Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computational_chemistr...

More recently it's turned out that quantum computers are less useful for molecular simulation than previously thought. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDj1QhPOVBo

The video is essentially an argument from the software side (ironically she thinks the hardware side is going pretty well). Even if the hardware wasn't so hard to build or scale, there are surprisingly few problems where quantum algorithms have turned out to be useful.