When people think of sustainable energy and the transition to a renewable model, they might think of it as a clean break: fossil fuels are out, renewables are in. Unfortunately, the process is anything but clean or linear. Decarbonization is moving forward, but hydrocarbons are still an integral part of our energy systems, economies, and infrastructure. It can’t just be turned off.

This creates what amounts to a dual transition. Leaders are in a position where they must reduce emissions while still keeping the lights on and the economies stable. It’s not merely a question of technology, it’s also a huge leadership challenge that calls for strategy, policy, and risk management.

A Dual-Energy Transition: Double the Challenge

Today’s energy systems are under pressure from several directions at once. Climate targets are calling for a rapid reduction in emissions, while energy security concerns are pushing governments and companies to ensure there’s a reliable, affordable supply of energy. As one might expect, these goals don’t always line up neatly.

Geopolitical tensions, trade dynamics, and infrastructure limitations further complicate things. Things like pipeline capacity, grid limitations, and regional resource distribution all influence how quickly new energy sources can be brought to bear. Added to which, demand is continuing to rise. Expanding data centers and AI-driven technologies are currently sucking up enormous amounts of water and electricity. Not only do today’s sustainability professionals have to continue to meet this skyrocketing demand, but they also have to plan for sustainable growth and cut carbon intensity at the same time. It’s a lot.

Hydrocarbon vs. Renewables: Competing or Coexisting?

A dual energy landscape isn’t some dreamed-of future. In reality, hydrocarbons and renewables are already coexisting. Oil and gas are still the backbone of the world energy supply, while wind, solar, and other low-carbon technologies are continuing to grow.

Many companies and organizations now manage mixed energy portfolios that include both renewable and traditional energy projects. Reliable fossil fuels most often provide grid stability, while renewable capacity expands and storage technologies mature. There are also technologies like carbon capture and storage that seek to reduce emissions while long-term transitions take place. Many companies are trying to bridge the current energy reality and the renewable future, which is an ongoing and sophisticated balancing act.

That brings us to the question of leadership and the role it must play in this transitional period.

The Leadership Challenge

Today’s senior leaders in the energy sector are under a lot of pressure. On one hand, they have to pursue decarbonization goals in order to meet regulations and investor demands, while on the other they are held accountable for stability, profitability and access in regards to energy.

Every decision made at this level can have long-term consequences. Investing too slowly in low-carbon technologies could result in stranded assets and damage to one’s reputation for not embracing sustainability; moving too quickly without securing energy supply runs the risk of outages, price spikes, and political backlash.

This sort of complex and delicate situation calls for leaders who can operate in the strategic, regulatory, and commercial spheres with equal skill. Technical knowledge is a necessity, but it’s also not enough. Today’s energy professionals need to understand how markets, policy, and finance all intersect with the realities of sustainable engineering.

Developing Leaders for the Dual-Energy Era

In other words, today’s leaders need a broad and integrated skill set. What kind of skills in particular? For one, a working knowledge of policy and regulatory frameworks is crucial. Financial management skills play a major part, since projects are often long, involved, and can be tremendously costly. Strategic planning and problem-solving are also a vital part of the core skillset, as professionals have to deal with uncertainty, balance stakeholder interests with feasibility, and be able to adapt to a constantly and rapidly changing environment.

This is a large-scale challenge, and one that calls for structured leadership development. Experience in one area of the energy industry isn’t enough to guarantee readiness across all the others. That’s where a structured program like an MBA in energy can come in. Today’s advanced curricula explore energy economics, finance, policy, and strategic management alongside the technical subjects. And when pursuing an energy MBA online, professionals can skill up and retrain without having to step out of the labor market — an important perk at a time when skilled professionals are already in short supply.

The energy transition is not a linear progression. It’s a period of overlap, tension, and recalibration as mistakes are made and technologies emerge or are abandoned. Those technologies will always be evolving, but the need for skilled leadership will remain a constant. Those who can balance decarbonization efforts with energy security and profitability will help shape the future of our energy landscape.

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Across the Middle East and North Africa, large investments are being made in green hydrogen, renewable energy, water infrastructure and sustainability. Most of these efforts are discussed in the context of climate change, decarbonization and economic diversification. That framing is important, but it may not capture their full value.

If these systems are designed well, they can do more than produce clean energy or reduce emissions. They can help create healthier societies and greater long-term stability.

