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Gold rush atmosphere:
The search for climate-neutral hydrogen
Researchers and companies around the globe are racing for an invisible resource, often seen as a breakthrough for climate neutrality—hydrogen. Could the key to a green transformation be right under our noses? And how can BASF produce this valuable gas in a climate-neutral way already today?
In the small village of Bourakébougou, deep in the Malian savannah, a story began in 1987 that would change the world of science. The villagers were searching for drinking water and drilled deep holes into the dry ground. But instead of finding water, they came across something entirely unexpected: gas. The next morning, a worker investigating the drilling site lit a cigarette and leaned over the hole. A loud bang, an explosion that injured him—and a flame that burned for days.
This flame, appearing as “blue sparkling water” by day and “shimmering gold” by night, baffled the people. Today, we know: the gas was hydrogen. The fact that hydrogen can occur naturally beneath the Earth’s crust is still a sensation. After all, our need for hydrogen is enormous—it is the basic material for countless products, from fertilizer to plastics, paints and medicine and it could make many industries climate-neutral. Why? When hydrogen burns, it releases a lot of energy, but unlike gasoline, it does not produce CO2. The only byproduct is water. Yet conventional hydrogen production is energy-intensive and associated with high CO2 emissions. That’s why projects worldwide are underway to extract natural hydrogen. But we are still not there, as the researchers need more time for this huge task.
How can we produce climate-neutral hydrogen?
So, how can we already obtain climate-neutral hydrogen today? That’s what we want to learn from Volker Ehret, hydrogen expert at BASF in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Here, the molecule is a feedstock to create complex high-performance materials and critical small molecules like ammonia and methanol alike. “Hydrogen is used in pretty much everything,” says Ehret, who is production manager at BASF’s main production site in Ludwigshafen. Since this spring, climate-neutral production is possible: In May 2025, an electrolyzer went into operation. The football-field-sized complex uses clean electricity to generate hydrogen from water. Conventional hydrogen production methods generate up to nine tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of hydrogen. In contrast, the only byproduct of hydrogen produced in Ludwigshafen is oxygen, earning it the moniker “green hydrogen.”
To generate green hydrogen, you use water as a feedstock and then some electricity, which is produced with wind or solar, and then that’s pretty much it,” explains Ehret. Products made with green hydrogen have a drastically reduced carbon footprint. The facility in Ludwigshafen, built in collaboration with Siemens Energy, could reduce BASF’s carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 72,000 tons per year.
Green hydrogen production of the superlative
While the natural hydrogen industry is in its infancy, green hydrogen is already making its way into many BASF products thanks to the water electrolyzer in Ludwigshafen. The 54-megawatt facility can produce 8,000 tons of hydrogen per year. That makes it the largest green hydrogen production facility in Germany. Embedded in the production and infrastructure at the Ludwigshafen site, it is truly unique in terms of its interface and integration into a chemical production environment.
“Here in Ludwigshafen, we supply around 70 plants that consume the hydrogen we produce,” explains Ehret. “We also have an outlet to the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region where we plan to supply hydrogen for mobility.” The hope is that the green hydrogen produced in Ludwigshafen will not only facilitate low-carbon chemistry, but support the beginnings of the local hydrogen economy.
For Olivier Sissmann, Ph.D., a co-leader of the International Energy Agency technical collaboration program on native hydrogen, it definitely makes sense to rely on electrolyzers—not only because he is familiar with the challenges of sourcing natural hydrogen, but also because an electrolyzer produces hydrogen exactly where it’s needed. For the expert, one does not exclude the other:
Rather than thinking it's going to be this way of producing hydrogen or this way, why can't it be both? I mean, that's what the energy mix is about, finding the right process to produce energy in the right place at the right time.”
Would you like to learn more? Then listen to our new podcast SUBSTANCE. In the first episode, our host, Joe Hanson, Ph.D., talks with his guests about hydrogen. Alongside Olivier Sissmann and Volker Ehret, he welcomes Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto, Canada — a pioneer in the search for natural hydrogen.
