When the price of methane goes up to more than three times it will be cheaper to produce hydrogen by splitting water molecules - H2O into hydrogen - H2 and oxygen - O2. .
2H2O + energy ® 2H2 + O2.
This is accomplished by electrolysis. If fossil fuels e.g. coal, oil or natural gas, are used to generate the electricity, there is no advantage over using fossil fuels directly. Indeed you still get CO and CO2 and there is a considerable loss of energy. Therefore the large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar electricity. In both nuclear and solar cases, there are possible technologies that do not use electricity as an intermediate form of energy. .
For example it is possible to "resonate- the water molecule and make it to "fall apart-, but the frequencies to do this are in microwave and infrared range. There are no energy advantages to doing so, because emitting these frequencies is very energy demanding. .
There is some hope that this process could be somewhat more efficient than electrolysis, but all of these technological procedures are still in development and are mostly only in a position of an experimental project. Besides new energy uses, hydrogen gets widely used to make ammonia, to stabilize fats, for welding, rocket fuel, acid manufacture, balloon filling, radioactivity studies and cryogenic research.
According to he Nuts & Volts Magazine (1999, WWW), the actual available energy in hydrogen flame is very low. Gasoline offers around 9000 watt-hours per liter and 13 000 watt-hours per kilogram of storage. Hydrogen at normal temperature and pressure offers an outstanding 39 000 watt-hour per kilogram, but only a pitiful 3,5 watt per liter. The major problem is that hydrogen gas uses too much volume to be very useful, as an energy carrier and compressing it into a liquid will increase the costs and loses. Efficiency goes down, safety and infrastructure issues appear and still are four-time les hydrogen atoms in any liter of liquid hydrogen than in a liter of gasoline.
