Maybe it can be a component of an artificial hydrocarbon, but unless the carbon were sourced from the air it wouldn't be a cycle and wouldn't be any better for the environment.
With hydrogen, the storage is cheap. We already store natural gas in tanks. We can switch to hydrogen. Maybe hydrogen will leak more, but 1. hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas and 2. the square-cube law tells you that for large tanks you don't really care about leakage.
I don't think we will find an alternative to hydrogen for long term storage of electricity.
Nobody is saying that hydrogen technology is without its problems, but it is feasibly scalable unlike anything else I am aware of, and it is not some kind of mythical vapourware that exists only in the form of CAD renderings.
Is there somewhere to learn about the proper storage and use of hydrogen?
I’d just add that for grid scale storage the hydrogen probably doesn’t have to go far from generation. That probably resolves plenty of problems.
Over time, hydrogen damages the tank. (Which is undesirable combo with “explosive gas when mixed with air”)
I would like some breakthrough in material sciences here.
> Steel with an ultimate tensile strength of less than 1000 MPa (~145,000 psi) or hardness of less than HRC 32 on the Hardness Rockwell Scale is not generally considered susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
Gas storage facilities also generally use geological structures which are not susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement either:
Converting hydrogen into something more safe, like ethanol or methanol. Fuel cells for those also exist, but needs more research.
You can't ship things in steel vessels overseas because steel rusts in contact with water, especially salty water. See what I did there?
> distribution costs
What about distribution costs? Hydrogen can replace natural gas. Wherever you have a gas burning powerplant, you can retrofit it to burn hydrogen. The tanks that store gas for that plant can be modified to hold hydrogen. Whatever distribution costs are incurred for natgas will be incurred by hydrogen. Some will go up, some down, but not by orders of magnitude.
> sheer loss of efficiency
As opposed to what? In a world powered by solar and wind, you'll have times (lots of times) when you generate more than you consume. The least efficient option is to just not generate. Generating electricity and converting it to hydrogen, and then the hydrogen back to electricity at a later time may or may not be economically profitable. In the cases where the economics will work out, people will do that, where it won't people won't do it. But the economics will always be against batteries for long term storage, except if by some miracle batteries will get to be 100 times cheaper (not a mistake, 100).
Other chemical storage solutions (ammonia, methanol, ethanol, lithium hydride) need one extra step that will be very expensive. There are slight chances for one of those to make sense, but my bet is that they won't. Why? Because both Europe and Japan are betting very, very big bucks on hydrogen.
Well, at least, it's a much less bad one:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2901/7f35d70295af32860db77a...
Cube square law also makes small scale hydrogen storage more expensive than batteries.
Then you're back to limited niche uses, or needing expensive, leaky distribution.
The best use of hydrogen for seasonal arbitrage is making it into sponge iron and ammonia for steel and fertiliser then storing that. Then your seasonal-cadence variability is gone.
A good reference is Michael Liebherr's hydrogen ladder. It organizes hydrogen use cases by their economical viability. Some of the least economical things you can do with it is using it for transport or heating. It just doesn't make any sense to do that; there are cheaper ways to do those things. The more economical things at the top are a combination of things we already use lots of (grey) hydrogen for such as fertilizer production and other industrial processes and a few things like steel production and other industrial processes that currently rely on burning fossil fuels. For each of those producing the hydrogen close to where it is consumed is key. There are plenty of economical uses for hydrogen. More than enough that bothering with the low yield uneconomical use cases just doesn't make sense. Just cleaning up the existing uses of grey hydrogen is actually a massive project by itself.
Because of it's physical properties, transporting and storing hydrogen is costly and technically challenging. It takes up a lot of space. In liquid form it's almost 3x the volume of liquid methane. And to get it to that state, you have to cool it to a few degrees above absolute zero. Keeping it in that state also costs energy. You typically get that by boiling some of it off. Same with methane of course but liquid methane is a lot warmer so the need to boil it off is a lot smaller. Converting hydrogen to methane or other fuels is of course possible but also not free. Every energy conversion you sacrifice double digit percentages of energy. The more conversions, the less economical sense it makes.
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.
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)?
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.
But my point being its storage and stability as a solid material unlike liquefied hydrogen which may cause embrittlement of its container.
A solid material, heat to release H, send it through a fuel cell. At some point maybe that method will become a type of battery.
I get people like batteries and they are very efficient but there seems to be such weird hostility at the mere mention of hydrogen. It's bizarre. It has its uses especially for the ability to store a powerful energy source.
PS: People are hostile because they own a BEV, or own shares in a BEV company, or have some other financial motivation. They are openly hostile to anything that could disrupt their business or lifestyle. In fact, we really should just be more direct in confronting this. Hydrogen is straight-up disrupting the conventional battery market, and the opposition is running a FUD campaign to stop it.