Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…
That's not true. There are two main storage cases: from day to night and from summer to winter. Because there are 365 days and nights in a year and only one summer and one winter, a battery for seasonal storage needs to be 365 times cheaper than one for daily storage to break even after the same number of years. Of course, there are no batteries that are 365 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Nothing comes close.
People are thinking that chemical energy storage could work for the case of seasonal storage. It doesn't quite work right now, but it's not off by 2 orders of magnitude, it's off by maybe a factor of 5. It is much more likely that we'll succeed in making green hydrogen production, transportation and storage economical than that we could make batteries cheaper by a factor of 100.
Separately, there is a fairly good chance that we'll be able to extract hydrogen from underground deposits (google "white hydrogen", e.g. [1]).
Third, hydrogen storage economics enjoys the square-cube law: larger pressurized tanks can hold a lot of hydrogen for not a much larger cost than smaller tanks. So hydrogen could make sense for applications where very large tanks are needed, and one such application is railways. A typical train oil car has a volume of about 130 m3. At 700 bar (typical storage tank pressure), one m3 of hydrogen weighs about 42 kg, so this is about 5.5 tons. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel, so that would be the equivalent of about 16 tons of diesel. Train have an efficiency of at least 400 ton-miles per gallon, which is more than 125 ton-miles per kg, or 2 million ton-miles for 16 tons. In other words, such a tanker car could be enough to propel a ten thousand ton freight train for 200 miles. It would be much easier to convert diesel locomotives to burn hydrogen than to electrify thousands of miles of railways, so there's a fairly good chance that rail could be hydrogen's killer app.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...