Don't take this quote outtake as indicative of what the article is talking about, the articl talks about actual usable hydrocarbon production instead of this:

Don't take this quote outtake as indicative of what the article is talking about, the articl talks about actual usable hydrocarbon production instead of this: "However, efficiency is still low and, as a gas, hydrogen is difficult to store." There's a lot of FCEV/"Hydrogen economy" stories floating through the channel in the last few months it seems, which to me speaks of some PR push to offset battery day. Hydrogen stories drive me a bit nuts because they handwave away the fundamental problems with hydrogen production, delivery, refueling, and storage as something that research will solve. Here we have a research project deep into solar fuel production and it drops that comment in. Strikes me as an unbiased / uninflated indictment of the other stories. Synthetic fuels are only carbon neutral even at the thinnest depth of analysis, but they'll probably be the only way to get aviation to at least carbon neutrality in a decade.