I'm not sure this is something that QC can easily solve.
[0] undergrad ochem is actually a pretty good heuristic for which reactions one can perform at industrial scale, though high scale reactions might require catalysts you don't learn about in ochem
Not at very massive scale of investments required.
Take for example, GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit). The wast investment needed to get there was funded by gaming industry. Supercomputers as a investment target were tiny compared to gaming and general purpose computing.
AI boom was created on a tails of gaming industry and the benefits spilled into scientific computing as well.
Water has 8 electrons (which QC can treat exactly without any extra work) in a number of orbital. In general we need 2 qubits per orbital.
Most QC demonstrations so far were performed using so-called minimal basis sets, which have a small number of orbitals and thus give inaccurate results. A better approach would be to take a large orbital basis, do a classical relatively expensive Hartree-Fock calculation then use the orbitals from that to do the QC. This technique when done on classical computers is called MRCI (multi-reference configuration interaction) and is the gold standard in Quantum Chemistry.
So, provided we can pay the cost of doing a large orbital HF calculation (and we can do that for fairly large molecules), we can get pretty good result using n electrons in n orbitals MRCI. So production electronic calculations of water molecules would take about 16 qubits per molecule.
The more frustrating problem is that the number of electronic interaction terms is N^4 the number of orbitals so that we would very rapidly need extremely deep circuits which are not feasible without error correction (which involve using like 8 actual qubits for every calculation qubit). There are proposal to use plane wave basis sets (N^2 interactions) but then we need many more orbitals and thus many more qubits.
We are in practice very far from QC having a significant impact on real-life quantum chemistry. It's not at all clear that we'll ever be able to do QC on a molecule the size of a typical drug, let alone a protein.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2227490-googles-quantum...
Note, it turned out later that classical computers could still do this faster, so, another QC fail.
It's true that there could be neat quantum computing shortcuts that maintain calculation accuracy and that aren't doable on classical computers... but then we could also imagine that some neat Quantum Chemistry trick might make classical computers much better too. (We actually have a bunch of these already but they are approximative: DFT, machine learning, pseudo potentials etc.)