How Dead Oil Fields Became Clean Energy Goldmines

Prabhdeep Sekhon, CEO of Eclipse Energy, breaks down the hydrogen rainbow and why it doesn't tell the whole story about cost, carbon intensity, and water use. From farm boy in Canada to petroleum engineer in the Bakken to clean tech founder, Prab explains how his team is using microbes to eat leftover oil in abandoned fields and produce hydrogen without water, turning billion-dollar liabilities into clean energy assets. He walks through their first-of-a-kind California project that hit 40% hydrogen production, the West Texas deployments coming next, and why co-locating data centers in oil fields solves both the molecule transport problem and the cooling water challenge. They discuss hitting $0.50 per kilogram hydrogen by 2028, why natural gas isn't going anywhere, and how oil and gas companies are actually paying them to figure out the future of their abandoned reservoirs.

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Click here to view the episode transcript.

00:00 - Prab's journey from farm to petroleum engineer
03:15 - Skills oil and gas taught him for clean tech
08:26 - Energy pragmatism and decarbonization economics
10:30 - Breaking down the hydrogen rainbow
14:01 - Green hydrogen costs and water intensity
15:53 - Gray and blue hydrogen trade-offs
17:55 - Natural and geological hydrogen potential
21:14 - Eclipse's approach to the problem
24:17 - Eating oil with microbes for hydrogen
26:20 - California first-of-a-kind project results
28:41 - Field operations walkthrough
32:10 - Hydrogen use cases and volumes
36:01 - Cost parity with natural gas
38:07 - Data centers solve the transport problem
43:03 - Path to commercial scale by 2028

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