We have a cheap, stable, infrastructure-friendly, high-density storage formula for hydrogen. Or better, since the application here isn't hydrogen-specific but is simply looking to find a fuel-storage solution: energy storage.<p>It's hydrocarbons.<p>In this case, synfuel hydrocarbons as direct analogues of fossil-fuel based compounds of chain-lengths 1 (methane) to around a dozen or so (kerosene / aviation fuel, at a stretch, diesel fuel).<p>It stores forever (proved to 300 million years), it is drop-in compatible with extant infrastructure and equipment, it's infinitely miscable with present fuels, it doesn't leak out of storage, it doesn't embrittle metals (and in fact generally lubricates and protects them).<p>Yes, the round-trip storage efficiencies are low (as low as ~15--20% recovery based on thermal electrical generation, roughly the same as the solution named here), but that's in exchange for something that can readily provide weeks to months of storage capacity in a stable, low-risk form. Where you need storage that's long-term stable, dense, safe, and instantly dispatchable, your options are few.<p>The technology has been demonstrated in numerous experimental trials, and is similar to processes run at national scale for decades in Germany and South Africa. US-based research has been conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab, amongst others. The stumbling block to date has been that fossil fuel prices are sufficiently low[1] that synfuels simply are not competitive presuming market-based mechanisms which fail to account for externalities and other market failures.<p>I've be aware of this for about a decade and have written about the technology, Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis, multiple times on HN:<p><<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20fischer-tropsch&sort=byPopularity&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>><p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. A market failure of staggering proportions, as the under-pricing is on the order of a million-fold. See: Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", <<a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf</a>> (PDF)