US DOE Selects Pacific Northwest for Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub

I guess this means that the goal is to use hydrogen as a battery of sorts, sinking excess hydro and other power into the electrolysis process. I haven't done enough reading about the power efficiency of hydrogen, but if there's enough energy to reasonably provide daytime capacity augmentation, I imagine the hydrogen -> water -> hydrogen process can be a relatively closed system, not requiring constant introduction of fresh water as the H2 + O2 are recombined and then split apart again.

Because hydrogen is the future.

Until SMR (small modular reactors) are available at Fly-in, fly-out camps and mine sites, they will use diesel or hydrogen. That will take at least a decade.

Alberta is going heavy into blue hydrogen. For them it's a win-win. They transition profit to natural gas (better than tar oil sands) and hydrogen is cheaper to produce, providing a base level of supply for heavy vehicles and the like.

You should ask yourself why we still spend money on anything else but this.

Using sunshine to create a gas that releases water when combusted is by a country mile better than anything else we have come up with. It's in fact hard to even imagine anything better!

If the petroleum industry uses its money to build infrastructure to handle hydrogen it'll the best thing they ever did, whatever their motivations are.