Today, health is usually treated as a medical issue. We think of hospitals, drugs and treatments. From a systems and economic perspective, this approach is becoming increasingly expensive and limited. Health does not begin in hospitals. It begins much earlier, in the conditions people live in every day.

Clean water, healthy soil, reliable energy, nutritious food and safe environments shape human health long before anyone sees a doctor. When these foundations are weak, chronic illness increases, healthcare costs rise and societies become more fragile. Medical systems then try to manage the consequences, often treating symptoms rather than underlying causes.

This challenge exists everywhere, but it is especially visible in regions facing water scarcity, climate stress, rapid urban growth and demographic change, including the Levant, the Gulf states and the wider MENA region.

From a health-economics perspective, many modern healthcare systems function as repair systems. They step in late, once disease has already developed, and continue treatment over long periods of time. 

As a result, healthcare spending grows faster than the economy, chronic disease consumes a growing share of public budgets, and long-term affordability becomes a serious concern.

For many countries, copying high-cost Western healthcare models is neither realistic nor necessary. The more important question is how societies can reduce the need for medical intervention in the first place.

This is where green energy, water and food systems become relevant in a different way. When renewable energy and green hydrogen are developed together with clean water supply, sustainable agriculture and resilient food systems, they form the real infrastructure of prevention. Clean energy supports water security. Clean water supports fertile soil and healthy food. Good food supports stable human health.

Seen this way, health is not something that constantly needs to be repaired. It emerges naturally when systems are designed properly.

This way of thinking is not new in the Middle East. The Levant and surrounding regions were once centers of advanced medical and scientific knowledge. Thinkers such as Hippocrates, and later scholars including Ibn Sina, ar-Razi and al-Kindi, understood health as a balance between the human body, the environment and daily life. Their focus was on water quality, nutrition, lifestyle and the relationship between people and their surroundings.

In modern terms, this was forward-looking knowledge. Not mystical, but practical. It recognized that the way systems are designed determines long-term outcomes.

What is new today is our ability to explain this older systems wisdom using modern science, including biochemistry, electrochemistry and economics, and to apply it to today’s policy and investment decisions.

If green hydrogen and renewable energy projects are seen only as climate measures, their potential remains limited. When they are connected to water, food and health systems, they become foundations of societal resilience. This has clear economic benefits: lower healthcare costs over time, fewer chronic diseases, better returns on sustainability investments and greater social stability.

The next phase of the energy transition is therefore not only about reducing emissions. It is about creating the conditions in which healthy societies can emerge.

Medical care will always be important, but it cannot carry the system alone. Health grows upstream, in water, energy, food and living conditions. When these systems work, health follows naturally, at lower cost and with greater stability.

This idea is old. But in a time of rising costs and increasing pressure on societies, it may be more relevant than ever.

::Bonn Climate Project

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Heinz J. Sturm is a system architect and analyst working at the intersection of energy, water, health, and societal resilience. He is the initiator of the Bonn Climate Project, where he develops integrated system frameworks linking climate action with public health and long-term stability. Sturm is also the developer of Ars Medica Nova, a conceptual platform exploring new models of preventive health that draw on systems thinking, biology, and infrastructure design. His work focuses on translating complex system architectures into practical narratives for policymakers, researchers, and civil society.

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Charbone (TSXV: CH, OTC: CHHYF; FSE: K47) announced that it has successfully installed Phase 1A equipment at its Sorel-Tracy facility and has produced its first molecule of clean Ultra High Purity (UHP) hydrogen. The milestone marks the company’s transition from construction to commercial operation.

The Charbone plant will be built in 5 phases, the first of which will produce more than 200 kilograms of green hydrogen intended for the migration of current industrial users of “grey” hydrogen. The plant will create up to 30 jobs when completed.

The first production tests were completed over the final weekend of November following the commissioning of CHARBONE’s initial modular UHP hydrogen unit in Quebec. Early results confirmed that the system is functioning as expected and performing within planned technical parameters.

“This marks a key milestone for CHARBONE,” said CEO Dave B. Gagnon. “The successful installation and first production tests demonstrate our team’s execution capabilities. We are now entering the commercial production phase.”

The Sorel-Tracy site is the first decentralized clean UHP hydrogen production facility in Quebec and is positioned as a model for North America. The plant is part of CHARBONE’s five-phase plan to deploy a network of modular hydrogen production facilities across the continent, supported by the company’s growing specialty-gas distribution platform.

