If pure hydrogen and pure oxygen are both very flammable, why is water not?
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Because Hydrogen and Oxygen LOVE hooking up. So when you have the two of them separated, just a little spark they will combine and release a bunch of energy – sometimes explosively.
But once they are together, they’re really hard to pull apart or to get to react with other things, exactly because they LOVE being together so much.
Hydrogen and Oxygen are like two people desperate to get married, so desperate they’ll get hitched to anyone they come across. Water is when they’ve already met each other and are now happily married.
Water being non-flammable is almost exactly the reason why hydrogen and oxygen are so flammable.
Water is incredibly stable; it has a very low amount of potential energy. On the other hand, hydrogen and oxygen separately (in diatomic form) have a high amount of potential energy; they are not so stable, and ideally want to dump that potential energy into heat.
So what happens? The hydrogen and oxygen react, releasing all of that potential energy as heat. They burn. And what do you get? Water, with very little energy left over to do anything.
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