A five year nuclear reactor project would be amazing! Most of them, outside of China at least, are more like 15 year projects these days.
I see this attitude often and I think it's detrimental. If 'blue' hydrogen (ie, extracting hydrogen from natural gas & storing the carbon) provides an economical stepping-stone toward a fully fossil-free energy system, why not take it? If the only comeback is reflexive disdain for incumbent technologies, give me a break.
Your points on battery vehicles vs hydrogen vehicles are in agreement with in the second Bloomberg article linked by the GP.
That's a PR phrase from the oil industry. The people who brought you "mild hybrids" and such.
Full electrics are getting cheaper each year. And bigger. The battery-powered Ford F150, Jeep Wrangler, Tesla's Cybertruck, and, of all things, the GMC Hummer, are all going to be out for 2022. That's going to totally change the way people look at electric vehicles.
Doesn't mean it's not true. I take your point that batteries are a better option for personal automotive applications. However, there are other applications where hydrogen does have advantages. In those cases, using 'blue' hydrogen (A) kick-starts the technology, because it is currently cheaper than 'green' hydrogen (B) is carbon-neutral if done correctly.
For instance, consider how a renewable-heavy grid relies on gas turbines to step in when there is a 'drought' in renewable production. Using 'blue' hydrogen to replace the natural gas for those turbines would immediately get a fully reliable, zero-carbon-emission grid. Then as renewable prices continue to fall, 'green' hydrogen can close the loop & eliminate fossil fuels altogether.
To be fair, in that instance the blue hydrogen would crowd out other battery investment, delaying cost reductions in actually renewable batteries.
If you're starting from electricity, a water to hydrogen to power system gets maybe a third or a half of that.[1]
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/406676/battery-electric-hydrogen-...
This is what's promised. In practice it turns into "extracting the hydrogen and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere". There are very few operating CCS schemes.
To ensure that the fossil hydrogen is 'blue' and not 'grey,' we'd need carbon tax or some other legislative action.
The big problem with hydrogen is that it currently is a smokescreen for a certain industry that has a ton of hydrogen attached to carbon atoms desperate to maintain relevance in the "green" energy revolution.
It is staring down a massive economic challenge as well, shared with any new five-year nuclear reactor project or similar cutting edge power generation scheme, is that solar/wind/storage is in the prime curve of double-digit improvements to various aspects of cost, scale, storage, performance every year.
BEVs are poised to undercut ICEs fundamentally in cost and simplicity. Solar/wind is about to drop under even natural gas in LCOE for even installed turbines. All of those have three year projections of continued double-digit percentage drops in cost and massive increases in scale.
Even worse for hydrogen, most of that is using existing infrastructure for transmission, so while charging stations need to be built out for EVs, it is far easier to do that than put in hydrogen storage / transport infrastructure.
So even if some hydrogen article targets a certain cost on the batteries / EVs / power transmission lines, in five years things will look completely different.
Maybe aviation?