The partial oxidation reaction occurs when a substoichiometric fuel-air mixture is partially combusted in a reformer, creating a hydrogen-rich syngas. A distinction is made between thermal partial oxidation (TPOX) and catalytic partial oxidation (CPOX). The chemical reaction takes the general form:

C_nH_m + ⁿ/₂ O₂ ? n CO + ^m/₂ H₂

Idealized examples for heating oil and coal, assuming compositions C₁₂H₂₄ and C₂₄H₁₂ respectively, are as follows:

C₁₂H₂₄ + 6 O₂ ? 12 CO + 12 H₂

C₂₄H₁₂ + 12 O₂ ? 24 CO + 6 H₂

The Kværner-process or Kvaerner carbon black & hydrogen process (CB&H)^[7] is a plasma reforming method, developed in the 1980s by a Norwegian company of the same name, for the production of hydrogen and carbon black from liquid hydrocarbons (C_nH_m). Of the available energy of the feed, approximately 48% is contained in the hydrogen, 40% is contained in activated carbon and 10% in superheated steam.^[8] CO₂ is not produced in the process.

A variation of this process is presented in 2009 using plasma arc waste disposal technology for the production of hydrogen, heat and carbon from methane and natural gas in a plasma converter^[9]

Coal can be converted into syngas and methane, also known as town gas, via coal gasification. Syngas consists of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.^[10] Another method for conversion is low temperature and high temperature coal carbonization.^[11]

Currently, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming or partial oxidation of methane and coal gasification with only a small quantity by other routes such as biomass gasification or electrolysis of water.^[15] There are three main types of cells, solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC's), polymer electrolyte membrane cells (PEM) and alkaline electrolysis cells (AEC's). SOEC's operate at high temperatures, typically around 800°C. At these high temperatures a significant amount of the energy required can be provided as thermal energy (heat), and as such is termed High temperature electrolysis. The heat energy can be provided from a number of different sources, including waste industrial heat, nuclear power stations or concentrated solar thermal plants. This has the potential to reduce the overall cost of the hydrogen produced by reducing the amount of electrical energy required for electrolysis.^{[15][16][17][18]} PEM electrolysis cells typically operate below 100°C and are becoming increasingly available commercially.^[15] These cells have the advantage of being comparatively simple and can be designed to accept widely varying voltage inputs which makes them ideal for use with renewable sources of energy such as solar PV.^[19] AEC's optimally operate at high concentrations electrolyte (KOH or potassium carbonate) and at high temperatures, often near 200 °C.

Thermochemical cycles combine solely heat sources (thermo) with chemical reactions to split water into its hydrogen and oxygen components.^[20] The term cycle is used because aside of water, hydrogen and oxygen, the chemical compounds used in these processes are continuously recycled. If electricity is partially used as an input, the resulting thermochemical cycle is defined as a hybrid one.

The sulfur-iodine cycle (S-I cycle) is a thermochemical cycle processes which generates hydrogen from water with an efficiency of approximately 50%. The sulfur and iodine used in the process are recovered and reused, and not consumed by the process. The cycle can be preformed with any source of very high temperatures, approximately 950 C, such as by Concentrating solar power systems (CSP) and is regarded as being well suited to the production of hydrogen by high-temperature nuclear reactors,^[21] and as such, is being studied in the High Temperature Test Reactor in Japan.^{[22][23][24][25]} There are other hybrid cycles that use both high temperatures and some electricity, such as the Copper–chlorine cycle, it is classified as a hybrid thermochemical cycle because it uses an electrochemical reaction in one of the reaction steps, it operates at 530 C and has an efficiency of 43 percent.^[26]

Biological hydrogen can be produced in an algae bioreactor.^[29] In the late 1990s it was discovered that if the algae are deprived of sulfur it will switch from the production of oxygen, i.e. normal photosynthesis, to the production of hydrogen. It seems that the production is now economically feasible by surpassing the 7–10 percent energy efficiency (the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen) barrier.^[30] with a hydrogen production rate of 10-12 ml per liter culture per hour.^[31]

Posted by dahsdebater on 2/27/2014 6:21:00 PM (view original):

  Hydrogen is produced deep within the earth and enters the ocean.  It is produced by fracking and fossil fuels.  It is produced through chemical reaction. It is produced through the production of fertilizer and ammonia.  It can be extracted from air at the rate of 1/2 liter to 1,000,000. Get it before it leaves. It can be extracted from water and turned back into water at a big net gain of energy.  IF YOU REALLY WANNA GO GREEN then this is the way to go. 

