Somewhere along the line that is - a source of hydrogen that is both cheap and also fits in with whatever are insisted upon as the rules of our new green overlords.
The reason?
No, not the A. Hitler vileness, back a generation to Imperial Germany. The observation was that those nations with a higher population would survive (this doesn’t have to be true but it was thought so then). From that logically, and correctly, follows that more food supply is necessary in order to feed the higher population. But there’s a limit to how much food can be grown from a piece of land - therefore more land is required, that lebensraum. In Germany’s case, Poland and the Ukraine.
That was indeed the line of thinking in those 1890s and so on. And given the constraints of the time (and the refusal to believe in importing food in large quantity) we might not like what they believed but believe it they did.
This all changed with the Haber Process - being able to make ammonia from natural gas. CH4 into HN3. Now it’s not necessary to have more land, one can slather ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3 and made from that HN3) onto it instead.
Artificial fertilizers mean it’s not necessary to conquer more land in order to feed the population. Huzzah.
But as a part of the Mitsubishi Group is pointing out, the price of gas inside Europe is currently such that there’s pretty much no fertilizer production. And if we all stop, entirely, using that natural gas, the CH4, then that old way disappears. We then get back to fights over enough land to feed people.
No, going organic doesn’t solve this. Precisely because fertilizer is a substitute for that more land, organic requires more land than fertilized. We’d be back with the battles - and also have, to a useful approximation, no land at all left for wildlife once we’ve fed humans from our now more extensive but less productive fields.
We really don’t think we’d like that world at all. Our conclusion here being that we really do hope that some form of green hydrogen production does work. At scale and cheaply. For that’s the essential input to this process of being able to feed the 8 billion of us.
A cheery thought for Christmas Eve, eh?