As global interest in naturally occurring hydrogen grows, researchers at InnoTech Alberta say the province has “exceptional potential” to lead production of the rare, nearly zero-emission energy resource.

Alberta is in a prime position for the emerging field because of its rich geology and energy industry expertise, they said. 

“We are trying to de-risk this for exploration companies through our work,” said InnoTech’s Dr. Tiago Morais, a geologist and one of the study’s authors. 

The gold standard

Natural hydrogen — known as “gold” or “white” hydrogen in the industry’s colour-coded system — is rare but highly sought after.

Unlike “grey” hydrogen, produced from natural gas or coal without carbon capture and storage (CCS), “blue” hydrogen, which incorporates CCS, or “green” hydrogen made from renewable energy, natural hydrogen can be extracted directly from the earth. 

It’s a resource in the very early stages of commercial development. 

Today’s only production comes from the West African country of Mali, producing five metric tonnes per year, or enough to power a small village, according to the International Energy Agency.

For end uses, hydrogen produces no emissions – only electrical power, water and heat.

“The idea that the Earth might generate a clean, replenishing energy source has attracted attention worldwide,” Dan Arthur, president of Tulsa, Okla.-based ALL Engineering, wrote for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. 

The U.S. Geological Survey’s first Geologic Hydrogen Prospectivity Map, released in January 2025, marked a turning point for the emerging resource, Arthur wrote.

A resource rich with potential

While hydrogen does not yet have widespread uses for the average consumer, it has long been a critical feedstock for heavy industry.

Canada produces about four million tonnes of hydrogen each year, primarily from natural gas, according to Natural Resources Canada.

More than 60 per cent of that — roughly 2.5 million tonnes — comes from Alberta, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). 

This is largely used to refine crude oil, upgrade bitumen from the oil sands, produce petrochemicals and make ammonia for fertilizers.

 The AER projects that by 2034, Alberta will produce about 4.4 million tonnes of hydrogen, nearly half of it “blue” produced with CCS.

World hydrogen demand has grown, reaching 100 million tonnes in 2025 for the first time in history, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global Hydrogen Review.

The future outlook is uncertain, but the IEA projects world demand could be as high as 585 million tonnes in 2050. 

Demand is rising from both traditional industrial uses and new and emerging applications such as transportation and aerospace, said David Billedeau, CEO of the Canadian Hydrogen Association.  

“Any credible pathway that can deliver low-emission hydrogen should be pursued, and that includes natural hydrogen,” Billedeau said. 

“While we’re at an early exploration stage, white hydrogen could complement other production pathways – accelerating hydrogen deployment while lowering costs and emissions intensity.”

Scaling up low-carbon hydrogen

Expanding conventional sources of low-carbon hydrogen is difficult. Green hydrogen costs significantly more than grey hydrogen, and scaling up green hydrogen remains a major hurdle.

“Even with a very large footprint – imagine 160 wind turbines – renewable energy can only produce about one-tenth the amount of hydrogen as a current industrial facility in Alberta produces with natural gas as a feedstock,” said Dr. Amit Kumar, director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Hydrogen Innovation, Workforce Development and Outreach. 

“From my perspective, developing any source of hydrogen is important, especially sources with lower carbon intensity,” Kumar said.

He said more research is needed into how natural hydrogen can be extracted, stored, transported and potentially liquefied for export, similar to natural gas.

“Those issues all need to be solved,” Kumar said.

Alberta’s opportunity

InnoTech Alberta sees its study as a first step towards a comprehensive evaluation of the province’s natural hydrogen potential. 

While drilling new wells for hydrogen could be expensive, the researchers said repurposing existing oil and gas wells and infrastructure offers a practical way to cut costs.

That could mean producing hydrogen alongside natural gas, generating it underground in suitable formations, or combining hydrogen production with geothermal energy in high-potential areas.

Kumar sees parallels between the development of the oil sands and the early stages of natural hydrogen exploration.

