Catalysts used for water-gas shift reactions, and other important industrial processes, often suffer from deposition of hydrocarbon and carbon species (coking) to reduce their effectiveness. Consequently, catalysts require reactivation/reforming to retain their catalytic activity. The effectiveness of this reforming depends on the type of species deposited and therefore it is very important to determine the nature of the carbon species. However, full determination of the nature of these species is very difficult. Neutron spectroscopy has been shown to be a very successful technique to ‘fingerprint’ different carbon and hydrogen species on catalysts materials. Inelastic Neutron Spectroscopy (INS) is a useful method for obtaining the information of hydrogenous species (C-H and O-H stretches) within the catalyst matrix.