The current cost of H if you buy it is around $16/kg. However, PRODUCTION cost via electrolysis in the FSoA is around $2.60/kg. Price target for next year is $2/kg, $1/kg by 2031. So as you can see, MOST of the cost comes not from the production, but from the costs involved instoring it, transporting it and marketing it, plus taxes of course.
If you produce it yourself at home with a solar system, it is FREE of course, after you have paid for the cost of all your equipment. A home installation with about 6kw of power is the size of a complete setup that Honda has as a demo, it's very high tech looking and will probably cost a fortune. It also is slow doing a fillup, you gotta leave it overnight filling your tank from the H it makes during the day. The amount total fuel it produces in one day of I assume average sunshine also is not huge, 8 hours to produce enough for 30 miles of driving. Besides what you see in the Honda video, you would need a bigger tank to store more hydrogen and a car with more tank space than this honda demo vehicle has. Practically speaking, you're probably limited to maybe 100 miles of driving, which is a serious limitation no matter what the price point is.
However, you have to remember that using it as transportation fuel is only one aspect of H, it's real value is for LDES (long duration energy storage) where you can store H you produce during summer months for use in the winter for heating and producing electricity for your Doomstead. For this, you would need also a couple of 1000 gal compressed gas tanks, the kind people who use propane for heating have up here.
The total setup cost on a doomstead with the big tanks and the compressor and electrolyser and solar cells etc I am WAGing at $30K. I'm sure NF could make a more knowledgable and accurate estimate.
Hydrogen can't replace FFs completely, but as part of a basket of different technologies that includes batteries, gravity & compressed air storage and pumped hydro, if enough renewable energy production systems are brought online, these LDES methods fill in the gaps that intermittent production has with wind and solar. Hydrogen can also be used for the direct production of ammonia needed for fertilizer, mostly made now from methane. So this could alleviate food production problems as FFs diminish in availability.
Do we still have problems? You bet we do. Will there still be a significant population die off? Yes. However, there is more hopium now that we are not facing an extinction level event, and that we can maintain a level of technology above the stone age. Whether we will actually do that is another question entirely. It is at least theoretically possible though.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/07/the-hydrogen-stream-us-government-targets-2-kg-by-2026-1-kg-by-2031/
The Hydrogen Stream: US government targets $2/kg by 2026, $1/kg by 2031
RE