Not the least of those problems is how to obtain pure hydrogen. Today, the most common method is to separate it from methane or natural gas, but that process consumes a nonrenewable resource and produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that has to be disposed of in some way.

A better solution would be to extract hydrogen from water, which can be done by electrolysis — running electric current through water.

But the problem with that is it requires a major energy input, and the technology in use today isn’t very efficient — it creates a lot of heat, essentially wasted energy.

That’s where a research group at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University is toiling away to find a possible solution. About 10 researchers armed with a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy are attempting to develop catalysts — materials that facilitate chemical conversions — that will make the electrolysis process a lot more efficient. In part, they are doing this by trying to mimic the process of photosynthesis in which plants efficiently take water and split it into oxygen and hydrogen.

“One of the big problems with hydrogen as a fuel is the lack of efficiency of making it,” said Neal Woodbury, director of the Center for BioOptical Nanotechnology, a division of the Biodesign Institute. “We need to have mechanisms to make it more efficiently.”

If the right catalyst can be formed, it can be coated on the surface of electrodes placed in contact with water, producing hydrogen cheaply and efficiently, he said.

Theoretically, it could be possible to use wind or solar energy to produce the electricity, create the hydrogen and store it in a tank at home, then transfer it to a car where it would be stored in condensed form. A fuel cell in the vehicle would convert the hydrogen back to electricity to power the vehicle, he said.

The process would be clean and use renewable energy sources completely independent of fossil fuels. Now, the process is complex and expensive, but that may change as the technology improves, Woodbury sai d.

“Pumping stuff out of the ground and burning it will be cheaper until there’s nothing left to pump out of the ground,” he said. “But we can’t do that forever, probably only for a few more decades.”