Indian American researcher Yashee Mathur, who earned her PhD this year from Stanford Graduate School of Business, is hunting for an energy source that most people don’t know exists naturally underground: hydrogen gas.
While energy companies race to manufacture “green” hydrogen using renewable electricity, she is betting on a novel path to deliver the same clean fuel at a fraction of the cost — if she can find it.
Raised in an energy‑scarce region near Dhanbad, India’s coal capital, Mathur is driven to provide affordable, clean energy for traditionally overlooked communities. “I come from a place where we don’t have access to electricity 24/7,” she says. “The possibility of expanding energy access really resonated with me.”
Mathur’s startup, Hydrify, applies the physics and machine learning skills she developed in conventional subsurface exploration to the task of finding a new target: geologic hydrogen, or hydrogen that forms naturally underground.
She first learned about geologic hydrogen while completing a PhD in energy sciences engineering at Stanford, becoming one of the first researchers to specialize in it.
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After researching geochemistry in Alberta, Canada, and working as a petrophysicist in India, Mathur was recruited to Stanford initially to use machine learning to enhance oil and gas exploration.
When Mathur came to Stanford, her focus expanded to exploring green applications such as carbon capture and storage or geothermal energy. Yet something clicked when she learned about the untouched frontier of geologic hydrogen, according to a university release.
Also known as “white” hydrogen, geologic hydrogen could solve a critical problem: existing hydrogen production is either dirty or expensive. However, subsurface hydrogen is underexplored and has attracted only a tiny slice of total capital for hydrogen exploration. Mathur aims to change that by addressing the main challenge of identifying hidden deposits.
Aided by advisor Tapan Mukerji, codirector of Stanford’s Center for Earth Resources Forecasting, Mathur chose the risk of laying foundations in a wide-open field with a potentially outsize impact. She completed her doctoral thesis on the exploration and commercialization of natural hydrogen and has a patent pending for a novel hydrogen detection methodology.
Mathur’s hypothesis follows the first principles of how hydrogen forms, migrates, and accumulates. Hydrify flips the industry’s dated norm of pursuing rare signs of the gas seeping from the surface.
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Instead, Mathur applies AI to large geological and geophysical datasets to predict where hydrogen is likely to occur underground, rather than where it’s already been found. Mathur’s algorithm ingests maps, soil surface samples, satellite images, geologic models, and other data to pinpoint sites, and does it faster.
Hydrify has already put these models to the test in the field. Once hydrogen is found, the extraction and transport infrastructure can largely borrow from existing oil, gas, or geothermal industries.
The implications for Hydrify stretch far beyond the startup itself. If geologic hydrogen scales, it could become one of the cheapest forms of power on today’s grid, while dramatically reducing emissions from high-carbon industries.
“This could be an affordable, reliable source of energy for regions the traditional grid has left behind,” Mathur says. She personifies that promise: Raised amid energy scarcity, Mathur is now building a company around a resource that could rewrite whom the energy system is built for.
“It could be huge,” she says. “It could also be a geological curiosity. But the potential was too big to ignore.”