There's a few companies that are drilling gas wells specifically looking for hydrogen. Gold Hydrogen in Australia, NH2E in the US.

Edit: for additional context:
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-hydrogen-next-generation-energy

Anyone following this?

I have to wonder if the current race to capture and inject CO2 into the subsurface in southeast Texas could have something to do with hydrogen. Oxy, Chevron, etc are spending lots of money on land leases with no visible income so far. The big play areas seem to have a correlation to the big salt domes in Chambers, Jefferson, and Liberty counties. Captured CO2 will one day be captured and transported in newly built pipelines to the leased acreage.

really cool article. to be honest, it's the first i've ever heard of geologic hydrogen.

i can only imagine the engineering challenges it will create if we ever figure out how to find and develop the resource. imagine a well blowout with an invisible fire!

It has everything to do with hydrogen. I've been working this space for about 3 years now for one of the majors and we have a large play in the gulf coast. The hydrogen that's left from cracking natural gas is referred to as blue hydrogen and to my knowledge is the most cost effective hydrogen alternative to grey hydrogen because of the inflation reduction act 45q incentives (although some are also exploring if 45v is more valuable here). What you do with that hydrogen depends. Some will use it in existing facility processing to reduce their emissions footprint, while others will synethsize to ammonia or methanol so they can export to Europe and particularly Asia where it can be cracked back to hydrogen or used as ammonia.

You also have Green (renewables based and very expensive) and Pink (Nuclear based hydrogen I'm less familiar with). I think there might be some other colors as well that I'm not familiar with, like White which I'd never heard of until this thread.