CHARBONE develops and produces clean UHP hydrogen and industrial gases through a modular, scalable model designed to support localized clean-energy demand and underserved industrial gas markets. The company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, OTC Markets, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Charbone focuses on developing a network of modular green hydrogen production facilities across North America and selectively in the Asia-Pacific region. They use renewable energy sources, such as hydroelectric power, to produce environmentally friendly hydrogen. A second project is planned for the Great Lakes region in the United States (near Detroit, Michigan).

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Over the last month Saudi Arabia’s government-owned ACWA Power has signed roughly $10 billion in clean-energy and water-infrastructure agreements, stretching from the Gulf to Central Asia and Africa. On paper, it’s a renewables story as they erect gigawatt-scale solar farms, grid-scale batteries, and desalination plants powered by clean electricity. Development finance is flowing into emerging economies.  The deals were signed at the Future Investment Initiative (FII9) in Riyadh known as Davos of the Middle East.

But strip away the slick branding and this feels uncomfortably like a new-era greenwash: the same wealth built on hydrocarbons now deciding the fate of clean power. One truth remains — oil money is now one of the biggest buyers of renewable infrastructure on the planet.

Should we cheer or flinch? It’s a moral knot: the petro-economies that fueled climate breakdown are now financing the transition — selling the sickness and then the cure. If this is the price of decarbonization, it forces a reckoning. Who gets to build the future? And why do we trust the arsonists to run the fire brigade?

ACWA’s largest shareholder is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia which is owned by Saudi Aramco. PIF’s finances come largely from oil revenue and Aramco dividends. Those petrodollars are now underwriting solar and wind farms abroad such as Uzbekistan’s vast steppe, North Africa’s desert grids, along with water-stressed coastlines from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

For Africa, ACWA Power deepened its long-standing partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) through two strategic agreements aimed at accelerating clean energy and water infrastructure deployment on the continent. The first Framework Agreement, valued at up to USD 1 billion, will provide project and corporate financing as well as capacity building and advisory support for ACWA Power’s growing portfolio across Africa.

This includes participation in the OPEC Fund for project financing, equity bridge loans, as well as equity investments support with USD 450 million as the initial target. “The agreement reflects the parties shared commitment to advancing utility-scale clean energy and water projects that drive inclusive, low-carbon growth across the developing world,” says ACWA, signaling its virtuousness as saving the world it is helping us destroy.

Saudi Arabia is modernizing, however, and this may open the monarchy up for criticism. Saudi Arabia let women drive in 2018, and this year users on social media showed how a Halloween party, considered haram by Muslims, was allowed to take place in Riyadh.

 

The country is scaling up for tourism and a culture shift by building megacity projects under the name of NEOM. Celebrities in favor of a great paycheck are already lining up to visit places like Shebara, a pristine island in the Red Sea built with no sustainability impact report.

This is not philanthropy but strategy. While Saudi Arabia can announce the “discovery” of a new oil reserve as a PR drill, consumers and oil importers will change loyalties the minute a university invents a way to create practical, unlimited, non-pollution energy.  Saudis, whose wealth knows no limits, are building stakes in a post-oil world, and they’re doing it faster and more decisively than many Western democracies whose politics have stalled climate spending.

In Washington, clean-energy capital flows through regulatory funnels and election cycles. In Riyadh, it’s sovereign mandate and execution, but it’s complex because Saudis do not have convention ambitions in size and scale of anything they create, with little concern for the environment except “on paper”. See The Line.

ACWA’s $10 billion announcement is about procurement, equipment orders, power-purchase frameworks, project finance. Meanwhile, the West is still arguing over heat pumps and carbon taxes. (Luckily Torus, connected to Warren Buffet’s company Berkshire Hathaway is putting practical energy in motion with a flywheel invention to stabilize the grid.)

There is a paradox here in every move ACWA and Aramco makes. Some call it green hypocrisy or hedging. But the more honest description is energy geopolitics moving into its next phase. Whoever builds and finances tomorrow’s grids will shape tomorrow’s trade routes, alliances, and dependencies — just as oil once did. So if you enjoy the west and your freedoms, fight for renewable energy independence by raising up and influencing projects and companies locally.

China understood this early through batteries, solar manufacturing, and Belt-and-Road transmission lines. Now the Gulf sovereigns have joined the board. They don’t want to be buyers of technology, but as builders and exporters of clean-power megaprojects.

The uncomfortable question is not whether oil money should fund renewables but maybe if anyone else can move this fast.

