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Uh hydrogen is an industrial chemical used by the millions of tonnes per year. Texas has a couple hundred miles worth of hydrogen pipelines in the petro industrial complex that runs from Texas City east into Louisiana. Hydrogen is critical to cracking petroleum products and taking the sulfur out of gasoline and diesel. Currently that hydrogen is made cracking methane with high temp and pressure steam.

Point is hydrogen is produced , stored , transported and used every day in massive amounts. It’s fudd lore that it leaks out of everything, aluminum lined carbon fiber vessels are impervious to H2 and aluminium doesn’t get brittle like iron alloys. Hannah solved the hydrogen issues 30 years ago.

Any process that lowers the cost of hydrogen production is a boom for the chemicals and petrochemicals industry. Every large electrical generator as in gas turbine and nuclear powered size are cooled with hydrogen gas as it’s the most efficient coolant gas. Think about that fact. Large spinning metal mass bathed in hydrogen if humans had not mastered its control and isolation we wouldn’t use it right next to nuclear reactors with multiple tonnes of hot spinning mass totally dependent on its containment ,flow and cooling.

The barrier to electrolysis cost is the catalysts replacing iridium with a nano metal oxide would break the $200 per kg threshold. At those costs your cost per kg is all dependent on the cost of the electrons driving the electrolysis. You can then run the machines intermittently not 24/7 this allows the whole equation to shift from demand based to supply based electricity. All of a sudden when you have like yesterday at 1145 am in Texas $4.65 per megawatt hour electricity for sale that’s 4/10s of a cent per kWh it takes 52 kWh to make a Kg of H2 at that cost its 24 cents per kg of H2 even with zero costs methane you couldn’t get to that price with steam methane reforming.

As a point there is the same energy in a Kg of H2 as in 1 US gallon of gasoline. To make synthetic fuel via FT using H2 and CO2 you need 3:1 H2 to CO2 the overall process is 33% efficient so you end up consuming 3 kg of H2 to yield one gallon of synthetic fuel.

At $5 per MWh its 78 cents for 3 Kg of H2 with $200 in capex per kg per hour in electrolysis costs over the 30,000 hour lifespan of the unit its fractions of a cent per kg in capex the bulk cost is the electrons.

Better would be to go to methanol which needs 2:1 H2 to CO2 for synthesis then use zeolite Z5 Exxon catalysts to go to gasoline and propane in a 70/30 ratio you save one Kg of H2 per gallon that way or just use the methanol as is its over 100 octane Indy cars and dragster used it for decades before moving to ethanol.

The critical breakthrough is the catalysts which these guys just broke that barrier. Electrons are cheap when the wind blows and the Sun shines sub $5 per MWh from either in real world ERCOT market the largest independent grid in North America.

Even $10 per MWh would only be $1.56 for FT and $1.04 for MTG or methanol direct. Canadian or S.Korean nukes can put out $18 MWh to the plant gate at 90% uptime per year. Again once you have economical catalysts hydrogen based chemicals and synthetics become cheaper than digging it out of the middle east and shipping it half way around a planet. Plus you now have unlimited supplies due to only needed water and not even fresh water plus CO2 from the air. Biomass is nothing but air CO2 turned into a solid that you literally can pick up off the ground all over the planet and from the oceans via seaweed.

The USA has over 1 billion tonnes of waste biomass per year with cheap catalysts and intermittent but cheap electrons or 24/7 nuke electrons 90% of that can be turned into fuels via FT or MTG

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/08/20180812-pbtl.html

The great enabler is lowering the catalyst costs.