Virtually all of the science in your post was wrong, but this part is just hilarious.  You can extract hydrogen from water and turn it back into water at a big net GAIN in energy?  The highest level of science background you need to recognize that this is IMPOSSIBLE is a year of high school chemistry and/or physics.  Heck, my freshman high school physical science class taught me that this couldn't be right.  But not everybody's high school science classes were that good.

There are no free lunches.  You can't break a molecule, put it back together, and gain energy.  Because no processes are perfect, you can't do it without losing energy.  In fact, the efficiency of the best processes we have for converting water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning the hydrogen is just above 30%.  But go on with your bad self, you know science.

Nothing you just posted addresses this simple truth.  In physics there are NO FREE LUNCHES.  Google that sentence - it's all over the place.  You can't turn water into hydrogen and back into water and gain energy.  It's impossible, would violate the basic laws of physics.  At 100% efficiency you would be energy neutral, but nobody can come close to 100% efficiency.  You can generate hydrogen from water at better than 90%, but it's impractical to convert back to water while capturing more than about 35% of the energy released, so you wind up at about 30% overall cycle efficiency.

Hydrolysis followed by combustion is useful for converting one energy source into another; for example, using electrical power from nuclear fuels to generate hydrogen to power a vehicle that can't conveniently be attached to the electric grid.  But you can't use a cycle to generate excess energy.  There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.  Can't happen.  You can gain energy by hydrolyzing water, collecting the hydrogen, and fusing the hydrogen into helium.  But that isn't a repeatable process.  It leaves you with a bunch of generally worthless helium.  Over time it would turn the world's water supply into oxygen and helium.  Probably not a good option for a long-term energy solution.  This is why I can't understand why so many people are so invested in developing cold fusion (there was a successful test at LLNL a few weeks ago, the first with a net energy surplus ever reported).  Sure, we can get power from that.  If we don't want water in 100 years.

Fermentative hydrogen production is the fermentative conversion of organic substrate to biohydrogen manifested by a diverse group of bacteria using multi enzymesystems involving three steps similar to anaerobic conversion. Dark fermentation reactions do not require light energy, so they are capable of constantly producinghydrogen from organic compounds throughout the day and night. Photofermentation differs from dark fermentation because it only proceeds in the presence of light. For example photo-fermentation with Rhodobacter sphaeroides SH2C can be employed to convert small molecular fatty acids into hydrogen.^[34]

Fermentative hydrogen production can be done using direct biophotolysis by green algae, indirect biophotolysis by cyanobacteria, photo-fermentation by anaerobic photosynthetic bacteria and dark fermentation by anaerobic fermentative bacteria. For example studies on hydrogen production using H. salinarium, an anaerobic photosynthetic bacteria, coupled to a hydrogenase donor like E. coli, are reported in literature.^[35]

Biohydrogen can be produced in bioreactors that utilize feedstocks, the most common feedstock being waste streams. The process involves bacteria feeding on hydrocarbons and exhaling hydrogen and CO₂. The CO₂ can be sequestered successfully by several methods, leaving hydrogen gas. A prototype hydrogen bioreactor using waste as a feedstock is in operation at Welch's grape juice factory in North East, Pennsylvania (U.S.).^{[citation needed]}

Due to the Thauer limit (four H₂/glucose) for dark fermentation, a non-natural enzymatic pathway was designed that can generate 12 moles of hydrogen per mole of glucose units of polysaccharides and water in 2007.^[36] The stoichiometric reaction is:

C₆H₁₀O₅ + 7 H₂O ? 12 H₂ + 6 CO₂

The key technology is cell-free synthetic enzymatic pathway biotransformation (SyPaB).^[37][38] A biochemist can understand it as "glucose oxidation by using water as oxidant". A chemist can describe it as "water splitting by energy in carbohydrate". A thermodynamics scientist can describe it as the first entropy-driving chemical reaction that can produce hydrogen by absorbing waste heat. In 2009, cellulosic materials were first used to generate high-yield hydrogen.^[39] Furthermore, the use of carbohydrate as a high-density hydrogen carrier was proposed so to solve the largest obstacle to the hydrogen economy and propose the concept of sugar fuel cell vehicles.^[40]

Currently there are two practical ways of producing hydrogen in a renewable industrial process. One is to use power to gas where renewable power is used to produce hydrogen from electrolysis and the other is landfill gas to produce hydrogen in a steam reformer. Hydrogen fuel, when produced by renewable sources of energy like wind or solar power, is a renewable fuel.^[48]