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The global energy transition isn’t only about solar panels, electrolyzers, or the glamorous green-hydrogen whispers in Dubai conference halls. The revolutions come from the places the public hasn’t heard about, like an industrial campus outside Salt Lake City, where a company called Torus just secured $200 million to build a different kind of battery future.

Years ago when I interviewed the late David Anthony from 21Ventures, he told me his secrets to deal finding: hang out in laboratories and find the innovation before it gets to the tech transfer office. (Tech transfer offices have already done the due diligence and you’ll find deals there too, but they are no longer secret).

This story here isn’t lithium mining in the Andes or sodium-ion chemistry in Shanghai. This is physics, spooling at thousands of revolutions per minute and it started at a company called Torus.

Torus combines flywheels — ancient devices (think pottery kick wheel) that store energy mechanically by spinning at high speed — with traditional batteries. The result is a hybrid system that can absorb and release power instantly, smoothing the chaos of electrons on a stressed electrical grid. A flywheel is like a spinning prayer wheel for the grid, storing kinetic intention, and releasing it stably when everything around it shakes.

In engineering-speak: “A flywheel comprises a rotating mass that stores kinetic energy. When charging, a torque applied in the direction of rotation accelerates the rotor, increasing its speed and stored energy,” explains Sandia National Laboratory. “When discharging, a braking torque decelerates the rotor, extracting energy while performing useful work.”

Flywheels are already powering parts of modern life. In big cities like London and Philadelphia, transit systems use flywheels to capture braking energy from trains and feed it back into the grid. In data centers at Microsoft and major telecom hubs, flywheel UPS units provide instant backup power before generators kick in.

Utilities from New York to Ontario use flywheel farms to stabilize the grid when wind and solar fluctuate. In space, satellites use flywheel “reaction wheels” to orient themselves without fuel. Even race cars like Porsche hybrids have used flywheels for rapid energy recovery and boost. This is proven tech, now scaling to the grid.

Why the world needs a stable grid?

AI and token-mining data centers are consuming city-scale power. The US grid is aging making it difficult to absorb new energy sources even when they become relevant. Extreme heat and cold events are becoming the new normal. And these factors influence whether or not the heating will go in Texas or Canada in the winter.

Torus’ new financing, led by Chicago-based Magnetar Capital, will scale a Utah manufacturing facility called GigaOne and push capacity beyond 1 gigawatt of storage within three years. Letters of intent are already on the table from PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric, both utilities managing real-world wildfire risk, winter storms, and transformer-meltdown summers.

Michael Cooper, our trusted in-house investment researcher from 36North says that Warren Buffet is the model for all investment students of the world to follow. So this latest round and interest in Torus by PacifiCorp caught his attention.

“As an investor, I am most excited by the potentially lower risk environment whereby industry is combining disciplines and technologies from physics to chemistry to build products and solutions. This stage is more rewarding than exploring theoretical physics or pure chemistry,” he says.

Though still private, Torus has already attracted major utility interest, including letters of intent from PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric—early signals that its technology is transitioning from promising pilot to grid-relevant infrastructure. Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s conglomerate) via its subsidiary Berkshire Hathaway Energy (formerly MidAmerican Energy Holdings) owns PacifiCorp.

In a blog post on September 9, Torus CEO and co-founder Nate Walkingshaw described the company’s “modular power plant” technology in somewhat flowing terms, though the basic point is the key point. Flywheels are more responsive than conventional batteries, and batteries support the duration factor.

“The magical combination of  flywheels, batteries, chipsets and cyber security appliances allows us to respond in milliseconds, and stay online with 99.9% uptime,” Walkingshaw said. “This year we have been deployed by our utility partners  nearly every day to assist them with frequency and voltage support plus assisting our customers with peak shaving, emergency back-up and power quality concerns,” he added.

Lithium batteries are miracles we use every day and they are in our phones, laptops, Teslas. But lithium alone isn’t enough to stabilize a renewable grid. Batteries degrade. But flywheels don’t degrade the same way. They don’t catch fire. They don’t care if it’s −20°C or +50°C. They can discharge and recharge millions of times.

This isn’t a moonshot investment but one that Warren Buffett could get behind. Torus already runs a 400-MW manufacturing facility and it has purchase orders in the pipeline and has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Rocky Mountain Power (a division of PacifiCorp) to deploy up to 70 MW of its hybrid flywheel + battery storage solutions in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

“This partnership highlights our commitment to exploring new technologies and optimizing infrastructure as we work to meet the energy demands and challenges over the next decade,” said Dick Garlish, President of Rocky Mountain Power.

