Transocean is looking for Houston innovators to help them on their decarbonization journey. Photo via Transocean

A major energy corporation has put its feelers out for Houston innovators solving for challenges within the decarbonization of offshore drilling operations.

Transocean, a Switzerland-based offshore energy leader with its United States headquarters in Houston, kicked off its Transocean Open Innovation Challenge this fall. The original deadline has been extended to December 15, and the program is in partnership with the Ion. The submission page is available online.

"Ion is proud to partner with Transocean, a global leader in offshore drilling, to launch this exciting challenge that invites startup companies, academics and entrepreneurs to contribute their innovative ideas with the potential for pilot opportunities and deep-dive engagements with Transocean in the future," reads a statement from the Ion. "Finalists will have the opportunity to pitch their ideas in front of a live audience, and the winning team may be awarded a pilot project with Transocean, offering a real-world testing ground for your innovative solutions."

Finalist selection will be hosted digitally in February, and the demo day and winner announcement will be in March at the Ion. The winner will have the potential opportunity to run a field trial with Transocean,

According to Transocean, the objections for the program are:

  • To engage as a customer to identify innovative technologies that allow us to physically reduce the carbon footprint of our offshore well construction operations
  • To explore novel and proven concepts that are ready or nearly ready to pilot
  • To discover providers, technology and solutions that are outside our core business, oil and gas exploration and drilling

For more information, please contact Ragen Doyle, corporate engagement Officer, at rdoyle@ionhouston.com.

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Gold H2 harvests clean hydrogen from depleted California reservoirs in first field trial

breakthrough trial

Houston climatech company Gold H2 completed its first field trial that demonstrates subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, which leverages microbiology and existing infrastructure to produce clean hydrogen.

Gold H2 is a spinoff of another Houston biotech company, Cemvita.

“When we compare our tech to the rest of the stack, I think we blow the competition out of the water," Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon, CEO of Gold H2 Sekhon previously told Energy Capital.

The project represented the first-of-its-kind application of Gold H2’s proprietary biotechnology, which generates hydrogen from depleted oil reservoirs, eliminating the need for new drilling, electrolysis or energy-intensive surface facilities. The Woodlands-based ChampionX LLC served as the oilfield services provider, and the trial was conducted in an oilfield in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

According to the company, Gold H2’s technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

“This field trial is tangible proof. We’ve taken a climate liability and turned it into a scalable, low-cost hydrogen solution,” Sekhon said in a news release. “It’s a new blueprint for decarbonization, built for speed, affordability, and global impact.”

Highlights of the trial include:

  • First-ever demonstration of biologically stimulated hydrogen generation at commercial field scale with unprecedented results of 40 percent H2 in the gas stream.
  • Demonstrated how end-of-life oilfield liabilities can be repurposed into hydrogen-producing assets.
  • The trial achieved 400,000 ppm of hydrogen in produced gases, which, according to the company,y is an “unprecedented concentration for a huff-and-puff style operation and a strong indicator of just how robust the process can perform under real-world conditions.”
  • The field trial marked readiness for commercial deployment with targeted hydrogen production costs below $0.50/kg.

“This breakthrough isn’t just a step forward, it’s a leap toward climate impact at scale,” Jillian Evanko, CEO and president at Chart Industries Inc., Gold H2 investor and advisor, added in the release. “By turning depleted oil fields into clean hydrogen generators, Gold H2 has provided a roadmap to produce low-cost, low-carbon energy using the very infrastructure that powered the last century. This changes the game for how the world can decarbonize heavy industry, power grids, and economies, faster and more affordably than we ever thought possible.”

Rice University spinout lands $500K NSF grant to boost chip sustainability

cooler computing

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

The team says it will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. According to a release from Rice, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

The technology has major implications for the future of computing with AI sustainably.

“With the huge scale of investment in new computing infrastructure, the problem of managing the heat produced by these GPUs and semiconductors has grown exponentially. We’re excited to use this award to further our material to meet the needs of existing and emerging industry partners and unlock a new era of computing,” HEXAspec co-founder Tianshu Zhai said in the release.

HEXAspec was founded by Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program. A third co-founder, Jing Zhang, also worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at Rice, according to HEXAspec's website.

The HEXASpec team won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024. More recently, it also won this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track, taking home $25,000.

"The grant from the NSF is a game-changer, accelerating the path to market for this transformative technology," Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie, added in the release.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.