CGG secures industry support as it commences global natural hydrogen screening project

French company CGG has begun a worldwide natural hydrogen screening project designed to identify and ‘high-grade’ areas for natural hydrogen exploration.

The global technology and Earth science specialist made the announcement on Wednesday, confirming it had industry support for the initiative. Also known as white hydrogen, natural hydrogen has been identified as potentially playing a key role in the energy transition.

CGG’s screening project will leverage the firm’s wealth of subsurface data, multi-disciplinary geoscience expertise, latest technology advances, and high-performance computing capabilities, to identify and high-grade ‘hot spots’ for natural hydrogen exploration.

Technology to combat transition challenges

Natural or white hydrogen offers potential to be a source of lower priced green hydrogen, due to geological origins; its production is natural and requires no energy-intensive processes, unlike the majority of hydrogen currently.

Chris Page, CGG’s VP of Geoscience, said the Paris-headquartered company is “committed to using its industry-leading technology to develop new solutions to address the complex challenges presented by the energy transition”.

He continued: “This natural hydrogen screening project builds on our successful track record of developing valuable Global Resource Screening Studies for geothermal energy, critical mineral exploration and carbon and energy storage, that combine our geoscience, data science and technology expertise. We are proud to work on this innovative project and play an active role in technology developments to accelerate the wider energy transition.”

CGG, which employs around 3,400 people worldwide, describes itself as a global technology and HPC leader. It provides data, products, services and solutions in Earth science, data science, sensing and monitoring, with a “unique portfolio” to support clients in “efficiently and responsibly solving complex digital, energy transition, natural resource, environmental, and infrastructure challenges for a more sustainable future”.

Solving issues to enable sustainability

News of the natural hydrogen screening project comes hot on the heels of CGG’s achievements in the US Gulf of Mexico which has experienced “rapid growth” in interest for carbon storage. To support operators in screening potential carbon storage sites, the company created a quality-controlled and consistent database of legacy data.

CGG had identified a major challenge in the Gulf in transforming disparate public datasets into a quality-controlled database. So, it successfully created and used a database for its Storage Play Quality Index (SPQI) carbon storage screening methodology and applied its latest imaging technologies to rejuvenate the legacy seismic data.