Airbus Reveals Plans For Zero-Emission Aircraft Fueled By Hydrogen (theguardian.com) 223
Airbus has announced plans for the world's first zero-emission commercial aircraft models that run on hydrogen and could take to the skies by 2035. The Guardian reports: The European aersospace company revealed three different aircraft concepts that would be put through their paces to find the most efficient way to travel long distances by plane without producing the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global heating. UK holidaymakers and business travellers could fly from London to the Canary Islands, Athens or eastern Europe without producing carbon emissions, should the plans become a commercial reality.
All three of the aircraft concepts rely on hydrogen as a fuel because the only emissions produced when it is burned is water vapor, making it a clean fuel option for heavy vehicles such as planes, trains and trucks. The first of the Airbus concepts could carry between 120 and 200 passengers more than 2,000 nautical miles by using a turbofan design that includes a modified gas-turbine engine running on hydrogen, rather than jet fuel, which could be stored in tanks located behind the plane's rear pressure bulkhead. The second concept, a turboprop design, would also use a modified gas engine but could carry up to 100 passengers for 1,000 nautical miles on short-haul trips.
The aviation giant's plans also include a plane with an "exceptionally wide" body that blends into the plane's wings to open up multiple options for hydrogen storage and the cabin layout. This plane could carry as many passengers as the turbofan design and travel as far too. [...] Airbus said hydrogen planes would also require airports to install hydrogen transport and refueling infrastructure, and government support to upgrade aircraft fleets to allow airlines to retire their older, less environmentally friendly aircraft sooner than planned.
All three of the aircraft concepts rely on hydrogen as a fuel because the only emissions produced when it is burned is water vapor, making it a clean fuel option for heavy vehicles such as planes, trains and trucks. The first of the Airbus concepts could carry between 120 and 200 passengers more than 2,000 nautical miles by using a turbofan design that includes a modified gas-turbine engine running on hydrogen, rather than jet fuel, which could be stored in tanks located behind the plane's rear pressure bulkhead. The second concept, a turboprop design, would also use a modified gas engine but could carry up to 100 passengers for 1,000 nautical miles on short-haul trips.
The aviation giant's plans also include a plane with an "exceptionally wide" body that blends into the plane's wings to open up multiple options for hydrogen storage and the cabin layout. This plane could carry as many passengers as the turbofan design and travel as far too. [...] Airbus said hydrogen planes would also require airports to install hydrogen transport and refueling infrastructure, and government support to upgrade aircraft fleets to allow airlines to retire their older, less environmentally friendly aircraft sooner than planned.
Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
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And the hydrogen just appears by magic, eh? Just happens to be lying around? Where does the energy come from to obtain the hydrogen?
Natural gas, of course. Wait, what do you mean that produces CO2? I'm starting to think that we need a law that says that if you use the words "Hydrogen" and "zero emissions" to talk about the same product, the word "zero" must be in scare quotes. I mean seriously, it's getting pretty silly.
Don't get me wrong. Aviation is one of the fields where hydrogen probably makes sense as a power source. The energy density of batteries per kg probably isn't anywhere near what it would need to be for a purely elec
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only does steaming it from natural gas produce CO2 but you get less energy from the gas than if you just burned it direct so for ever BTU of hydrogen used approx double the amount of CO2 is released. Hydrogen as a fuel is the worst kind of greenwash imaginable at the moment. In theory it could be produced by nuclear and or renewables but right now there isn't the infrastrcture anywhere in the world to produce enough and probably won't be any time soon.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen as a fuel is the worst kind of greenwash imaginable at the moment.
(my emphasis)
"could take to the skies by 2035" - this is a speculative technology reveal designed to get people thinking. There are already large green hydrogen plants coming online (20MW - it's more or less enough to run one jet engine continually - see my post above). You have 15 years of engineering time to come up with a way to scale those up, say 100 to 1000 times and build them at a few airports in western/central Europe in order for this to be a sensible idea. That's completely reasonable.
You need to reduce the cost of the plants enough and make sure you have decent designs so that it's reasonable to stop and start the plants depending on the cost of electricity during the day. In this case, even if efficiency isn't high, you may end up paying near zero electricity costs just using free capacity from excess wind and solar capacity.
