're already at a $330 million market cap." That market-cap figure reflects the time of the interview and differs from more recent trading levels. MAX Power Mining Corp. (MAXXF) said it confirmed the first subsurface natural hydrogen system in North America. Kitchen also name-checked QIMC, which is advancing a soil-gas program in Nova Scotia's Cumberland Basin, and Bill Gates-backed Koloma, which he said is exploring in Kansas.
 

The magnesium "side gig"

The part of the story Kitchen kept returning to was not hydrogen at all, but magnesium pulled from the same family of rock.

"We've got a side gig that we've also assigned agreements for. Where we're... going to be able to produce about $95 million worth of magnesium on an annual basis in the next couple of years," he said. The plan is to process "about 100,000 tons a year after about two or three years" using technology from Revora Materials, with which Element One has signed a strategic technology partnership. Element One has no revenue from this line today, so the figure is a forward-looking projection, not a result.

The appeal is domestic supply. "Currently, there's very few sources of domestic magnesium in the US. And there's been a big push not only by the government, but by having onshore sourcing and we're going to take advantage of that." The feedstock, he said, comes via a signed agreement with a supplier he called Mailbroke, providing foundry sand. That supplier name could not be verified in the company's public materials.

Asked whether there was a sovereignty dimension, Kitchen agreed. "You're probably going to see something up from the... Department of Defense or the Department of War as they call it as a request for proposal for magnesium. Because they want to make sure that their magnesium is sourced if possible in the US." At full production, he said, "we would probably be in a position to source roughly 15 to 20% of the magnesium requirements for the US." No such federal solicitation has been confirmed, and the supply-share figure is Kitchen's own estimate.

The speed advantage, in his framing, is that Element One does not have to build a mine. "We don't have to do all the permitting for building a mine... We're just piggybacking on an existing mine. So we save roughly, oh, I'm going to say five to 10 years on anybody else." He described a 45,000-square-foot former sawmill site with a pilot circuit already running in New York, close to rail, highway and a deep sea port. The revenue figures are new, and Kitchen flagged their freshness himself: "Our cost production, I can't, no, we haven't even had it for a year. It's just in the last couple of months."
 

The bigger number, and the caveats

Kitchen threw out a headline energy figure for one project, hedging as he went. "Even if only we recovered 25% of the hydrogen we produce... would still result in about 14 to 35 million tons. It would be equivalent to 275 million to 686 million barrels of oil equivalent." He called it "mind blowing." That figure is a projection tied to a pre-revenue, pre-production process and has not been independently verified.

Investors looking for public-market exposure to the theme can also track the GX Hydrogen ETF, though its holdings are weighted toward green hydrogen rather than the geologic variety Element One is pursuing.

Beyond Element One and MAX Power, the public roster of natural-hydrogen juniors includes HyTerra (HYT) testing wells in Kansas and Nebraska, and Gold Hydrogen (GHY) exploring South Australia's Yorke Peninsula. Canada also has REV Exploration (REVX.VN) and Primary Hydrogen Corp (HDRO.M.DX) while Thor Energy and UK-listed Getech have each added natural-hydrogen exploration to their existing portfolios.

Kitchen expects incumbents to adapt rather than resist. "Unless they get on board. They will buy it and they will take control of it," he said of oil majors. "All the turbine engines that produce are all hydrogen ready... So most of this energy dense facilities are ready to switch anytime to hydrogen the moment we can produce it in economically viable sustainable solution."

He also tied the pitch to the data-center power crunch. "If there's an area where there's ultramafic rocks and they want to put a data center there, we can power the data center. Plus, we'd be able to put more electricity into the community." He cited a rise in one city's power bills: "Last year, Cleveland's cost of electricity went up by 30% because of data centers." That 30% figure is Kitchen's own and could not be independently verified.

For now, the honest summary is Kitchen's own on why this has not happened before. "The biggest question I have is why hasn't it been exploited in the past? But quite frankly, it's because we haven't had the technology and we have that now." The field tests next summer will start to tell whether the lab result travels.