You may have heard of blue, green or even gray hydrogen, but golden hydrogen? No, that’s not what you throw into your wrapped Ferrari as a fitness guru. It is a new innovation from America, where they put old oil wells to work again, but then to produce hydrogen.
The Texan Cemvita Factory has carefully formulated a cocktail of bacteria and nutrients that they throw into depleted oil wells. The stuff starts working there with the leftover hydrocarbons from the oil that are still present. In July, the company began initial testing and against Wired says a spokesman that it is a great success.
The company aims to make the so-called ‘golden hydrogen’ for about 1 dollar per kilo. On top of that there are the costs of operational management and the margin, of course. If you get hydrogen at the pump here, you pay about 10 euros per kilo in the Netherlands. The production price of 1 dollar per kilo is in any case competitive.
There are still some details to look at. When the bacteria do their job, CO2 is also released. This shouldn’t escape because that’s exactly the stuff you don’t want in the atmosphere. If they get it all right, they could use an estimated 1,000 depleted oil wells in America to make golden hydrogen.
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