[Christ]

You can also use resulting sulfuric acid and iodine to chemically strip hydrogen from water, and it doesn't require hydrocarbon use, and is cyclic... both materials are fully recoverable.

So you could have your own hydrogen plant with just a little chemistry and waste from removing ethanol from fuel. The problem with the sulfur iodine cycle, as I understand it, is that it takes very high temperatures to complete, and sulfuric acid is extremely caustic in vapor form at high temperatures/pressures.

After hashing out some math, it looks like anhydrous sulfuric is worth about 32 cents per gallon, while strongly diluted sulfuric maybe worth about 16 cents per gallon.

The annual production is approx 165 million tons, or about 8 billion dollars, which equates to approx 2 cents per pound. Anhydrous sulfuric weighs about 15 lbs per gallon.