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While I agree that hydrogen for electricity generation/storage doesn't really make sense, there are some industries that either can use or must use large amounts of hydrogen for chemical purposes. For example, the production of ammonia for fertiliser needs hydrogen, and refining metals from ore can use hydrogen.

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That's obviously necessary, yes. It still really doesn't make much sense to do it with microbes when compared with SMR, though. It's entirely possible to store the CO from SMR as with microbes producing CO₂, but there's more CO₂ compared to CO from SMR.

Proton Technologies (mentioned in the article) claims to solve the problem by using a membrane that only lets hydrogen pass through. That way all the co2 just stays in the well. If that works that sounds way superior to SMR plus carbon capture.

Not really? It's not different from SMR. Hydrogen is tiny and non-polar, so it's easy to filter only for such small molecules, making storing it a pretty big issue. SMR produces a mixture of methane, water, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is just as easily filtered into plain dihydrogen. Nevertheless, it's still just storing it somewhere in a cave, not really worth the effort most of the time, and since CO / CO₂ is a lot smaller than methane, it'll find its way out by other means way easier.

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