The energy stored in hydrogen gas is enormous, but the challenge is how to release that energy in a controlled way.
Hydrogen holds great promise as a clean renewable fuel for the future because the only waste product of using it as a fuel is water.
There's already a growing fleet of hydrogen powered cars and buses on the roads in London and a growing network of hydrogen fuelling stations.
So what is it that holds us all back from having a hydrogen powered vehicle?
One of the big challenges in using hydrogen as a fuel is how to split apart the two atoms of the hydrogen molecule to release the energy.
Currently, the best way to do that is using platinum.
But the problem is that platinum is very expensive, more expensive than gold, and it's a limited resource.
We are looking into the natural world to find ways of splitting hydrogen, using cheaper metals.
Bacteria all around us use hydrogen for energy.
These are bacteria found in all sorts of environments, in the soil, in lakes, even in our own stomachs.
And they're able to split hydrogen using large molecules called enzymes.
And these enzymes split apart the hydrogen using special metal sites very deep inside the enzyme.
And these metals are cheap, readily available metals, nickel and iron.
Here at the University of Oxford, I'm working with my colleague, Dr Philip ECHE to study how these enzymes from bacteria are able to split hydrogen.
Dr. Ash is now going to tell us more about how he's studying these enzymes.
Enzymes have shown us that it's possible to split hydrogen gas using cheap and abundant metals,
nickel and iron, but we really don't know what makes them so efficient at doing this.
One of the problems that we face when we're studying these enzymes is that all the chemistry
takes place at a tiny metal site within a very large enzyme molecule here in Oxford.
We've developed a technique that uses Infra-Red light to take snapshots of the metals inside the enzyme as they split the hydrogen gas.
There's still a lot of fundamental research needed here,
but what we're learning from studying how bacteria in the natural world are able to use cheap metals to extract energy from
hydrogen brings us a step closer to the reality of affordable vehicles running on hydrogen as a clean renewable fuel.