Let’s take a couple things you’ve said and compare them to the link you just provided me. You said that the cost of hydrogen pipelines was equally inexpensive as methane / natural gas. Yet in the abstract of your link,
The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines
Now how could nat gas be 11x cheaper than electricity but hydrogen is only 8x if they cost the same? That sounds like it’s 37.5% more expensive per MWh delivered. Interestingly, to deliver 1 MWh of hydrogen, you only need to deliver 30kg. Of course, the LCOE of that 30kg of hydrogen is hilarious compared to methane gas power plant.
And, of course, the very next paragraph dives into that.
The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels
That’s only true for DC, not for AC transmission lines which regularly move 900 - 2200 MW of power. Not that it’s even a point that matters much, since most power plants don’t produce 2200 MW of power at one location. We tend to distribute the generation for reliability reasons at the very least.
Now, are you ready for the kicker? I mean, are you really ready for me to just put the final nail in this coffin for you? What kind of electricity transmission are they comparing pipelines to in this link?
HVDC
And there it is. The cost of HVDC is overwhelmingly dominated by AC to DC and DC to AC conversion hardware, as noted by EIA in their reports. But, of course, if you compare to AC transmission as I mentioned above, this entire report is so upside down that it’s laughable. And that is why we have electric transmission lines rather than natural gas generators at every home and business in the entirety of the US. You should read the whole report, it’s really full of a lot of fun tidbits like this.
You basically picked the highest cost method of electricity transmission with the least adoption, and wondered why piping natural gas was cheaper. The fact that the into to the research said that electricity was hard to move at such high MW levels was the first clue that something was wrong here. That’s a rookie mistake for you.