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Thats all well and good , but solar and wind farms take up physical room and in europe space is limited in a lot of countries so where would you suggest the hundreds of gigawatts of renewable capacity to provide H2 for aircraft and ground transporation be built? Sure, you can uild wind farms in shallow seas but unless you want them along every single coastline (and that won't work for switzerland, austria etc) its not going to happen. Over to you...
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Scotland alone has enough offshore power to power the entirety of Europe without even breaking sweat. Over to you.
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Are you serious? Scotland has 8GW of wind power in total (onshore and offshore) which isn't even enough for the whole of scotland never mind europe so unless you're talking about europe in the 1950s you're talking out of your arse.
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I think GP meant potential power if all possible offshore sites of Scotland are used.
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What is the potential power output from installing massively redundant arrays of rodent-centered electrical generating apparatus in every house? How many hamsters on wheels do you need to power all of Europe? Only about 560 billion! Just think of the green possibilities of this power source. Why, each person would only need to be responsible for about 760 hamsters. This is the solution we need for today's power generation and carbon consumption problems.
(0.5 W per hamster wheel, about 2458 TWHr power u
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Where did you find this?
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"could take to the skies by 2035" - this is a speculative technology reveal designed to get people thinking.
So, a PR stunt?
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Reasonable, but possibly wrong. Hydrogen can be more concentrated energy than natural gas. There are questions about the weight of the storage, etc. And it can also, in principle, but produced from energy+water. And the energy could be from solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, etc. Whether that's cost effective is a different question, and at the moment the answer is no. Who knows what it will be in a decade or two.
My quibble is the "zero emissions" claim. If they're planning a combustion engine, hydrogen bu
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"Hydrogen can be more concentrated energy than natural gas"
If it comes from methane in the first place thats irrelevant.It takes energy to extract it from methane and you lose a lot of the potential thermal energy in the process. Its a lose-lose.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
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Methane (the primary component of natural gas) can be carbon neutral if you use a Sabatier process to generate it from water and atmospheric CO2. As I understand it, the usual process to get hydrogen is not nearly as environmentally friendly (it's not electrolysis). It's also much easier to keep methane as a cryogenic liquid, making it one of the better rocket fuels. The main place where hydrogen is strictly better is in a fuel cell to produce electricity.
I'm just sad that aluminum is mostly immune to hydr [wikipedia.org]
Anhydrous ammonia (Score:2)
Hey, it worked for the X15.
I didn't just make this up.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/... [newatlas.com]
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For the sake of perspective: Hydrogen is not an energy resource, because it's all been burned up. It's an energy transfer medium that lets you move energy from a resource to a consumer. All the environmental impact takes place in unburning the hydrogen by adding energy extracted from the resource.
If the resource is a reactor, you effectively have nuclear-powered airplanes.
Re: Zero emissions (Score:2)
Solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, or nuclear. Lots of zero emissions options.
Whatâ(TM)s with your oil addiction?
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
And the hydrogen just appears by magic, eh? Just happens to be lying around? Where does the energy come from to obtain the hydrogen?
You could easily generate Hydrogen it from excess grid power that otherwise goes to waste. There are already multiple projects in Europe aimed at high efficency hydrogen production for the purpose of synthesising methane for energy storage. Cutting out the methane bit would be a big bonus if they can solve the technological problems of storing large amounts of hydrogen safely. A modern electrolysis plant today has an energy efficiency of around 80%. If they can make this work economically it will be a big deal for the aviation industry. Side note, if they go with the flying wing I'll go out of my way to fly in one, somewhere, anywhere outside of a war zone, just for the sake of having flown somewhere in a flying wing.
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Exactly how the "excessive grid power" goes to waste?
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly how the "excessive grid power" goes to waste?
Large scale thermal power plants in general, but nuclear power plants especially, especially, are really inflexible and problematic - especially in places like France this is a big problem since they are almost 100% Nuclear. Wind power is easy to stop and start, but the current subsidy structure encourages them to produce anyway so not all wind turbines are fitted with controllable inverters. This means there are times when the price goes really low because the Nuclear plants have to dump the electricity and the wind generators don't get paid to drop off the grid for them. In fact, there have even been times when it's been so desperate that the (wholesale) price of electricity has gone negative and the Nuclear plants were actually paying people to use their electricity.