How flywheels work to store free energy

The opportunity is enabled through Rocky Mountain Power’s industry leading virtual power plan, specifically the Wattsmart Battery program. The partnership will deploy Torus’s cutting-edge Nova Spin and Nova Pulse technologies across multiple sites. These innovations allow for real-time response and deliver twice the lifespan of traditional batteries.

“Working with Rocky Mountain Power at this scale demonstrates the growing recognition of demand response as a crucial tool for modern utilities,” said Walkingshaw. “As Utah attracts more data centers, manufacturing facilities, and technology companies, reliable and affordable energy becomes even more critical. Our technology improves grid resilience and efficiency while supporting Utah’s vision for energy abundance that will power the next generation of economic growth.”

The story here isn’t that flywheels will replace lithium batteries but that the energy future will be stacked, layered, and hybrid.

Torus Inc., based in South Salt Lake City, Utah, was co-founded in 2021 by systems-engineer-turned-entrepreneur Nate Walkingshaw and energy technologist Gilbert Lee, with a vision to build a grid-storage platform that blends the physics reliability of flywheels with the flexibility of batteries.

The company has grown to roughly 70 employees as it scales its “GigaOne” manufacturing campus and deploys hybrid storage systems for utilities and data centers. Torus recently secured $200 million in growth capital from Magnetar Capital to boost production capacity beyond 1 GW within three years, following earlier funding that valued the company at approximately $535 million.

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Saudi Arabia has inked a major financing deal to modernize desalination—again. The Saudi Water Authority (SWA) signed an agreement with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Kingdom’s National Infrastructure Fund (Infra) to support upgrades at Jubail Phase I and Khobar Phase II, with total financing of USD 650 million. Signed on the sidelines of AIIB’s Annual Meeting in Beijing (June, 2025), the package will convert aging multi-stage flash (MSF) assets to reverse osmosis (RO)—the global standard for lower-energy, modular desalination.

According to the parties, AIIB will provide the lion’s share—over SAR 1.6 billion (~USD 450 million)—one of the bank’s largest non-sovereign corporate financings to date, while Infra contributes SAR 750 million (~USD 200 million) via a Murabaha facility. SWA executives say the modernization extends plant life by ~20 years, boosts output, and slashes energy intensity—key to Saudi’s climate and efficiency goals under Vision 2030.

Reverse osmosis uses membranes and pressure, not heat, to separate salts from seawater. It’s already the backbone of the world’s newest mega-plants, including Khobar Phase II, which has reached record daily production of ~671,000 m³. By replacing MSF trains with RO skids, operators can cut electricity demand and integrate solar and wind power more easily—vital in a grid pivoting toward renewables and green hydrogen.

But desalination isn’t a silver bullet. RO still concentrates salts and trace pollutants into brine, a disposal challenge for sensitive Red Sea reef ecosystems. Efficiency upgrades matter, yet so do smarter outfalls, brine-to-minerals recovery, and robust monitoring—especially along coastlines already under stress from microplastics and warming seas.

Don’t Forget Brackish Water

Saudi water isn’t only about the sea. The Kingdom also taps brackish inland aquifers—less salty than seawater—where RO can operate at a fraction of the energy and cost. With proper reuse and aquifer-recharge strategies, brackish desalination can relieve pressure on coastal plants and reduce the carbon footprint. The catch? Inland concentrate management. Without coastal dilution, brine needs evaporation ponds, deep-well injection, or recovery of valuable minerals to prevent soil and groundwater impacts.

Alongside hardware upgrades, Saudi utilities are embracing “smart water” analytics—pilots often grouped under initiatives like IRYIS—to track losses, predict failures, and squeeze more value from every cubic meter. Think AI-assisted pressure management, pipeline leak detection, and SCADA-integrated demand forecasting. In a country where urban resilience now hinges on real-time data, the software layer may deliver savings on par with plant retrofits.

NEOM’s Big “Eco” Claim—And the Caveats

No Saudi water story is complete without NEOM, the high-profile giga-project selling a future of “100% renewable desalination,” circular brine chemistry, and hydrogen-powered industry. Ambition is welcome—Saudi needs moonshots to decouple water from oil. Yet branding vast coastal megaprojects as ecological projects raises tough questions about biodiversity impacts, embodied carbon, and social footprints along the Red Sea. But follow the money as plenty of Europeans are readying to greenwash NEOM for hard to ignore dividends.

