Energy

Oil-eating microbes excrete the world's cheapest "clean" hydrogen

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Cemvita says its oil-eating, hydrogen-excreting microbes can turn depleted oil wells into clean hydrogen production facilities
Cemvita
Cemvita says its oil-eating, hydrogen-excreting microbes can turn depleted oil wells into clean hydrogen production facilities
Cemvita
Microbes, nutrients and inhibitors, where necessary, will be pumped down into depleted oil wells. Hydrogen will bubble out, to be captured and sold, and carbon dioxide will be separated out for sequestration.
Cemvita
These are not the actual microbes that went down the well. They're not even the same type of microbes. But they are microbes, and sometimes that's all that matters.
Cemvita
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Texan company Cemvita is promising clean hydrogen at less than US$1/kg, after testing a fascinating new technique in the lab and the field. The idea is to pump specially developed microbes into depleted oil wells, where they'll eat oil and excrete hydrogen.

Humans have been harnessing tiny single-celled and multicellular organisms to perform work for much longer than we've known what they were. The earliest beers known to history were brewed some 13,000 years ago, making systematic use of a microscopic fungus called yeast, and its habit of eating sugars and starches and excreting carbon dioxide and ethanol. That's about 7,000 years before recorded history was known to history.

Microbes can be incredibly hard workers – Louis Pasteur once described yeast's work on glucose as the equivalent of a 200-pound person chopping two million pounds of wood in two days. But their ability to party is critical as well; in two days under the right conditions, 100 yeast cells can multiply into 400 billion.

Now that humans are beginning to get a handle on genetic engineering, a huge range of other possibilities are opening up. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, it's becoming easier than ever before for scientists to identify which bits of the genetic code are responsible for a microbe's desirable behaviors, and repeat those sections to juice these little creatures up for higher and higher performance.

One company engaged in such work is Cemvita, which is concentrating at present on microbes that feast on hydrocarbons – in particular, crude oil – and ferment them, excreting hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, it's not accurate to describe this release as a belch or a fart – believe me, nothing would make me happier, but in this case the gases simply bubble out through the cell walls without any celebratory audio.

This ties in beautifully with the way oil wells work; they start out at maximum production when they're first tapped, sometimes even squirting out of the earth under pressure. But then things gradually dwindle until it costs more in energy to push or pull the remaining oil out than you can sell it for. So there's plenty of oil left in depleted wells, as well as some handy infrastructure in place at each project. Cemvita wants to turn all these wells into biological hydrogen farms.

Microbes, nutrients and inhibitors, where necessary, will be pumped down into depleted oil wells. Hydrogen will bubble out, to be captured and sold, and carbon dioxide will be separated out for sequestration.
Cemvita

So, it presumably stops up the top of the well, before pumping a heap of specially bred microbes down into its murky depths in a stream of recycled water. The microbes go to work, feasting, excreting and multiplying, and Cemvita captures the gases as they exit the top of the well, separating them into hydrogen for processing and sale, and carbon dioxide for sequestration. The company is able to send nutrients and inhibitors down into the well to keep things under control and moving in the right direction.

Cemvita started out in the lab, modifying the micro-organisms genetically, but trying not to go far enough to get them classified as genetically modified.

"We are actively engaging with regulatory agencies (such as EPA) regarding the application of genetically engineered microbes," reads the company's website. "In some cases, since we are only enhancing the natural ability of microorganisms (for example by increasing the copy number of genes that already exist), the microbes are not considered genetically-modified. Regulatory assessment is included as a deliverable for our projects."

The team set its sights on the economic target of hydrogen production at less than US$1/kg, and its oil-munching microbes quickly overshot their performance targets, becoming six and a half times better at their job than Cemvita projected they'd need to be.

From there, it was time to try them out in an actual oil well. Cemvita partnered with an oil production company operating in the Permian basin in West Texas, and stuck a small test load of microbes down into a depleted well. The results: hydrogen levels three times higher than the baseline.

“In a very short time frame," said Zach Broussard, Director of Gold H2 at Cemvita, in a press release, "we moved our microbes from the lab to the field. The hydrogen production in this trial exceeded our expectations. As we continue to use hydrogen producing microbes downhole, we anticipate we can achieve rates that will translate to hydrogen production at $1/kg or less.”

