Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.