Of course it’s not a sure thing. I’d be just as happy to see any other sustainably produced biofuel or chemically synthesized fuel scale up. But hydrogen is a more plausible option than batteries for large trucks. Even with battery swapping stations, you’re adding significant extra time to a trip due to frequent stops, likely on the order of every hour, and even if you could switch to lithium-air batteries (sorta the theoretical limit for energy density for a battery, essentially burning metal) it’s still not clear you can get enough energy per unit of battery weight to make it viable. You end up with heavier trucks, which have lower range and are less energy efficient, compared to trucks that can refuel with a chemical fuel. Those heavier trucks, in turn, create much higher wear on roads as well.
I’m also not too positive on plans requiring significant changes to the design of nationwide highway infrastructure, with swapping stations needing to be positioned more frequently along highways (requiring many new ramps and rest areas). The US is terrible at updating infrastructure, we spend way more per mile than the rest of the world on whatever we attempt. Seems way more feasible for Pilot and Flying J and so on to roll out hydrogen or other clean fuel filling stations along major trucking routes and expand from there.
Edit to add: right now we’re in the phase of experimenting with a bunch of options to see what works well, but in the long run the economics works out better if we standardize on a single solution, whatever it turns out to be. I suspect fuel cells are a stronger candidate for that end point. The theoretical efficiency of a fuel cell is way higher than for any fuel that gets burned, you get to decouple the fuel from both the power source used to produce need (no need for specific feedstocks) and (to a large degree) from the design of the vehicle that uses it, and you get to leave your existing infrastructure (and existing ways of handling the logistics of shipping) mostly intact.
And RE: the “always will be” joke, I agree it’s obligatory. But it’s mostly a matter of people ignoring how long it actually, usually, historically takes to bring truly, fundamentally new kinds of technologies to commercial readiness. It took about 80 years to go from the first incandescent light to a commercially viable model, and it’s major competition was the candle. It took about a century to go from the invention of carbon fiber to its commercial use in composites. It took about 90 years to go from the first lab demonstration of silicon carbide electronics to their use in power electronics. We’ve only been working on, say, fusion reactors for about 70 years, and we’ve frankly never spent more than a few billion dollars a year on it, which just plain isn’t enough to succeed.
And any new fuel has to compete with a century of engineering progress in ICEs, so why would we expect to be able to make the switch faster when we’re still investing way more in R&D on ICEs than any of the alternatives?
