Might be worse than burning coal
After the recent study by Howarth et al. [1] on the carbon cost of 'blue' hydrogen, many questions are being raised about how much sense it even makes, and whether burning the natural gas directly doesn't make more sense. Taking leakage into account, as well as the inefficiencies of carbon capture, blue hydrogen might very well be worse than burning coal in terms of its effects on the climate. Less polluting probably, though.
There's also the thing that CCS has never been applied on this scale, and we still have to sort out small details like where we would be storing all of this captured CO2 and prevent it from simply leaking into the atmosphere during a careless moment or leak in whatever reservoir is picked.
As for green hydrogen, at this point there is only one realistic source of it, and that is from nuclear power. At least if we want to have significant amounts of it. That's why e.g. in Poland companies are looking at having SMRs installed to produce both electricity and hydrogen for industrial processes.
Industrial processes is highly likely where hydrogen will remain for the foreseeable future considering how much hydrogen is used by these processes, and how long it'll take for production to ramp up.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
Biting the hand that feeds IT
