I was reading about the hydrogen projects around Teeside in the UK. You have existing hydrocarbon infrastructure, industrial customers, offshore storage, spare land, and an existing grid connection to the wider grid and renewables. This proximity makes the economic case work as there are opportunities to buy and sell in one place.
Also, efficiency becomes far less important if the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive. If the margins are high enough you can afford to waste energy.
True, it's just that that excludes any use cases where that hydrogen competes directly with renewable electricity. When the choice is using the electricity to charge a battery to drive a truck, or convert the electricity to hydrogen transport it half way around the world after first compressing and cooling it and while boiling off double digit percentages to keep it cool and then transporting it by road to a fueling station (in gas form by now stored at 300 bar), putting it in a truck and then running it through a fuel cell .... you get my point. No sense whatsoever. Unless you ignore all the inefficiencies. The vast majority of road transport is going to be powered by batteries. Including 100+ ton road trains in Australia. Because that already happened.
Green hydrogen production will eventually happen at scale. As you say, it's way too valuable for that not to happen. But the caveat with that is that using it for uneconomical / low value things doesn't make much sense. Why waste an expensive resource on stuff like that when there are much more valuable things you can do with it.
At the top of the ladder are things like industrial and chemical processes, long haul aviation via e-fuels generated from hydrogen, etc. Sticking it in the ground in order to burn it in order to boil water and drive a generator would be closer to the bottom. You could do it technically but there are a gazillion other ways to store and generate energy. Likewise using it for road transport is just madness. And forget about replacing methane with hydrogen to heat your home.
The fact that it exists does not mean that it’s fit for purpose. Hydrogen gas has very different material requirements, you can’t simply put it into those pipes.
“If the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive”
Except a) the energy is not cheap (nor is the equipment required to make and transport the hydrogen).
And b) who is going to buy this expensive hydrogen when they could instead use a cheaper alternative which is much more efficient (direct electricity cation)?
Also, efficiency becomes far less important if the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive. If the margins are high enough you can afford to waste energy.