The global hydrocarbon industry has spent more than a century building the most extensive energy infrastructure in human history: millions of kilometres of pipeline, hundreds of thousands of drilled wells, vast storage networks, and processing facilities on every inhabited continent. The environmental cost of that construction has been severe and well-documented. This framework does not relitigate that cost — it addresses what happens next. The Presignal Hydrocarbon Infrastructure Transition Framework presents a systematic, company-led, asset-preserving transition pathway that converts existing hydrocarbon infrastructure into a clean energy network without shutting down companies, displacing workforces, or abandoning the physical assets that took a century to build. The transition operates across four parallel tracks: (1) closed-loop geothermal conversion of aging and abandoned wells using existing borehole infrastructure; (2) pipeline network upgrade for hydrogen and biological synthetic gas transmission, addressing hydrogen embrittlement at the materials level with progressive blending; (3) storage facility repurposing for renewable energy storage including compressed air, thermal, and synthetic fuel; and (4) deployment of the Presignal distributed electromagnetic monitoring array across the transitioning network to maintain safety and operational intelligence throughout the conversion period. Five falsifiable predictions are provided. This is a worldwide initiative. The companies that built the hydrocarbon network are the right entities to lead its transformation — they have the infrastructure, the workforce, the regulatory relationships, and the site access that no new entrant can replicate. The path forward does not require starting over. It requires upgrading what exists.
John Carter (Mon,) studied this question.