Congress is busy debating how to solve our energy problem. (Link) Put a windfall profits tax on oil companies? That would probably result in less production. Force oil companies to invest in alternative energy programs? What expertise does ExxonMobil have in alternative energy?

I think ExxonMobil is correct returning its capital to its shareholders by buying back stock. It is a form of economic recycling. When these shares are bought by ExxonMobil, the government will share in the profits through our current tax code. The shareholders are then free to find other investments including alternative energy projects.

An alternative energy that ExxonMobil might pursue is the production and marketing of hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is the ultimate in clean fuel as it combines with oxygen to produce water. The problem is that all of the hydrogen available to us is bound up with other elements, water being the best example. It takes a lot of energy to break the bonds and free the hydrogen.

Hydrogen is used today both as a fuel and as a feedstock for many industrial processes. It can be used to manufacture fertilizer. It can be used in an oil refinery to upgrade heavy crude to lighter fuels.

Hydrogen can be produced by the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. Electrolysis is an environmentally clean cycle, assuming the electricity is produced from an environmentally clean source. This is an old and widely understood process for creating hydrogen, but requires a tremendous amount of electricity.

Hydrogen is mostly produced from natural gas where the hydrogen is split from the carbon and the carbon is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas. This is not environmentally clean. It is better to just use the natural gas as a fuel then to produce hydrogen from natural gas, so most hydrogen produced this way is used as a feedstock.

There is one way to produce hydrogen that is environmentally clean and produces huge amounts at potentially low cost. That is to use nuclear power. The government recognizes the potential for using hydrogen as fuel in the transportation sector through its Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative (Link). 

There are designs for nuclear reactors that can have a thermal efficiency of up to 45% for producing hydrogen using high-temperature electrolysis and up to 60% (combined cycle also producing electricity) using thermo-chemical production. (Link)

A 3,000 M Watt thermal reactor (at 60%) should produce about 46,000 Kg/hr of hydrogen. This is the equivalent energy to 29,000 barrels of diesel fuel per day. That’s 1.2 million gallons worth over $5 million per day retail or $1.83 billion per year. Seems like that type of return would justify a pretty large investment in plant and equipment considering the raw material input to the process is only water. (Nuclear fuel and fuel disposal are additional costs).

Question for ExxonMobil, are these types of numbers in alternative fuel interesting to you? This type of project seems like it would be in your area of expertise. Building and running this type of production facility seems similar to building and running an oil refinery, your area of strength and competitive advantage. You then have to store and distribute the fuel, probably to large commercial customers like railroads, bus operators, heavy equipment operators, and maybe even truck operators.

Pursuing hydrogen from nuclear could also have political benefits. It gives you something constructive that you are pursuing in your area of expertise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, clean up or environment, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

I believe that fossil fuels will eventually be phased out for cleaner technologies. This is an opportunity to be on the leading edge of a new age in energy production. The development of cheap hydrogen fuel could spawn the development of new transportation technologies like supersonic jets, much in the same way that producing cheap oil products facilitated the development of our automotive industry. What do you think John D. Rockefeller would do?

The amount of money to develop nuclear hydrogen technology and gain a competitive advantage in what could be a huge industry is very small compared to the massive amount of cash you are generating each year. I am a small [sic] shareholder and in a reasoned and measured way, I say go for it!