TL;DR: You’re correct, in my professional opinion.
The catalyst in most hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive and have a limited life. Hydrogen will mostly be sourced as a waste product from oil and gas extraction (though it could be done with clean electricity and electrolysis), that’s why oil and gas companies are becoming so interested in pushing hydrogen (see the successful “clean” natural gas campaigns, but depending on how you measure it natural gas can result in more emissions than coal and is just a bunch of greenwashing. Same would happen with hydrogen in my opinion). Additionally, we’d have to build out an entire hydrogen delivery infrastructure that serves only that purpose. We’ll just end up with commercial fuel stations like we have now. Fuel cells (for many fuels) can make sense in very remote applications, or industrial applications where specific waste gasses can be turned into supplemental electricity right on site.
Battery-electric on the other hand is much more flexible and fits into our existing infrastructure better. It’s not just power dense batteries for cars; it’s (maybe gravity) batteries for communities, safe and long-lived (maybe salt) batteries for homes, better batteries for our electronics. Research in one area can support improvement of the others. They all connect to the same electricity grid so the energy can be shared among applications. Batteries play a role in decentralizing and democratizing energy (today you can put PV on your house, charge your car or home battery, use your car to power your house in a power outage, etc). As mentioned we can use greener and cleaner batteries (even completely non-chemical) in some applications, and one day we can hopefully get to the point of using ultra- or super-capacitors in place of high-density chemical batteries. In the mean time we have batteries that work and are getting quite affordable, we can transition to this solution now without waiting for a miracle breakthrough, then continue to iterate the technology over time.
TL;DR: You’re correct, in my professional opinion.
The catalyst in most hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive and have a limited life. Hydrogen will mostly be sourced as a waste product from oil and gas extraction (though it could be done with clean electricity and electrolysis), that’s why oil and gas companies are becoming so interested in pushing hydrogen (see the successful “clean” natural gas campaigns, but depending on how you measure it natural gas can result in more emissions than coal and is just a bunch of greenwashing. Same would happen with hydrogen in my opinion). Additionally, we’d have to build out an entire hydrogen delivery infrastructure that serves only that purpose. We’ll just end up with commercial fuel stations like we have now. Fuel cells (for many fuels) can make sense in very remote applications, or industrial applications where specific waste gasses can be turned into supplemental electricity right on site.
Battery-electric on the other hand is much more flexible and fits into our existing infrastructure better. It’s not just power dense batteries for cars; it’s (maybe gravity) batteries for communities, safe and long-lived (maybe salt) batteries for homes, better batteries for our electronics. Research in one area can support improvement of the others. They all connect to the same electricity grid so the energy can be shared among applications. Batteries play a role in decentralizing and democratizing energy (today you can put PV on your house, charge your car or home battery, use your car to power your house in a power outage, etc). As mentioned we can use greener and cleaner batteries (even completely non-chemical) in some applications, and one day we can hopefully get to the point of using ultra- or super-capacitors in place of high-density chemical batteries. In the mean time we have batteries that work and are getting quite affordable, we can transition to this solution now without waiting for a miracle breakthrough, then continue to iterate the technology over time.