You're right to point out that tankers are phenomenally efficient, but that's _for oil_. Just as LNG is much more expensive to ship than oil, because of the increased handling complexity, any shipping of hydrogen is going to lose that advantage completely to electrification.[0]

> there will be (very long) distances that you'll want to ship energy

This is probably the real crux driving the difference in how we see this.

The main reason we have to ship hydrocarbons long distances is because those resources are so concentrated. Wind and solar aren't perfectly distributed, but they are so much more distributed that local generation would be much more efficient than transporting anything much beyond what current HVDC projects can easily handle.

So, sure, we're not going to stretch a cable for 12,000 miles. But we're also not going to build a solar farm in Saudi Arabia to generate hydrogen to ship to Canberra. We're just going to put a solar farm in the outback instead.

[0] "Relative costs of transporting electrical and chemical energy" by Saadi, Lewis, and MacFarland, studies this very question.

Even in that report, you could quibble with a lot of their assumptions that I think bias it against HVDC, project lifespans, ignoring loading and unloading costs for tankers, etc. But it's not a crazy starting place, and HVDC still beats hydrogen on $ per mile per Joule. My takeaway from it was that if we're stuck with a carbon economy, sure, we'll keep using tankers. If we're talking about going carbon neutral, the difficulties of working with hydrogen relative to oil and LNG will probably tip us back towards electrification and local generation, except in the most highly specialized of situations (fueling Antarctica or something).

The report was a good reminder why we have an oil-based economy though. It is so obnoxiously practical and well suited to everything we want to use it for. Ditching carbon will be hard.