Currently, European (and Chinese) strategy on hydrogen is to use it as a reduction agent in steelmaking and other industrial processes (I've heard cement and some non-steel metallurgy, but steelmaking is the main one). Hydrogen is made from gas locally (as it is cheaper) and replace cocking coal. The next step is to produce hydrogen from water.

People think it is a dead end, and we should keep using coke clearly haven't read enough. The advantage of hydrogen are massive: no need to source the coal, the hydrogen can be made in situ. The reduction effect is for now more controllable (in a mix 80% coal, 20% hydrogen), and the inconvenients are reduced each year.

This is not necessarily true for all situations. Northern Europe is planning to produce a lot of electricity with offshore wind, but laying deep sea high voltage electricity cables isn’t cheap. There’s already a lot of gas pipelines that can be retrofitted for hydrogen transport at a much lower price. At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.

There are also industries like steel production that are just not going to transition to electricity. Hydrogen has a place there too.