Chip if it was prioritised to make hydrogen do what we know it can, it would happen. The fossil fuels industry has completely nobbled all research on it to date, as far as I can see. They've done it by taking ownership of research claiming it to be to support hydrogen but actually what they have done is completely trash it, by always associating it and comparing it with fossil fuels, which obviously they were incentivised to promote. I don't know if they are even aware of doing that, but that is what appears to have happened. Some things have come on in huge leaps and bounds, like electrolysers, fuel cells not far behind, but a key technology - pumping, appears to have been left out. Pumping is all that is needed to liquefy it.
Pump it hard enough, it liquefies, like any gas. This would for sure be required for aeroplanes. Once you have it liquified, it is much easier to handle, and it has 2.5 to three times the energy capacity of the same weight of the nearest fossil fuel, so no problem on power to weight ratio. Actually if used on the example I quoted earlier, concorde, it used to be range limited to about from London to New York, because of its huge appetite for fuel, but this could theoretically be extended x2.5 with the use of hydrogen as fuel, so it might get from London to Australia. For Jumbos this would be a definite, no more need to stop in China or anywhere en-route.
In fuel cell installations, open the tank containing it liqified to another tank at much lower pressure, it turns back to gas that can be regulated back down to fuel cell consumption pressure, with some thermal management needed, due to temp reduction on decompression and the opposite on compression, but it is all doable. It is very conspicuous how retarded this is, neglected by both Chinese and Western development research.
China offers domestic sized hydrogen pumps on Alibaba that can pump to the 700 bar needed for HEVs, but... the catch is they are air driven, so you need an industrial air compressor at the side, to drive it!
Yet more waste of power oviously., and air compressors are noisy things to have in a domestic environment.
I bet the reason for that is it will have been argued by fossil fuel funded researchers this is needed to be safe, so as not to have electric motors next to pumping enclosures - ridiculous since there are such things as "Safe" motors that can operate in fossil fuel explosive environments.
There was research started around 2008 to develop solid state hydrogen pumping, which had been demonstrated to be about twice as efficient as mechanical pumping, and silent, compared with direct driven mechanical pumps.
but no sign of where it went, just seems to have dropped into a void.
So for now domestic scale installations are going to be unnecessarily saddled with an almost prohibitive amount of extra noisy, very inefficient pumping hardware, in order to just produce HEV dispensable hydrogen.
It is possible to buy a complete hydrogen station with all pumps built in, but looking at them, they are the size of a small builiding, crammed full of complex hardware and a mass of piping, valves and cables. The pump is an obvious huge, several hp induction motor, belt-driving an even bigger compressor rotor. These things are aimed at 100KW and greater installations, so would probably be good for airports etc, but crazy for domestic communities.
Just means things will not scale up so rapidly, but it will happen all the same, because it has to.
The bio-fuels you mentioned can remove a small amount ot the load from fossil fuels, but it could never replace it, and if it did, this would be a different kind of burden on the energy of Earth, maybe even worse, we would be incentivised to destroy things just to produce the fuel. We've seen all that before I think :)
After it is sorted out, the potential volumes of hydrogen that would be produced by all domestic and community installations would be huge, unlimited, because to scale up, all that is needed is to plow some of the revenue from previous sales of fuel into the installation.
We would do that it we were appropriate incetivised, as we will be by solar indexed stimulus, which I explained elsewhere else will be required, just to rescue the value of money.
This is the only way we will ever replace fossil fuels, it seems to me.
It will happen, because it has to.