“That’s an industry that was created in Alberta using technology developed here, and that’s what we want to repeat with hydrogen,” he said. 

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If you’ve ever been to an event at Rogers Place in Edmonton, you probably noticed the massive exposed concrete walls and columns that give the arena its unmistakable sense of strength. 

That strength is real — because like many buildings, bridges, roads, industrial projects and even sidewalks in Western Canada, Rogers Place is built from limestone quarried in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Located about 350 kilometers west of Edmonton, the hamlet of Cadomin, Alta. has just 54 permanent residents, many of whom have mining in their blood. 

At the community’s edge is Heidelberg Materials Canada’s Cadomin Limestone Quarry. 

Connected by rail to the company’s Edmonton cement plant, each year the quarry delivers enough limestone to build 100 25-storey buildings or pave a 1,600-kilometre highway. 

“Our daily life in the western provinces – Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and northeast British Columbia – is built by concrete that is made from limestone supplied by the quarry,” said Joerg Nixdorf, Heidelberg Materials’ vice-president of cement operations. 

Heidelberg Materials is changing the way it mines limestone at the quarry, resulting in a reduced environmental footprint and continued safe access to decades of limestone reserves.

From the quarry to your door

Second only to water, concrete is the most widely used building material on Earth. Versions of it have shaped construction for thousands of years.

A familiar material all around us, concrete is made by mixing water with materials like sand and gravel and adding cement.

Cement, the “glue” that holds the concrete together, is a fine powder made from limestone – like that from the Heidelberg Materials Cadomin Quarry – along with other materials that contain silica, alumina and iron. 

Worldwide cement demand continues to rise. The International Energy Agency projects global cement demand will rise to 4.36 billion tonnes by 2050, about 10 per cent above 2024 levels. 

“It’s exciting to be a part of an industry that provides a material that literally builds everything,” said David Perkins, Heidelberg Materials’ senior vice-president of sustainability and public affairs. 

“You can create almost any kind of shape that you want, and then once you place that shape, it’s extremely resilient. It’s 100 per cent recyclable, it’s fire resistant and it’s extremely long-lasting.” 

Decades of operations

Originally known for coal mining, limestone mining is now Cadomin’s main industry.

Inland Cement Company (a predecessor to Heidelberg Materials) began quarrying limestone at this site in 1954.

For decades, this has been done by blasting, slowly moving equipment down the surface of the quarry.

The quarried limestone is conveyed through an inclined chute underground, where it is crushed and stored before being transferred to rail cars to be shipped to the Edmonton cement plant.

The quarry reached a point where operators faced a choice: relocate all the equipment and continue working on the surface — an expensive and highly impactful undertaking — or move the entire operation underground.

Moving underground

They chose the latter, and the limestone quarry is now in the process of being converted from a surface mine to the first fully underground limestone mine in Alberta. 

“The transition will help lower our environmental footprint by minimizing surface impacts, reducing the potential for dust and noise, and eliminating the need for large amounts of caprock removal, all while ensuring continued access to high-quality limestone,” said Brent Korobanik, permitting and community liaison for Heidelberg Materials in Edmonton.   

“From an economic perspective, it helps us out, but the big reason is sustainability.”

High-tech underground fleet

Moving underground allows Heidelberg Materials to retain existing infrastructure such as crushing equipment. It will also require a new mining fleet, supplied in part by Stockholm, Sweden–based Sandvik Group.

Sandvik says the fleet uses next-generation automation, and the project “could redefine expectations for how underground mining is executed in Canada.”

Heidelberg Materials expects the underground mine to be fully operational by spring 2027, when surface mining will be discontinued.

Sustainable Cement 

As Heidelberg Materials works to reduce its footprint at Cadomin, its Edmonton cement plant is advancing new sustainability strategies.

In 2025, the plant hit a major milestone, with 50 per cent of its fuel now coming from low-carbon alternative sources including processed municipal waste, demolition wood chips and tire fibre.

