ABSTRACT
The April 1972 meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston promised to be just another of the thousands of scientific congresses held every year. C. Marchetti had been discussing and calling for the introduction of hydrogen as a chemical fuel since the late 1960s. The idea was to use a large nuclear power plant to produce both hydrogen and ammonia to meet the then skyrocketing demand for fertilizer. Electrolysis is a proven process for making hydrogen and oxygen on an industrial scale, but it has been extensively used only in places where electricity is extremely cheap, such as Canada and Sweden with their vast hydropower. The amount of energy needed to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis is exactly the amount of energy given off in the reverse process when hydrogen burns and recombines with oxygen to reform water vapor.
