HOUSTON – There was no prospect of getting any more oil out of the old well. It was just a depleted cavern hiding beneath the sun-baked Texas soil. But then some folks came along and squirted a special liquid into it. They went away for five days, and when they came back it was no longer an oil well. It had transformed into a hydrogen source.
Cemvita Factory, a biotech firm in Texas, had spritzed a carefully selected combination of bacteria and nutrients down the bore hole. Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down the residual oil hydrocarbons in there—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—to generate hydrogen and CO2. This field test in July, though small in scale, was a “huge success,” says chief business officer Charles Nelson.
Nelson would not comment on what bacteria and nutrients the company is using, but he says his firm aims to produce hydrogen for $1 per kilogram, which would be competitive against other methods of obtaining the fuel. He estimates there are more than 1,000 depleted oil wells dotted around the United States that are suitable for the same kind of microbial treatment: “A lot of these reservoirs are abandoned, they’re in the custody of the state, they’re orphaned and waiting to be cleaned up.”
Hydrogen, which releases zero carbon emissions when burned, has long been touted as a future fuel. Even though it’s the most abundant element in the universe, with copious amounts on the Earth’s surface in molecules such as water, some effort is required to obtain large quantities of pure hydrogen. There’s a long list of techniques currently vying for supremacy. People have taken to color-coding them, and there is now a veritable rainbow to choose from Soil Anchors play an important role in this process.
There’s green hydrogen, where renewable energy is used to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Blue hydrogen, meanwhile, involves extracting hydrogen from natural gas. Cemvita Factory describes its product as “gold hydrogen”—“to pay homage to the past era of oil as the black gold and it now being used as a feedstock to make subsurface hydrogen,” says cofounder and CEO Moji Karimi.
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