“We were accelerating before the Iran war,” Shane Cronin, professor of earth sciences at The University of Auckland, told Carbon News. “But it (the Iran war) gave us an extra push.”

News of the potential for a Wairarapa white hydrogen development slipped out on Monday morning in comments from the Resources Minister, Shane Jones, in a wider interview on the fragility exposed in New Zealand’s energy security by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The closure has boosted transport fuel and fertiliser prices globally, forcing the government to make contingency plans for potential supply shortages within weeks.

Jones raised white, or naturally occurring, hydrogen in the context of ways for NZ to increase its energy sovereignty. Hydrogen can be used to make transport fuels, industrial heat, and products such as fertiliser instead of using petro-chemicals.

“There’s been a little gold rush bubbling away in the background over the last few years” on white hydrogen, said Professor Cronin.

But “historically cheap” oil prices had worked against swifter uptake of a potential source of replacement fuel that is both free of carbon emissions and, in its natural form, requires no energy-intensive production process.

The hydrogen industry grades various ways of producing hydrogen from grey (fossil fuels as feedstock), blue (electricity), green (renewable energy), white (natural), and orange, the last amounting to fracking for the naturally occurring gas.

Cronin did not favour fracking and the project he is working on focuses instead on how to capture the very light gas, which cannot be trapped in geological formations in the same way as hydrocarbons.

“You need to look for locations where you have a flux of channeling” of the gas as a point of capture, he said.

While NZ had a variety of potential sources of white hydrogen, Cronin is focusing on hydrogen created by seismic activity in subduction zones, where the Earth’s plates meet and either dive under or rise over one another.

NZ’s Hikurangi trench meets an oceanic trench that is sliding underneath it, Cronin explained.

“As that slab is being subducted, that gets to the temperatures needed to produce hydrogen. It’s happening all the time. You don’t have to drill to find it. You’re looking for where it flows to the surface.”

However, hydrogen-consuming bacteria near the surface meant capture needed to occur at a depth of one kilometre or more, otherwise “you lose all the hydrogen and the bacteria have a great time”.

“You want to do it (hydrogen capture) below the biotic zone.”

Cronin said global venture capital and industrial partners had been identified and are working on a project to commercialise the resource.

However, he was “deliberately cagey” about further detail and identified white hydrogen potential in various parts of NZ other than the Wairarapa.

Asked whether Jones was correct to say a Wairarapa project was in prospect, Cronin said: “The Minister must have had a reason for saying that.”

He is to brief Jones on the project, which is supported by the university’s commercialisation arm, Uniservices, this week.

The Japanese industrial conglomerate, Obayashi, is already a significant player in NZ’s fledgling hydrogen market, owning 50% of Eastland Energy and investing in projects to make green hydrogen from renewable solar, wind and geothermal sources.

“We think we are close to commercialisation with a couple of opportunities,” said Cronin of the white hydrogen project. “I’m being deliberately cagey. We are in discussions with government and international venture capital organisations wanting to invest.

“We have a model and an idea that is commercialisable. We are working with a company from Australia to look at a few different plays.

“We have the potential to be looking at commercialisable quantities, but I can’t say that for sure and can’t give you too much more detail.”

Australia has large deposits of granite, also found in parts of the South Island, which can generate white hydrogen as geological processes release radioactive elements. However, that is different from the subduction plates project that Cronin is working on.

He said the project had the potential to make NZ a global leader in the harvesting of naturally occurring hydrogen, which is currently under exploration in Japan, Australia, the US and the Pyrenees region of France. The only production facility to date is in the west African country of Mali.

“I want us to be first,” said Cronin. “I think we have the knowhow and the geological and geographical location.”

NZ’s opportunity was as much in being hydrogen industry “knowledge leaders” as it was in harnessing hydrogen in the domestic economy.

“We are a bit closer to market than some of the others, at least in terms of scale. We need some decent investment to make it happen.”

Cronin would also be briefing Jones on the need for legislative reforms to deal with an emerging hydrogen sector.

The use of hydrogen in heavy transport is in its infancy in NZ, but Taranaki-based hydrogen firm Hiringa is building out a refuelling network for a hydrogen-powered truck fleet.