Interestingly enough, just last week I saw a talk given by Jack Szostak (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_W._Szostak) who researches, and has actually constructed, proto-life forms. Before a cell needs to worry about an energy source, it needs to worry about sequestering genetic material within a membrane, growing and dividing. Dr. Szostak has demonstrated very simple solutions to these problems for early life. An assumption of his work is that activated nucleotides (the energy source) are available in the environment and can freely cross the membrane.
Dr. Lane does not seem to be arguing that there wasn't a "primordial soup" but that it was concentrated in and around these vents. One problem with this idea is that early cells likely needed temperature fluctuations to replicate their genetic material (like a primordial pcr, except with spontaneous nucleotide assembly on the template instead of having a polymerase), since they would have lacked the machinery to do so.