From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://www.science.org/content/article/metal-driven-chemical-reaction-deep-sea-may-explain-origin-life

The current thinking is that life evolved within a couple hundred
million years of the earth cooling enough to have liquid water.
Hydrothermal activity in the oceans would have been much more common
than it is today. This article is about a researcher who is claiming
that hydrothermal vent regions had all the materials needed to sustain nucleotide triphosphate production. He is proposing that the reactions
needed were catalyzed by metal granules that form around the
hydrothermal vents. He thinks that early life metabolism may have been working with the mineral catalysts around the hydrothermal vents. He is likely talking about a time before cellular life arose. It would have
been a time when molecular self replicators would have existed in clay
matrix or some other semi-contained space around hydrothermal vents.
Hydrogen flowing from the vents would have been the primary energy
source (electron donor) for the self replicators, and they would have
been evolving a metabolism to help them replicate. He thinks that this
early metabolism would have been preserved as the self replicators
replaced the mineral catalysts with organic catylysts and formed cells
with membranes. Nucleotide triphosphates are used as energy transfer molecules in extant lifeforms, and they would have been needed to create
RNA polymers that would make the RNA world possible. Nucleotide
metabolism may have evolved very early in the evolution of life when
mineral catalysts were being utilized by the first molecular self
replicators.

Ron Okiomto

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