Hydrogen wildcatters still need to find their first gusher

THINK of an iconic image of the petroleum age, and you may well be picturing a fountain of crude spouting hundreds of feet into the air, scattering thousands of barrels around a smashed drilling derrick.

From Spindletop – the Texan oilfield whose 1901 blowout kickstarted the oil era and sparked nearby Houston’s transformation into one of America’s biggest cities – to the disaster 109 years later when a gusher on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, such geysers have been synonymous with both the wealth and the damage that hydrocarbons can bestow.

Those who hope to remake the energy industry for a zero-emissions world are still looking for their equivalent. Right now, the absence of a gas gusher is the main factor holding back geological hydrogen, a promising fuel that few had given any thought to 12 months ago.