The project received provincial support, including a $2.4 million investment from Emissions Reduction Alberta.

The Edmonton cement plant also repurposes byproduct streams from other industries to replace traditional clay, ash, sand and iron in cement production.

This diverts waste from landfills and helps preserve Alberta’s natural resources.

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As the world moves to secure lithium for electric vehicles and other power-hungry products, Alberta is advancing an approach that could offer both environmental and strategic advantages.

A new assessment of Alberta’s lithium resources confirms the enormous scale of the province’s potential.

A new approach to lithium production

Rather than relying on sprawling solar evaporation ponds or energy-intensive hard-rock mining operations, Alberta is pursuing lithium production centred on direct lithium extraction (DLE) from deep underground deposits. 

Using technology adapted from decades of oil and gas experience, DLE uses solvents to selectively remove lithium from salty formation water before reinjecting the spent brine back underground, significantly reducing land disturbance and water loss.

Work underway in the province is showing the feasibility of lithium production from DLE.

“We have a great resource base, and our oil and gas industry has set us up to pursue a more environmentally friendly way of producing lithium,” said Kim Mohler, vice-president of project development for energy consulting firm GLJ Ltd. 

Much of Mohler’s time is spent supporting clients’ lithium and geothermal projects across Canada and the U.S., including key DLE developments underway in Alberta.

“Alberta has an advantage because a lot of the knowledge and infrastructure for drilling wells and producing deep subsurface brines is already in place,” she said. 

The province is also a step ahead because the exploration work that has to be done in other parts of the world has already been done here, Mohler added.

One of the world’s largest lithium resources

According to a new report by the Alberta Geological Survey and Alberta Energy Regulator, the province’s subsurface contains an estimated 82.5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent, one of the largest known accumulations in the world. 

Most of the resource is concentrated in the Devonian-age Leduc formation, the same geologic formation that launched the province’s modern oil industry in 1947. 

Significant additional resources are also found in the Swan Hills and Nisku formations.

Source: Alberta Geological Survey/Alberta Energy Regulator

The new report outlines the enormous scale of the lithium industry’s opportunity. 

Alberta’s lithium resources could supply material for more than 10 billion electric vehicle battery packs and could theoretically generate more than US$1 trillion in revenue over time, the analysis found. 

Rising demand, limited North American supply

North American lithium demand is projected to grow sharply over the next several years. 

According to S&P Global, U.S. consumption is forecast to increase by roughly 74 per cent annually while Canadian demand grows by about 40 per cent by the end of the decade. 

Right now the vast majority of the world’s lithium supply comes from outside of North America, which produced just 40,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate out of a global supply of 1.28 million tonnes in 2024. 

Canada accounted for approximately 2.5 per cent of that, at 5,983 tonnes, according to the Canada Energy Regulator.

Alberta emerging as a new lithium player

As global demand for lithium accelerates, driven by rapid growth in electric vehicles and battery storage, Alberta is emerging as a new player in a market long dominated by countries such as Chile, Argentina and Australia. 

Approximately two million hectares have already been leased for lithium exploration in Alberta, and the province is a hot spot in the nascent DLE industry.

The E3 Lithium pilot plant near Olds, Alta., September 2023. CP Images photo

E3 Lithium is the province’s most advanced lithium developer. 

The Calgary-based company produced Alberta’s first battery-grade lithium carbonate at its demonstration facility near Olds in 2025. 

The milestone marked a major step toward commercial production and validated the technical feasibility of extracting lithium from Alberta brines. 

Path to commercialization

E3’s project leverages Alberta-based DLE technology and existing oilfield infrastructure, and the company is working toward commercial-scale production later this decade.

“Nobody has proven they can do DLE production at commercial scale yet,” Mohler said. 

“The potential for Alberta to be among the first is very good if they can make the economics work, and I think following the oil and gas industry’s value chain of having companies specialize in upstream production, transportation, processing and refining will likely be a good business strategy.”

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