In order to take full advantage of the heat from high temperature gas cooled reactor, thermodynamic analysis of high-temperature helium heated methane, ethanol and methanol steam reforming for hydrogen production based on the Gibbs principle of minimum free energy has been carried out using the software of Aspen Plus. Effects of the reaction temperature, pressure and water/carbon molar ratio on the process are evaluated. Results show that the effect of the pressure on methane reforming is small when the reaction temperature is over 900 degrees C. Methane/CO conversion and hydrogen production rate increase with the water/carbon molar ratio. However the thermal efficiency increases first to the maximum value of 61% and then decreases gradually. As to ethanol and methanol steam reforming, thermal efficiency is higher at lower reaction pressures. With an increase in water-carbon molar ratio, hydrogen production rate increases, but thermal efficiency decreases. Both of them increase with the reaction temperature first to the highest values and then decrease slowly. At optimum operation conditions, the conversion of both ethanol and methanol approaches 100%. For the ethanol and methanol reforming, their highest hydrogen production rate reaches, respectively, 88.69% and 99.39%, and their highest thermal efficiency approaches, respectively, 58.58% and 89.17%. With the gradient utilization of the high temperature helium heat, the overall heat efficiency of the system can reach 70.85% which is the highest in all existing system designs. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.