You seem to happily ignore the distribution costs, metal embrittlement, sheer loss of efficiency and rest of factors that make hydrogen a bad idea for almost any use where it's not yet being used.
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.
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.
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.
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.