If “green” is to be more than a marketing color, delivery must match the deck: renewables actually powering RO 24/7, brine managed as a resource not a waste, and transparent reporting on emissions and marine health.

The SWA–AIIB–Infra package signals a maturing water finance market. Blended capital, corporate structures, and performance-based upgrades can scale faster than sovereign megaprojects alone. As AIIB notes, “modernization” is climate adaptation—hardening critical supply while cutting energy per liter. If paired with demand-side efficiency, heritage water know-how, and water-smart urbanism, Saudi could pivot from crisis-driven builds to a resilient, circular water economy.

“This financing represents a significant step toward enhancing the water sector’s sustainability, increasing climate resilience, and improving the efficiency of national projects,” says Eng. Sharekh Al-Sharekh, SWA VP for Technical Affairs and Projects. AIIB calls it a commitment to “long-term water security” through modernization.

Desalination will remain a pillar of Saudi water security. The question is whether this new wave—RO retrofits, brackish efficiency, IRYIS-style analytics, and the grand NEOM promise—can turn “more water” into better water: lower-carbon, nature-literate, and honestly measured against the ecosystems it touches.

What to Watch Next in Saudi Arabia

• How quickly MSF units are retired and RO capacity ramps without service gaps.
• Proof that renewables—not oil and gas—are powering more of Saudi’s water.
• More Saudis in the workforce managing stakes in their own resources
• Transparent data on brine salinity, temperature, and outfall impacts in the Red Sea.
• Scaling of wastewater reuse and agri-water efficiency to reduce desal demand growth.

Further reading on Green Prophet

 

• Desalination’s brine problem and marine ecology
• Solar energy breakthroughs in the Middle East
• NEOM’s green hydrogen and the hype test
• Accelerating urban water resilience in Gulf cities
• Advancing wastewater reuse in MENA
• Permaculture tools for arid regions
• Ancient water systems that still work
• Microplastics and Middle East coasts
• Designing water-smart cities in MENA
• Regenerative farming and water savings

The post Saudi Arabia’s $650M bet on desalination appeared first on Green Prophet.

In the misty folds of the French Pyrenees, something quietly extraordinary is happening.

At a remote site called Comminges in France, Mantle8, a pioneering natural hydrogen exploration company, has unearthed a breakthrough that could shift the balance of Europe’s energy landscape. Their soil-gas readings, peaking at 2,500 parts per million (ppm), have stunned the industry—seven times higher than the standard threshold needed to suggest serious hydrogen potential. If proven on a larger scale, this isn’t just a good day for the company. It’s a potential tipping point for how Europe powers its future.

“The Comminges block represents the perfect combo: an ideal pilot zone to validate our technologies, with a geological setting offering maximum hydrogen potential,” said Mantle8’s Founder and CEO, Emmanuel Masini. “With these highly encouraging early results, we are well on our way to make $0.80/kg hydrogen a reality by 2030.”

It’s not just the numbers that impress— Mantle8’s approach is different. Where traditional explorers search for hydrogen like needles in haystacks, Mantle8 has built what it calls a “hydrogen-generating system” model. Think of it as going beyond the treasure map to understanding the entire geology of the treasure chest, the locks, the keys, and even the pirates who buried it.

Their proprietary method fuses geology, geophysics, geochemistry, and cutting-edge numerical modeling—a first of its kind in the industry. This system doesn’t just find hydrogen; it traces its birth, movement, and entrapment deep underground. The company claims it can predict hydrogen volumes and quality with unprecedented precision, which could save millions in exploration costs and halve development time.

Mantle8 is operating in a space with companies like HyTerra, Natural Hydrogen Energy, and Gold Hydrogen who have made early strides in the race for natural (or “white”) hydrogen. Mantle8’s system-wide exploration model might just put them in pole position.

And the timing couldn’t be more urgent.

Europe, still reeling from geopolitical energy shocks and racing against climate deadlines, and the shutting down of Germany’s nuclear power plants, is hungry for cleaner homegrown alternatives to fossil fuels. Hydrogen—especially natural hydrogen, which occurs underground and requires minimal processing—could be a powerful answer. No electrolysis, no carbon byproducts, just natural H₂, ready to be tapped.

