Great Idea.We are now facing following problem in Australia.Excess of cheap green energy from solar and wind.Then politicians comes with the most stupid idea of all .Make hydrogen from it, cool down to the liquid , then ship to Japan and they may use it.The point is that whole process is terribly inefficient and 80-90% of produced electric energy is wasted. If we now use this hydrogen here in Australia, onsite we don't need to compress, cool down and ship to Japan, then bring pieces of steel pigs back.This is a matter of pure economy and those that pay the most for our electric energy mass produced should win - not political priorities when we actually subsidize Japanese manufacture.
Then we don't need to send millions of cheap iron ore , because we could ship refined product- steel pigs, raw iron.
We may need to buy this technology from Germany or Japan or even invent something here from scratch. There should be millions of goverment money directed , not into subsidy into liquid hydrogen production and export.PS. there is also some use for our coal in this greeniest of all technologies. Because steel require carbon as one of components.
by a change Australia have all those components to make GOOD steel, but choose to sell all as ore, not refined product.