NEWS FROM THE FUTURE: Gas is the new gold

Futureworld brings you Mindbullets: News from the Future, to spark thinking about leadership, innovation and digital disruption. These fictitious scenarios aim to challenge conventional mindsets and promote understanding of the future context for business. 

Dateline: November 30 2026

When Cemvita first coined the term “gold hydrogen” in 2022, we thought it was a bit of a gimmick, a marketing stunt to differentiate themselves from the “green hydrogen” hype. But as it turns out, mining hydrogen with microbes is a real gold mine.

In theory, it makes perfect sense. Fossil fuels are simply solar energy converted into hydrocarbons by organisms — plants, animals and microbes — and stored underground. What better way to recover that energy than to use organic agents to release clean hydrogen gas directly from the earth?

But it has taken Cemvita four years to go from simple lab and field tests to commercialisation of their process. First they had to optimise their genetically modified bacterial “soup”, which is mercifully easy to cultivate in large volumes. Then they had to perfect their patented method of injecting the microbes into old oil wells, where they feed on hydrocarbons and belch out gas. A critical factor in the extraction process was separating the hydrogen from other gasses, like methane and carbon dioxide, which are best left in the ground.

Hydrogen gas has the advantage of being clean and non-polluting, and can be burned directly as fuel or used in fuel cells to generate electricity. Because it burns at much higher temperatures than natural gas, it’s ideal for heavy industry, like making steel. And in both cases the only exhaust product is water vapour.

But until now, hydrogen had to be manufactured from chemical feedstocks or electrically extracted from water, making it costly to produce at scale. The ability to mine hydrogen from abandoned oil wells, making use of sunk costs and stranded assets, has dramatically changed the game. Now hydrogen gas can be produced in reliable quantities, at economical rates — to the delight of the oil companies.

And the microbes that make it possible are worth their weight in gold!

• First published on Mindbullets December 1 2022

Deep drilling delivers the power

It’s back to baseload as geothermal energy comes on stream

Dateline: March 25 2027

There’s almost infinite heat energy below the planet’s surface. We’ve seen enough pictures of molten lava spewing out of volcanoes to appreciate the power that heat can generate, and countries such as Iceland have been converting geothermal energy into electricity for ages. It’s the ultimate form of clean, green energy, but only available in special places in the world.

Until now. Quaise Energy has developed a method of drilling deep enough to unlock that energy almost anywhere on Earth. Using a combination of traditional drilling and plasma boring to vaporise the bedrock, the deepest boreholes in the world are delivering superheated water to a 100MW power plant in the US. The next step is to replicate this success at other locations.

Once the Quaise technology has been proved beyond doubt, thousands of coal-fired power stations that faced being shut down because of climate concern can simply switch to clean geothermal energy to run their turbines, and never burn a single lump of coal again. That would make them cheaper to run than solar or wind power plants, with no need for huge tracts of land covered in panels or giant turbines. There’s also no need for batteries or storage solutions, as the geothermal energy source is constantly available.

Retrofitting existing fossil fuel power plants has another advantage, as they are already connected to the grid. Besides having a huge effect on carbon emissions, the new borehole technology will save billions on new infrastructure, while threatening to disrupt not only coal and gas, but alternative energy industries such as solar, batteries and carbon-capture systems. And nuclear power is just too costly.

It’s back to baseload and centralised, monolithic power utilities. Micro grids and distributed generation projects will be viable only for remote locations, and energy abundance will drive a new economic boom.

• First published on March 24 2022

• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.