At the point that electricity costs are negative, companies that have wholesale contracts will do silly things like running heating in empty buildings since they are being paid for that. This really is electricity going to "waste", though it's needed because the alternative would be to emergency stop the nuclear plant which can take months to recover.
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especially especially especially - oh well; I guess it's worth emphasising it can be a big problem [limejump.com]
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Your own link blames it on solar wind and nuclear but you picket only nuclear to blame here. Well, but the point is that nuclear does not have such big problem as solar and wind because nuclear is reliable and the plants can enter into long term contracts. So spot prices are not relevant to them. Wind and solar somewhere do not have a big problem as well since regulations will prefer them to e.g. coal. That is a nice subsidy for solar and wind right there.
Private money isn't flooding into Nuclear and Coal because they have a high LCOE. Private money is flowing into Wind and Solar because their LCOE is a third of that of Coal and Nuclear. It has nothing to do with regulations unfairly punishing Nuclear and Coal, they are simply very bad investments. On top of that neither Wind nor Solar are subject to fluctuations in fuel prices and neither has a the massvie pollution problems of Nuclear and Coal. The biggest subsidy here is to Nuclear which is uninsurable wi
Re:Zero emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Spot energy prices are rarely negative in France. They are much more often negative in Germany ... especially when wind blows and sun shines. This leads to negative prices in Germany since German law requires to prefer renewables for electricity production. Prices go negative in Germany and this negative price will somewhat spill to neighbouring countries. Nuclear power in France is not such a problem.
Anyway, this is only about spot prices. Most part of your electricity bill is actually from long term contracts which are never negative. So trying to fuss about occasionally negative spot prices is misleading.
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And the hydrogen just appears by magic, eh? Just happens to be lying around? Where does the energy come from to obtain the hydrogen?
Err! Water is comprised of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, so using electrolysis there is no problem producing plenty of Hydrogen. As for the energy used for electrolysis that can come from solar, nuclear or polluting electrical power. Of course, storing a large amount of Hydrogen safely may be a bit problematic.
That said the Hindenburg sends its best wishes. \(*_*)/
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Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
That can change.
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Hydrogen fuel cells arent even close to new technology. When I was a child in the 1970s people said the same shit you are saying now. Thats 50 fucking years.
Re: Zero emissions (Score:2)
Sunlight for one method.
https://www.elektormagazine.co... [elektormagazine.com]
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Informative)
It's more the "Stored in tanks" bit that irks me. Pressurized H2 needs heavy-duty storage - and that's most of your carrying capacity taken up right there.
There are a bunch of interesting hydrogen storage ideas, including lightweight but strong tanks mostly based around carbon fibre up to 700 bar. Also, airliners have a limited time in flight, so use cryogenic liquid hydrogen might be completely reasonable. If there's one place where it can be worth using expensive technology then the airline industry is it. It's also the area where batteries are going to have a hard time competing with hydrogen so it makes sense to invest. This is especially true since it would be completely practical to have a hydrogen electrolysis plant directly at an airport replacing the huge fuel storage tanks they need to have already, all you need is electricity and water supplied to the airport which could make whole fuel logistics safer, easier and more reliable.
There's already a 10MW plant online [fuelcellsworks.com] and a 20MW plant is planned for Canada soon [hydrogenics.com] so this is changing from the range of speculative science to a question of engineering that Slashdotters should be interested in getting involved with. It makes me quite sad that we've now got the same negativity around this that we had over wind power 10-15 years ago when everyone was saying that it's impossible. Remember the history of that - what was impossible now turns out to be the cheapest source of flexibly available energy available.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
engineering that Slashdotters should be interested in getting involved with. It makes me quite sad that we've now got the same negativity around this ...
Remember that until Apple integrated phone capabilities into their Walkman most vocal slashdotters thought that mobile phones were a passing fad for yuppies that would never catch on. The disdain for engineering has been here for a while!
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LOL! If I had modpoints I would mod you up.
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"Remember that until Apple integrated phone capabilities into their Walkman most vocal slashdotters thought that mobile phones were a passing fad for yuppies that would never catch on."
Completely false. The closest thing you could say that would come close to that is that slashdotters thought that the iPod was lame because it had no wifi and less space than a nomad. Mobile phones were already a thriving, established market when the iPod was introduced.