These are not the actual microbes that went down the well. They're not even the same type of microbes. But they are microbes, and sometimes that's all that matters.
Cemvita

Thus, an oil company's stranded asset becomes an extremely low-effort source of hydrogen – and a very, very cheap one. At less than a dollar a kilogram (2.2 lb) – before subsidies – this could represent some of the world's cheapest H2. And there'll be no lack of feedstock; Cemvita points out that in order to meet the Paris climate goals, some 60% of the world's known oil reserves will need to stay in the ground.

So what are the risks? Well, they're mainly regulatory. Firstly, the company will need to satisfy regulators that its microbes are safe for use, and won't cause unintended environmental consequences.

Secondly, you may have noticed Cemvita can't call its product "green" hydrogen, presumably due to the carbon dioxide that's released as part of the process. Instead, it's calling it "gold" hydrogen, and relying on carbon capture and storage to ensure that its hydrogen is "carbon neutral." This may limit sales as regulations tighten in the long run.

Thirdly, the business model does give us some cause for concern there. Cemvita needs old oil wells to advance its plan, so where it can't buy these wells outright, it'll have to license the technology to, or partner with oil companies to put its microbes to work. The oil companies must be thrilled about the idea – there'd be enough dollar signs spinning in their eyeballs from these long-written-off assets to knock their ten-gallon hats off.

But for this to be good news for the planet, we'll need to trust these oil companies to dutifully capture and permanently store all the carbon dioxide that comes out of their wells. Either that, or we'll need to trust environmental regulators – in Texas, no less, to begin with – to hold these oil companies to their promises. I'm not feeling a ton of trust in my heart of hearts, but hey, that's just me.

Either way, it's a fascinating technology that does seem like it's going to have plenty of money behind it, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Check out a short video below.

Source: Cemvita via Recharge

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18 comments
Daveb
Hmmm what could possibly go wrong…so, zero chance that the new microbe will spread to all the world’s active oil wells and digest the lot?
David F
@Daveb. LOL. Maybe it's a green activists' plot to rid the world of all oil. ;-)
BeeCurious
This is an interesting idea but I think the article’s author is rightly sceptical, given the involvement of oil companies in texas no less. I wonder if microbes could be used to capture the co2 in the same way.
CarolynFarstrider
The main risk is not ‘regulatory’. It is an actual risk associated with the use of technology that is not properly understood. Yes, three times the H2 yield expected…. But then the science is inaccurate. And in the hands of oil companies??? As the inventor of the chain saw carried by a drone said ‘ What could possibly go wrong?’.
Robt
I’m not sure that I understand the comments, and I include those within the article, regarding oil companies.
Like any corporation, they look for ways to make money, and this would provide them with a viable and totally unexpected stream.
Are you saying that they are so stupid that they’d gamble throwing all of that that away for some unstated nefarious reason?
mark34
It will difficult to even guess what abilities or"superpowers' these microbes will have when the inevitable random mutations occur
dominic
Except that all the hydrogen escaping in the atmosphere will accelerate global warming, as the radicals combining with CO² and methane are combining more easily with hydrogen molecules.

"When hydrogen is present, however, those hydroxyl radicals react with the hydrogen instead. There are fewer cleanup agents to go around, so there's a direct rise in methane concentrations, and the methane stays in the atmosphere longer.

What's more, the presence of hydrogen increases the concentration of both tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapor, boosting a "radiative forcing" effect that also pushes temperatures higher. "

https://newatlas.com/environment/hydrogen-greenhouse-gas/
MichaelStevensonc2504af27a7c4b68
People have obviously already commented on the absurd risks of this idea below, but if you want to be quite thoroughly frightened by this idea, read John Varley's Slow Apocalypse. There are any of the number of SF novels based on the idea.
K2panman
From the article: “The results: hydrogen levels three times higher than the baseline.” Am I reading this correctly? Three times higher than doing nothing to the well - ie 3x more H2 than what is naturally seeping out of the hole? That sounds like a failed experiment, but the article makes it sound like a resounding success.
TechGazer
Step 2: develop a phage to shut the microbes down if (when) an unexpected problem occurs. Deepwater Horizon? "Oh, if a problem occurs, we'll just plug it."

Maybe the regulatory agencies could require step 2 to be done _before_ approving wide-spread deployment of step 1.