As a clean energy source for the future, hydrogen can be produced from a diverse array of domestic resources including fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and renewable energy technologies. The two major challenges to hydrogen production are identifying a sustainable supply resource and achieving commercial production at competitive prices. Coal, America's largest domestic fossil energy resource, offers a sustainable and stable resource for producing large quantities of hydrogen. Analyses by the U.S.DOE indicate that hydrogen may be produced from coal at $2.00 3.00/gge (untaxed 2005 dollars), a value now adopted by DOE as its cost goal for hydrogen production from coal. Consequently, for the near to mid term applications, hydrogen production from coal appears most feasible for countries like the U.S. It is likely that in the longer term, hydrogen production will be transitioned away from fossil fuel-based methods.

The production of hydrogen from coal requires coal gasification to produce a clean synthesis gas that can be converted to pure hydrogen through the Water-Gas Shift reaction and gas separation. Any carbon dioxide generated during the process can be captured through carbon sequestration technologies and concentrated into stream for use, for example, in enhanced oil recovery. To address the development of technologies for producing hydrogen from coal, the DOE developed a new R&D program, which was derived from the 2003 Presidential $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. This new program, termed the Hydrogen from Coal Program establishes a plan to produce hydrogen and electric power from coal in central and decentralized settings by 2015 and 2013 respectively.

This paper provides a summary discussion of DOE's Hydrogen from Coal program, the R&D technologies under development, and some major accomplishments in the production of hydrogen from coal. To date, the program has developed several innovative approaches for obtaining pure hydrogen and sequestration ready carbon dioxide from the complex gas mixture produced from coal gasification. In addition, the paper also discusses some of the technical and economic challenges that have to be overcome in order to meet DOE's goals for producing hydrogen from coal.