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HyTerra Plan -
Part 6 |
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HyTerra will make tons of money selling impure hydrogen July 2026 updates 1. The most
significant change in HyTerra is the
appointment of Riley Kemp as CEO. I
know he will drive development and
profitability forward at the fastest
possible rate given the resources
available. His priorities may not
fully agree with mine but I'm convinced he
has a strong vision. I was impressed
with his issuance of additional shares to
finance drilling, even though the issuance
diluted my holdings. Not to put too fine a point
on it, but if you are investing in a penny
stock that has the potential to be a
dollar stock, it doesn't matter much if
your average is .01, .0144 or .02. I
started buying in May of 2025 at nearly 3
cents a share. My average is now
down to .016, so on some days I've lost a
chunk of money on paper. The
day-to-day prices don't matter, as they
didn't for my investments in LAC and
PPTA. What matters is the price when
the company generates revenues.
Drilling and permitting are necessary
steps to that objective. 2. I have become
convinced that HyTerra's easiest and
quickest route to the production of
revenues consists in selling their
subsurface hydrogen as it comes out of the
ground, rather than purifying it - hence
the title of this page, making tons of
money by selling impure hydrogen. I
recognize that "impure" is kind of a nasty
word, but I'm using it deliberately to
make a point for investors, both current
and potential. A more marketable
term is the one that HyTerra already uses
on their website - natural hydrogen. I'm seeing the beginning of
a trend to use hydrogen as only part of
the energy requirements of new projects,
either through blending in the pipeline,
mixing at the site, or using
multi-fuel turbines. This
development is not surprising, because
hydrogen purification requires expensive
equipment, dedicated pipelines, and safety
controls. I do not see HyTerra
becoming a competitor for steam-methane
reformation plants any time soon. In
other words, they will not compete for the
markets requiring high levels of purity,
such as chip fabs, until much later in
their development cycle, when they are
producing sufficient revenues to afford
building the $150 million plants required
to produce that level of purity. So
how can they generate
revenues? By selling the
combustible gases in the form that they
come out of their subsurface
deposits. Parts 6 and 7 of this
article are dedicated to showing exactly
how this can be done. In Part 3 of this article,
written in November 2025, I criticized
HyTerra for focusing on purity as a metric
for its progress, which results in
investor disappointments when new test
wells produce lower purity statistics than
the original test well. Purity isn't
the measurement that matters - the volume
of the underground hydrogen deposits is
much more important, but that can't be
measured, much less publicized, until
drilling is underway. However, in writing Part 4, I fell into the purity trap by recommending a plan for an inexpensive proof-of-concept project that requires pure hydrogen. I now withdraw this plan. It is cheap but only a show for investors. A faster road to revenue production is to proceed with the plan, mentioned in Part 5 and detailed below, to place natural hydrogen turbines at or near well sites to produce electricity that can be sold to utility companies and uploaded to the grid. Solar farms have been
doing this profitably for a few years now
and have gained substantial investor
interest. Natural hydrogen would
compete successfully with the solar farms
because the investment in drilling would
be smaller than the cost of thousands of
acres of solar panels, and the cost of
above-ground storage facilities to permit
the increased generation of electricity
during high-demand, high-reimbursement
periods would be far less than the Tesla
Megapack batteries that the solar farms
require for storage. 3. Once HyTerra can
generate revenues by interconnection with
the national grid, and proves that natural
hydrogen can power turbines reliably, the
next area of development would be to
invite data center developers to locate on
the Nemaha Ridge and use natural hydrogen
to run onsite turbines. The plan to
accomplish this is described in Part 7.
1. Develop a plan for
an Upload Processing Center (UPC) that
will interconnect the product of several
nearby wells to the grid. The
UPC will consist of two turbines designed
to use natural hydrogen and other
combustible hydrocarbon gases (i.e, "flare
gases" - mostly methane) in the same form
that they come out of the wells, a
pressurized above-ground storage tank to
hold well output so that the turbines have
a 24/7 supply, and a private network of
pipelines to bring well output to the UPC.
"Several" wells means more
than one, because one well, no matter how
large the deposit, is subject to downtimes
for various reasons, and the UPC must have
a reliable supply. Ideally, three or
four wells should be connected, but the
exact number should be determined based on
the composition of the output gases of
each well, the size of the deposits, and
the distance from the UPC. The above-ground storage
tank will also allow for mixing the
outputs of each well to reduce the
variability of the output from the storage
tank to the turbines. For example,
if the turbines operate at peak capacity
with a mixture of 70% hydrogen and 30%
flare gases, and connected well #1
provides 90% H2 and 10% flare while well
#2 provides 50% H2 and 50% flare, then a
50-50 mix of the two wells' output will
provide the optimal blend. This
mixing can be done automatically with
shutoffs and alerts to the operator if the
desired mix cannot be obtained - if, for
example, well #1 suddenly clogs up. HyTerra will need to
research the handling of inert
gases. If they can be separated and
removed at the well, prior to entering the
private pipeline network, that might be
desirable. Inert gases would likely
be released as exhaust from the turbines,
but it might be better to remove them
prior to combustion so that these gases do
not occupy space in the private pipelines
and above-ground storage tank. Also
requiring research is the question of the
processing needed to prep the output gas
for combustion. Are there impurities
that could lead to environmental
violations in the flue that is released to
the air? If so, these impurities
need to be removed. Jenbacher's
website discusses this issue in the flare
gas section of their website and offers
remedial equipment along with their
turbines for some impurities that may be
encountered. The Jenbacher flare-gas
link is at the end of Part 5. 2. Make contact with
turbine manufacturers to obtain turbines
that will work within the range of
combustible gases available from the
wells. In Part IV, I spoke of
separating hydrogen from flare gases and
firing them in separate turbines, but now
I think it best to combust everything
together as long as a manufacturer can
produce turbines that will handle the
fuel. The best bet seems to be
Jenbacher, as they have customers
currently producing electricity with their
turbines by burning flare gas and a range
of hydrogen/methane mixes. The Jenbacher
hydrogen link at the end of Part 5 shows
the turbines they have for sale, and four
different models can operate with
hydrogen/methane mixes with over 60%
hydrogen content. Other contacts
that would be very interested are Siemens
and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, as they
fully understand the advantages of being
the first to offer a turbine that can
handle subsurface hydrogen without
purification. 3. Once the
production planning has been done and the
wells devoted to uploading identified, a
specialist in obtaining approval of
Department of Energy FERC interconnection
requests should be hired. These
specialists are typically not engineers
but know the process and have the contacts
necessary to obtain approval. The
first UPC will be difficult, as it will be
something completely new to FERC and the
servicing utility. But subsequent
UPC's - HyTerra's 80,000 acres of wells
should support several dozen - will be
practically carbon copies of the first one
and with the right specialists should
obtain approvals quickly and smoothly. 4. In Part V I spoke
of producing electricity only during
periods of peak demand and reimbursement,
but I want to modify that recommendation
in preparation for the sale of natural
hydrogen to data centers. The
HyTerra UPC's should produce electricity
24/7, but have the capacity, thanks to the
above-ground storage system, to increase
production during peak periods.
Showing that HyTerra's system can provide
fuel constantly and reliably is essential
to developing the most lucrative markets. |