It's only far away if you want to work in pure hydrogen, which is ideologically simple but not really required. Synthesis of methane from hydrogen is easy and e

It's only far away if you want to work in pure hydrogen, which is ideologically simple but not really required. Synthesis of methane from hydrogen is easy and efficient and (pretty) cheap - use atmospheric co2 as carbon feedstock. A German company is working on this and has proven solution at small scale, I'm sure they're not the only ones. More of a pain than simply burning/recombining hydrogen with oxygen, but has the upside that there is already a huge and established global network for transport and storage of methane - cheap and proven and currently being rapidly scaled.