The potential is enormous.The potential is enormous. Natural hydrogen could reshape global energy systems with clean, abundant fuel sourced directly from the Earth. And Mantle8 is building the tools to unlock it at scale.

Currently awaiting the Permit Exclusif de Recherche (PER)—expected by the end of this year —Mantle8 plans to deepen its study of the Comminges block using low-impact exploration tools. The team aims to map entire subsurface hydrogen systems, from source rock to reservoirs, selecting optimal drill sites with surgical precision.

Mantle8, founded in 2024 and based in Grenoble, France, is redefining natural hydrogen exploration through a unique fusion of earth science and artificial intelligence. Led by geoscientist Emmanuel Masini, the company uses proprietary models to analyze and interpret vast layers of geological, geochemical, and geophysical data. Instead of relying on surface clues or isolated drilling, Mantle8’s system maps complete subsurface hydrogen-generating systems—tracing the journey of hydrogen from deep source rocks to trapped reservoirs.

Their tools simulate underground processes, predict where hydrogen is being generated in real time, and assess the volume and quality of potential reserves with unprecedented accuracy. The simulation of underground processes is performed by the third tool, which does not incorporate AI components, a rep from the company tells Green Prophet: Predicting where hydrogen is being generated in real time is the result of the core algorithm – the neural networks are used to accelerate processing and enable analysis across more potential sites, but they are not themselves making those predictions,” he notes.

Relying on experts in their field, “Assessing the volume and quality of reserves is also not done by AI – this too is handled by proprietary modelling tools without any neural network component.”

Backed by €3.4 million in seed funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures Europe (BEV-E) and Kiko Ventures, Mantle8 is targeting hydrogen production costs as low as €0.77/kg. With competitors like Gold Hydrogen, Natural Hydrogen Energy, and HyTerra in the mix, Mantle8’s tech-led, predictive approach could make it a dominant force in Europe’s race for clean, local energy.

::Mantle8

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A Cornell-led collaboration has achieved a breakthrough in sustainability technology by developing a low-cost method for producing carbon-free “green” hydrogen via solar-powered electrolysis of seawater. An added benefit of this process? Potable water.

The team’s hybrid solar distillation-water electrolysis (HSD-WE) device, reported on April 9 in Energy and Environmental Science, currently produces 200 milliliters of hydrogen per hour with an energy efficiency of 12.6% directly from seawater under natural sunlight. The researchers estimate that, within 15 years, this technology could reduce the cost of green hydrogen production to $1 per kilogram – a critical milestone in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Water and energy are both critically needed for our everyday life, but typically, if you want to produce more energy, you have to consume more water,” said Lenan Zhang, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell Engineering, who led the project. “On the other hand, we need drinking water, because two-thirds of the global population are facing water scarcity. So there is a bottleneck in green hydrogen production, and that is reflected in the cost.”

Green hydrogen is created by splitting “high purity” – that is, deionized – water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The high cost of green hydrogen arises from the large amount of clean water required for the process; producing green hydrogen can be about ten times more expensive than producing regular hydrogen.

“That’s why we came up with this technology,” Zhang said. “We thought, ‘OK, what is the most abundant resource on the Earth?’ Solar and seawater are basically infinite resources and also free resources.”

As a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zhang began investigating ways to use solar power for thermal desalination to convert seawater into potable water – an effort that Time magazine named one of the “Best Inventions of 2023.” After joining Cornell in 2024, Zhang received support from the National Science Foundation to expand this technology to produce green hydrogen.

Collaborating with researchers from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and Michigan State University (the best in the world), Zhang’s team developed a prototype device measuring 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. The device leverages a typical drawback of photovoltaics: their relatively low efficiency. Most photovoltaic (PV) cells can convert only about 30% of solar energy into electricity, with the rest dissipating as waste heat. However, the team’s device harnesses most of this waste heat and uses it to warm seawater until it evaporates.

“Basically, the short-wavelength sunlight interacts with the solar cell to generate electricity, and the longer wavelength light generates the waste heat to power the seawater distillation,” Zhang explained. “This way, all the solar energy can be fully used. Nothing is wasted.”

