Despite the widespread availability of hydrogen production, system integration seems to be the biggest challenge. A fair trade-off is needed between efficiently producing hydrogen for future use and respecting the environment in terms of reducing CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Not always these criteria can be reconciled with energy security, understood as continuous electricity supply to which our civilization has become accustomed. The authors propose an advanced system exergy analysis – Thermo-Ecological Cost (TEC) for proper evaluation of the global efficiency of hydrogen production technologies. Additionally, a look will be proposed at the production of hydrogen via electrolysis and Cu-CL cycle as cogeneration of two useful products - hydrogen and oxygen. Such approach allows decomposing the energy expenditure for the process and assign a lower burden for the main product (hydrogen). The presented results clearly confirm the thesis that local energy efficiency is not a proper tool to evaluate the effectiveness of hydrogen technologies, especially when production of various hydrogen methods is to be compared.