A conceptual design for the carbon dioxide reforming of methane to consume greenhouse gases is implemented in an autothermal reformer (ATR)-based hydrogen production system. Based on the waste heat recovery configuration, a heat-integrated system without external heat supplies is proposed where the optimal operating conditions are determined by solving the constrained optimization algorithm for maximizing hydrogen selectivity or minimizing carbon dioxide selectivity. The results obtained from an Aspen HYSYS (R) simulator for the system design and optimization shows that the proposed stand-alone hydrogen production system can achieve 40%similar to 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Copyright (C) 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.