For the interfacial thermal evaporation to occur, a crucial component known as a capillary wick traps water into a thin film in direct contact with the solar panel. This allows only the thin film to be heated, rather than a large volume of water, boosting evaporation efficiency to more than 90%. Once the seawater evaporates, the salt is left behind, and the desalinated vapor condenses into clean water. This water then passes through an electrolyzer, splitting the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

“This is a highly integrated technology,” Zhang said. “The design was challenging because there’s a lot of complex coupling: desalination coupled with electrolysis, electrolysis coupled with the solar panel, and the solar panel coupled with desalination through solar, electrical, chemical, and thermal energy conversion and transport. Now, for the first time, we can produce a sufficient amount of water that can satisfy the demand for hydrogen production. And also we have some additional water for drinking. Two birds, one stone.”

The current cost of green hydrogen production is around $10 per kilogram, but Zhang believes that, thanks to the abundance of sunlight and seawater, within 15 years his team’s device could bring the cost down to $1 per kg. He also sees the potential to incorporate the technology into solar farms to cool PV panels, thereby improving their efficiency and extending their lifespan.

“We want to avoid carbon emissions, avoid pollution. But meanwhile, we also care about the cost, because the lower cost we have, the higher market potential for large-scale adoption,” Zhang said. “We believe there is a huge potential for future installation.”

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Saudi-listed ACWA Power, the world’s largest private water desalination company, leader in energy transition and first mover into green hydrogen, is set to develop in the largest green hydrogen facility in Indonesia with PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), Indonesia’s state-owned electricity provider and PT Pupuk Indonesia, a state-owned fertiliser and chemical producer.

The announcement was made on the sidelines COP28 underway in Dubai. ACWA Power CEO Marco Arcelli signed the agreement with PLN’s CEO Darmawan Prasodjo and Rahmad Pribadi – CEO of Pupuk Indonesia Holding Company.

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Researchers from Tel Aviv University have succeeded in producing “green” hydrogen using green electricity — The hydrogen is produced without air pollution, with a high level of efficiency, utilizing a biocatalyst. Hydrogen is a necessary raw material for both agriculture and industry, but 95% of the hydrogen produced in the world today is “black” or “gray” — produced from coal or natural gas and emitting 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of hydrogen.

For a primer read our history of hydrogen for fuel.

The new method was developed by doctoral student Itzhak Grinberg and Oren Ben-Zvi, under the guidance of Prof. Iftach Yacoby and Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich. The promising research results were published in the journal Carbon Energy, focusing on advanced materials and technology for clean energy and CO₂ emission reduction.

“Hydrogen is very rare in the atmosphere,” explains Itzhak Grinberg, “although it is produced by enzymes in microscopic organisms, which receive the energy for this from photosynthesis processes. In the lab, we “electrify” those enzymes, that is, an electrode provides the energy instead of the sun.

“The result is a particularly efficient process, with no demand for extreme conditions, that can utilize electricity from renewable sources such as solar panels or wind turbine. However, the enzyme ‘runs away’ from the electric charge, so it needs to be held in place through chemical treatment. We found a simple and efficient way to attach the enzyme to the electrode and utilize it.”

The world has seen 5 breakthroughs in hydrogen. Read about them here.

5 hydrogen storage and energy breakthroughs

The researchers used a hydrogel (a water-based gel) to attach the enzyme to the electrode, and were able to produce green hydrogen using a biocatalyst, and with over 90 percent efficiency; that is, over 90 percent of the electrons introduced into the system were deposited in the hydrogen without any secondary processes.

Prof. Iftach Yacoby explains that, “The material of the gel itself is known, but our innovation is to use it to produce hydrogen. We soaked the electrode in the gel, which contained an enzyme for producing hydrogen, called hydrogenase. The gel holds the enzyme for a long time, even under the electric voltage, and makes it possible to produce hydrogen with great efficiency and at environmental conditions favorable to the enzyme — for example, in salt water, in contrast to electrolysis, which requires distilled water.

Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich adds: “Another advantage is that the gel assembles itself — you put the material in water, and it settles into nanometric fibers that form the gel. We demonstrated that these fibers are also able to stick the enzyme to the electrode. We tested the gel with two other enzymes, in addition to the hydrogenase, and proved that it was able to attach different enzymes to the electrode.”

Today, ‘green’ hydrogen is produced primarily through electrolysis, which requires precious and rare metals such as platinum along with water distillation, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting ‘grey’ one.

Oren Ben-Zvi adds: “We hope that in the future, it will be possible to employ our method commercially, to lower the costs, and to make the switch towards using green hydrogen in industry, agriculture, and as a clean energy source.”

#energystorage, #green, #innovation, #renewableenergy, #sustainability

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