I don't get why people are acting like it's an either or scenario. That said, one pro for hydrogen, is should be easily burnable in the current natural gas plants, which should easily cover off peak times without the need for batteries.
Another thing. I think we should question any plan that requires more mass mineral extraction than necessary. It's not as if mining is an environmentally neutral thing, and there is more to restoring our planet that just getting surviving climate change.
The UK is going to mix hydrogen and natural gas through the current infrastructure. They're currently building dozens of hydrogen plants and each one that comes online will increase the hydrogen until it's 100%.
Really brilliant as the UK will be way ahead in global production.
There's a good YouTube video explainer, search "just have a think blue hydrogen"
Stupendously massive production capacity of H2 will be needed for every plausible climate disaster mitigation scenario. If you want to synthesize CH4 or other hydrocarbons from captured CO2, or to synthesize NH3 for fertilizer, or for fuel, or for storage, you need H2 first.
To fuel aircraft efficiently, you want a great deal of LH2. Anywhere LH2 aircraft fly, kerosene-fueled aircraft will be simply unable to compete. That will start on major international routes, with airports synthesizing LH2 on demand from grid power, banking it when spot price is lowest. The only thing that will save carriers loaded up with kerosene craft is the limit on how fast the LH2 aircraft can be manufactured.
Carbon-neutral steel production will depend on really huge amounts of H2, in place of coal or natural gas. Existing fertilizer production lines can inject H2 with the natural gas, and increase its fraction as more becomes available. At some point, as the carbon fraction decreases, electric heating will become more economical than burning injected gas for heat. Ultimately, improving catalysts will make the whole process more efficient than ever.
NH3 made with green hydrogen is a likely fuel for retrofitted long-distance shipping, where ships need only new fuel tanks and plumbing to switch over. Probably legislation will be needed to drive this change fast enough.
Cars with high-pressure H2 tanks are beginning to be practical, and are much lighter and cheaper to make than lithium-battery cars. When the car is lighter, the motor and drive train can be lighter too, and it takes less energy to accelerate them. In the short term, though, batteries are clearly winning. It is hard to be sure which will win, long term, but batteries have a huge first-mover advantage.
You can burn H2 directly in a natural-gas plant, or mixed into natural gas. So, as H2 production capacity grows, an increasing fraction of gas input to these systems will be H2. Ultimately, fuel cells driven from pure H2 will start to take over as prices of improved catalysts fall.
For utility-scale storage, bulk underground H2 is a much simpler and more reliable proposition than millions of battery cells, even though round-trip efficiency is poor. As top-line generating cost plummets, efficiency matters less. All the hottest storage systems (iron-air, hydrogen) are low roundtrip-efficiency.
Another thing. I think we should question any plan that requires more mass mineral extraction than necessary. It's not as if mining is an environmentally neutral thing, and there is more to restoring our planet that just getting surviving climate change.