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Could you please expand on this? My understanding was that hydrogen was produced through electrolosys. What process does one use to go from a hydrocarbon to H2? And does that process produce CO2?

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Unfortunately, the electrolysis of water is not efficient enough to produce enough H2 on an industrial scale at the moment. Most H2 is produced by steam reforming of gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

The first link says that the efficiency is 80%. Seems like that’s enough to scale, especially if electricy prices go negative during peak hours of renewable energy production. So I’m still trying to understand what the roadblocks to this are.

Historically it was the most expensive approach thanks to the high cost of electricity and higher initial capital. Here is a pretty easy to skim paper on the cost breakdown from 1980: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/bk-1980-0116.ch001

The approach is quite competitive technologically and the efficiency is there but the problem is electric cost. Thankfully renewables are bringing that cost down so some areas with very cheap electric could support such manufacturing.

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