The fortunate/unfortunate thing about hydrocarbons is that they are a miracle fuel. We would probably not have any combustion engines if they had to run on wood, charcoal, solar, etc. Nor might we have more sophisticated power sources like nuclear.

It was only the fact that we were mining coal that allowed the first steam engine, with an efficiency of just 2%, to be commercialized to pump water out of coal mines. Without that first engine, we'd never have bootstrapped our way to modern engines, modern industry, etc.

The only good thing about hydrogen is that it creates the impression that we can just keep the same engines but use hydrogen instead. As the article shows, this just doesn't solve any problems except in niche cases. The only viable hydrogen economy I could imagine is based on massively scaled up and cost optimized nuclear power as the source of hydrogen. That would allow the extremely poor process efficiency of hydrogen to be ignored without causing carbon emissions.

Electric engines have been around for a long time too. But if we'd taken that path I think that we would still have used fossil fuels to produce the electricity.

My colleagues in our hydrogen team tell me that one issue of more widespread use of hydrogen is that current gas infrastructure leaks to much when you put hydrogen through it due to its molecular size.

Why would we ship hydrogen through canals? It can be made almost anywhere. Make it locally and don't worry about shipping it.

I can see an somewhat idealized future where we use a mix of ethanol/methanol from farm/plant waste for "small" engines, and then on a large scale establishing a superconductor network so your additional, non-local electricity could come from solar in the Sahara, or nuclear in Antarctica, or a dam half the world away.