The Holy Grail is cost-competitive "green hydrogen" with "blue hydrogen", produced with natural gas via steam reformation and carbon capture being the second choice and "gray hydrogen" fossil fuel reformation without capturing the CO2 not making a lot of sense at this point.
There is still a long way to go on this quest for the green. The European majors are focusing on the "blue" as a stepping stone and as a reason to build out the hydrogen infrastructure while awaiting some fancy materials science to manifest in somebody's lab.
From IEEE Spectrum, April 9:
Researchers in Japan reported a 100-fold improvement in their solar energy conversion method
Converting sunlight into hydrogen is a seemingly ideal way to address the world’s energy challenges. The process doesn’t directly involve fossil fuels or create any greenhouse gas emissions. The resulting hydrogen can power fuel-cell systems in vehicles, ships, and trains; it can feed into the electrical grid or be used to make chemicals and steel. For now, though, that clean energy vision mainly exists in the lab.
Recently, Japanese researchers said they’ve made an important step toward making vast amounts of hydrogen using solar energy. The team from Shinshu University in Nagano studies light-absorbing materials to split the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water. Now they’ve developed a two-step method that is dramatically more efficient at generating hydrogen from a photocatalytic reaction.
The researchers began with barium tantalum oxynitride (BaTaO2N), a semiconductor material that can absorb light at up to 650 nanometers (a visible wavelength at the orange end of red). The powdery substance serves as the photocatalyst, harnessing solar energy needed to drive the reaction. They also used an aqueous methanol solution instead of water, which allowed them to focus only on the hydrogen component and reduce the complexity of the reaction.
By itself, BaTaO2N can hardly “evolve” hydrogen gas from the solution. So, using their new method, the Shinshu team “loaded” the powder granules with a platinum-based co-catalyst to improve the chemical activity.
As a result, the materials evolved hydrogen much more efficiently—about 100 times more efficiently—than BaTaO2N that’s been loaded with platinum using conventional methods, according to their paper in the journal Nature Communications....
....MUCH MORE
