Going all in on hydrogen is a bit of a loosely defined notion. Mostly it boils down to dumping lots of money on the table for whomever wants to grab it and creating a few photo opportunities for politicians parroting whatever their sponsors want them to parrot. And as it turns out the fossil fuel industry seems to want to claim most of that.
Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way.
So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around.
Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive.
And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy.
There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.
I liked GraphViz a lot, but eventually got frustrated with its layout algorithms and default look and feel. I would switch to Mermaid wholesale if it could render SVGs without requiring a browser engine.
Our World In Data has a plot of conditional life expectancy throughout recent history. It's one of my favourite plots of all time not because it's important, but informative and intuitive.
I have worked in card payment industry. We would be getting products from China with added boards to beam credit card information. This wasn't state-sponsored attack. Devices were modified while on production line (most likely by bribed employees) as once they were closed they would have anti-tampering mechanism activated so that later it would not be possible to open the device without setting the tamper flag.
Once this was noticed we started weighing the terminals because we could not open the devices (once opened they become useless).
They have learned of this so they started scraping non-essential plastic from inside the device to offset the weight of the added board.
We have ended up measuring angular momentum on a special fixture. There are very expensive laboratory tables to measure angular momentum. I have created a fixture where the device could be placed in two separate positions. The theory is that if the weight and all possible angular momentums match then the devices have to be identical. We could not measure all possible angular momentums but it was possible to measure one or two that would not be known to the attacker.
There's a whole fillet / chamfer library using masks and such, but I've found that you can go a looong way with just basic shapes that start out chamfered/filleted, and unioning and differencing them.
Shameless plug: I created an online Graphviz/dot editor which is powered by a language server that provides auto completion and refactorings. It uses a WASM version of Graphviz to render the graph. You can try it out here:
Anyone thinking of installing Firefox should check out the Multi-Account Containers addon. I'm pretty sure such functionality doesn't exist for Chrome, and it makes it possible to isolate different sites and logins from each other. It's one of the best reasons to switch to Firefox, in my opinion.
Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way.
So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around.
Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive.
And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy.
There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.