Abstract
There are several methods for the hydrogen production such as steam reforming of natural gas, photocatalytic method, biological method, electrolysis and thermochemical method, etc. These days it has been widely studying for the hydrogen production method having low hydrogen production cost and high efficiency. In this paper, patents in the hydrogen production by water electrolysis were gathered and analyzed. The search range was limited in the open patents of USA(US), European Union(EP), Japan(JP), and Korea(KR) from 1996 to 2005. Patents were gathered by using key-words searching and filtered by filtering criteria. The trends of the patents was analyzed by the years, countries, companies, and technologies.