Yeah, burning oil (with microbes this time) to make hydrogen while wasting the rest of the energy in the oil (to sustain microbes) while generating the same emissions as oil (but using microbes instead of burning it in engines) so that when the hydrogen (which has less energy than oil because microbes) can be used without harmful emissions in the cityscape (but overall double the emissions of hydrocarbons per mile because microbes).
It doesn't sound good when you put it like that, so you call it gold instead, supplanting the """"actual"""" meaning of "gold hydrogen" which is emissionless hydrogen pockets underground. Fuck the colour system though, it's ridiculous obfuscation. This is just plain old "hydrogen we made by wasting half the energy from oil (using microbes)".
PS. For a little substantiation to those "less energy" claims, dihydrogen has a heat of combustion of ~290 kJ/mol. Methane has 890 kJ/mol, and ideally decomposes into two hydrogen molecules at 580 kJ/mol. Add in the fact that such a reaction literally cannot exist and whatever reaction the microbes do, they probably do to gain energy as they release the carbon, we can expect a lower ratio of hydrogen molecules to methane in. With longer hydrocarbons, the super ideal ratio drops, as well as with switching to more complex hydrocarbons, so we're talking hyper idealised scenario here. This is overall a pretty bad idea, probably not far from SMR in efficiency, if not worse.
EDIT: I've gone and balanced it out, assuming that the microbes use water to pull the oxygen from (as they do with extreme likelihood), the ideal reaction is CH₄ + 2 H₂O → CO₂ + 4 H₂ with an enthalpy of 252.8 kJ/mol. That's more endothermic than SMR, which sits at 206 kJ/mol. Both are very strongly endothermic. _It would, genuinely be way more efficient to just burn natural gas or your output hydrogen to make ""grey"" hydrogen._ This is garbage and results in higher emissions than existing, widespread technology accounting for ~78% of global hydrogen production. What the hell! Not to mention that both of these are a horrible idea beacuse it's genuinely more environmentally friendly to just burn natural gas. This causes more emissions in every case than just natural gas.