By Amara Osei

Eclipse generated hydrogen for 30 consecutive days at a West Texas oil field and targets a commercial project within two to three years, CEO Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon said. The Houston startup completed the month-long pilot at a field nearing the end of its commercial life, then stopped the test.

Eclipse injects microbes into end-of-life wells; the organisms consume residual oil and release hydrogen gas. Existing wells and surface facilities bring the gas to the surface.

Eclipse CEO Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon previously worked in the oil and gas industry. He said: “When you produce these oil fields, you’re lucky if you produce 40% of the oil. There’s still a tremendous amount of hydrocarbon in the ground; it’s just not economic to produce. If there’s hydrocarbon, that also inherently means there’s also hydrogen.”

Eclipse estimates comparable old-field projects could produce hydrogen for 10 to 20 years. The company says the resulting cost could support baseload power (continuous grid electricity supply). The report says hydrogen emits only water vapor when burned and could reduce emissions in steel production and shipping.

What did the West Texas pilot establish?

Eclipse built a large database of microbes found in oil fields and developed its own mixture for depleted reservoirs. After injection, the microbes consume remaining oil and release hydrogen, which moves through the reservoir because the molecule is lightweight.

Unlike geologic hydrogen (hydrogen trapped in underground reservoirs), Eclipse’s approach requires no expensive exploration because operators already know where residual hydrocarbons sit. The process also releases carbon dioxide, Eclipse said. The company says some emissions remain underground and that carbon capture (retention of released carbon dioxide emissions) can contain others.

In the Texas pilot, hydrogen injected into one well traveled to a second well roughly 600 feet away, Eclipse reported. The company also ran a smaller California pilot in the prior year. Eclipse said the Texas test demonstrated the process under more challenging geological and chemical conditions.

Sekhon said fields already contain billions of dollars in deployed wells, surface facilities and rights-of-way. Reusing that infrastructure reduces project deployment time and production cost, according to the company.

A review of competing hydrogen routes identifies three constraints for scale-up:

• Green hydrogen uses renewable electricity to split water, a method the report describes as expensive and water-intensive.
• Natural-gas hydrogen remains expensive to produce when operators must capture carbon emissions.
• Geologic hydrogen targets reservoirs of trapped hydrogen but has not yet demonstrated commercial viability.

Geoffrey Ellis, who studied geologic hydrogen at the U.S. Geological Survey and now teaches at Stanford, said the technology still requires optimization for commercial use. He described the resource potential as enormous and said the key test was whether operators could convert unrecoverable hydrocarbons economically.

Can old wells produce hydrogen economically?

Wood, an independent energy consulting group, analyzed Eclipse’s projected scale-up. The analysis found that commercial-scale hydrogen from Eclipse could cost as low as 56 cents per kilogram, potentially the cheapest production route.

The report says hydrogen made from natural gas is commonly used to make fertilizer, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Eclipse’s low-cost output could serve fertilizer production and, at broader scale, electricity generation.

For oil and gas operators, the process can transform a field scheduled for plugging from a closure cost into a revenue source. It can extend productive life and defer plugging costs, according to Weatherford’s assessment.

Weatherford, the oil-field services company, partnered on the Texas project. Its executive vice president and chief commercial officer, Depinder Sandhu, said: “If we get the economics, execution model and policy right, this stops being a pilot story and becomes a way to manage end-of-life assets across the industry.”

The process works best with wells that have not yet been plugged, Sandhu said. Scaling it across the industry requires a clear regulatory path for operators to switch from planned abandonment to hydrogen production.

Who might buy the output?

Eclipse is forming partnerships with data-center developers that want to build beside a power source, Sekhon said. The company also evaluates fuel for heavy-duty transportation, industrial heat, fertilizer feedstock (raw material for fertilizer and chemicals) and other chemicals.

Sekhon set a two-to-three-year goal for a commercial project. Eclipse must now optimize the process for commercial scale, establish a regulatory route for wells awaiting plugging, and develop demand from data centers and industrial users.