Edit: Thanks for all the answers and the effort to answer this trendy “sciency” question.
In: 3
There are three “colors” of hydrogen. First, almost all hydrogen is made by cracking natural gas(methane) into hydrogen and CO2. You can in theory do it by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen but that takes *a lot* more energy and you end up using more energy than you can possibly get back
Grey hydrogen just cracks the methane and releases the CO2 into the air. Blue hydrogen cracks the methane and uses carbon capture to store the CO2 it produces. Green hydrogen uses renewable energy or low carbon sources to power electrolysis of water so there’s no CO2 created
In the end though, Green Hydrogen is about 5x as expensive as Grey/Blue due to the high energy cost of electrolysis, and even if today you power it off of solar panels or wind turbines you could have instead used those producers to offset a carbon producing power plant in the main grid
Hydrogen was thought to be the next great car fuel but then battery technology improved significantly and is continuing while Hydrogen never ended up building out its infrastructure. The end use case for hydrogen right now seems to be nothing, even Toyota has shifted away from it and is now pursuing electric vehicles, they were the last major hold out and it has put them far behind
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