Hydrogen has often been called the champagne of fuels, because it’s so expensive and most likely will be for the foreseeable future. So I don’t think we’ll ever have a “hydrogen economy” in the sense that most things are powered by hydrogen like they now are by fossil fuels.

Electrifying things directly will always be cheaper and much more efficient, even if you have to use batteries. I’m sure hydrogen will play a role somewhere, but it will always be a niche fuel.

That being said, the world uses gigantic amounts of hydrogen already as a chemical substance for industries such as fertilizer production or hydrocarbon cracking. This hydrogen is almost completely made from fossil fuels and this causes huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions (more than the entire country of Germany). The first thing we should do is to replace this fossil hydrogen with green hydrogen, because it will directly cause lower CO2 emissions. Once we’ve done that and we still have the option to produce more hydrogen, we can start looking for other application such as flight, shipping or energy storage.