[alephnerd]

> I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel

Not everything is about "muh EV".

There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.

H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.

Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.

And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.

[KennyBlanken]

You don't need hydrogen to smelt, refine, recycle, whatever, metal.

You build an electric arc furnace.

[marcosdumay]

Furnaces don't refine metals just by themselves.

Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.

[alephnerd]

You still need iron to be processed in steelmaking. THIS is where the carbon bottleneck in steelmaking exists because pig iron has a high carbon ratio. H2 helps with processing sponge iron which dramatically reduces the carbon ratio within iron ingots used for steelmaking.