Hydrogen is an element that, in addition to being super abundant throughout the known universe,

is also widely available

in our own solar system, including here on Earth. Stars like the Sun are made of plasma hydrogen,

while much of the hydrogen planet side, on Earth-like rocky planets anyway, are merged into

compounds with other elements, making things like methane and

simple sugars and water, which is H2O, the H in that formula being hydrogen.

Considering this near ubiquity then, it's fortunate that hydrogen can also be useful for

energy generation purposes.

Fossil fuels like gas and oil and coal are potent for this purpose, but also come with

a slew of downsides, including their carbon emissions and the pollution that results from

burning oil and coal in particular.

But they're also geopolitically fraught because these resources are only found in suitable abundance

in certain locations around the world. And much of the modern economy, including which nations

are wealthy and which are less so, comes down to where fossil fuels were discovered, when, and who

was in the position to exploit these resources, at what scale at pivotal moments in history?

Ultra abundant resources like hydrogen then are interesting because of what they are,

but also because they present the potential to separate energy production and natural resource

distribution. We've all got plenty of hydrogen to work with, theoretically

at least, so random geologic chance and historical resource grabs would probably influence

a hydrogen-driven economy significantly less than they've influenced our current, primarily fossil-fuel-driven

economy.

The tricky part of making such a switch is that we've built the modern world around primarily

...