That's said to be even more energy-dense than liquid H2, and it's obviously much safer.
Guessing the answer is that it requires heat to liberate the gas, and/or makes us even more dependent on rare earths.
As methane it's reasonably easily liquified. You also already have a network of natural gas systems that you can utilise this in right now. There's literally fleets of natural gas vehicles today as well as pipelines everywhere. If making hydrogen from electricity was in any way viable we'd already be doing it for the methane networks we have today.
Of course if we start talking like this the myth of hydrogen being green gets blown right out of the water and we realise that storage isn't even the biggest issue of hydrogen. "Hey Toyota why don't we just use your existing CNG cars instead, it'll save us making hydrogen from methane and if we ever do start making it from electricity in bulk couldn't we just make methane similarly?".
By the same token, I've always thought it would be interesting if someone came up with a way to retrofit gas stations with something that could split the hydrocarbon molecules without burning them. Then we'd really be able to reuse existing infrastructure (handwaving away the storage-density problem of course, which the subject of this article might help with.)
But same problem... the carbon and the hydrogen really, really like to hang out together.
You then reform the co2 on combustion.
Fwiw methane to hydrogen and back again is trivial. It’s how hydrogen is predominantly made today. You can indeed make a hydrogen fuel station from methane. It’s just that it’s really really dumb to do that when hydrogen is so inefficient in an engine and so hard to store. You should just use methane all the way.
A hydrogen battery that operates at just 90 °C has been developed by researchers from Japan, overcoming the high-temperature and low-capacity limits of earlier methods. The device works by moving hydride ions through a solid electrolyte, allowing magnesium hydride, which acts as the anode, to repeatedly store and release hydrogen at full capacity.