Renewable energy is a very little dog. Environmentalists envision an energy economy where hydrogen comes from water, and the energy used to accomplish this comes from wind. Big dogs like the nuclear industry also foresee a water-based hydrogen economy, but with nuclear as the power source that electrolyzes water. Nucleonics Week boasts that nuclear power "is the only way to produce hydrogen on a large scale without contributing to greenhouse gas emissions."
For the fossil fuel industry, not surprisingly, hydrocarbons will provide most of our future hydrogen. They already have a significant head start. Almost 50 percent of the world's commercial hydrogen now comes from natural gas. Another 20 percent is derived from coal.