Re:Zero emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember that until Apple integrated phone capabilities into their Walkman most vocal slashdotters thought that mobile phones were a passing fad
No. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. Mobile phones had already been ubiquitous for more than a decade at that point. Everybody had one.
The skepticism was over whether the full-touchscreen integrated smartphone would catch on, not mobile phones in general.
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Slashdot tends to be very wrong about technology.
Actually, Slashdot tends to be very wrong about the public acceptance of technology.
Nerds are not typical consumers.
In 2007, I didn't see the point of a smartphone. If I wanted something "smart", I would use my laptop.
I didn't foresee that BILLIONS of people would use smartphones as their one-and-only computing device.
I didn't realize how wrong I was until 2010. I was on a family outing in Zhejiang. We stopped to eat lunch next to a rice paddy. We were watching a barefoot rice farmer wading through the
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Practical? Do you know how many billions of dollars it would take to replace the existing fueling infrastructure at just one mid-size commercial airport? Also, during any transition, both fueling systems would have to be operational at the same time, so you couldn't just take over the existing fuel storage locations or
Re:Zero emissions (Score:5, Funny)
We'd best not even try then.
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
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We'd best not even try then.
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
It's super expensive. It may be true that it's better to pursue other options. I guess we'll see.
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Also, airliners have a limited time in flight, so use cryogenic liquid hydrogen might be completely reasonable.
It's also quite cold up there. 40 degrees less will make a huge difference.
They use L.E.D.s to release it from Metal (Score:5, Funny)
The Hydrogen is stored in a Heavy Metal matrix and release by UV light emitting diodes. "It's called the LED Zeppelin", said Baron Von Hindenburg, as he ascended to the heavenly lofted aircraft.
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Overall, we need this technology. We need some type of clean, renewable fuel that is energy dense. Batteries are nowhere near there yet. It would be ideal to have something less nasty than hydrogen, perhaps ethanol or Audi's e-fuels/synthetic diesel. Hydrogen might be the best of breed for aviation.
Right now, H2 storage may be at an infancy, but battery tech was medicore for a few decades until the lithium battery was invented. If hydrogen storage can be made idiot-resistant... i.e won't go boom in car
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There are a bunch of interesting hydrogen storage ideas, including lightweight but strong tanks mostly based around carbon fibre up to 700 bar.
Hydrogen is not dense, and you have to put those tanks somewhere. Because you're talking about high pressures, you're limited to spheres and cylinders, which means you can't put very large tanks in the wings, like aircraft typically do. There are going to be a lot of challenges here.
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The first airliner that ran on hydrogen used liquid hydrogen [ram-home.com].
The main drawback is that even LH is much less dense than, say, petrol, or even LNG. In rockets this becomes visible: theoretically LH is the best fuel (highest Isp), but because its density is so low, the increase in tank size means you end up with very little performance advantage over RP-1 or LNG.
In the Tu-155, the LH tank took up 1/3 of the fuselage.
Re: Zero emissions (Score:3)
Hydrogen for small capacity long term storage needs to be in high pressure tanks, or dissolved in something.
At the airports and in the planes you'd use liquid hydrogen, boiling it off for cooling. Insulation can be light weight.
That said, just for planes biofuel seems good enough. There's not enough arable land to use biofuel for all transport, but for planes it will do.
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"There's not enough arable land to use biofuel for all transport, but for planes it will do."
Topsoil-based biofuel is just another idiotic and unnecessary way to sell out the future for profits today. You make it from algae.
Re: Zero emissions (Score:2)
Algae sounds nice and all, but open sea farming with enviromentally competetive crops has unusably low yields. Open pond farming needs lots of water and optimized crops will quicker face competition than land based crops. Bioreactor farming is currently very expensive.
Growing stuff on land is easy mode ...
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Growing stuff on land is easy mode ...
Easy mode is better. There's less chance for mishap.
We have plenty of desert land which we could be actively reclaiming in the process of using seawater to algae farming.
Re: Zero emissions (Score:2)
Sea water is expensive to pump, but more importantly the salt content in the ponds will go through the roof in no time. You can't continuously pump water and just flush them, because the ponds will be fertilized and you can't afford to lose all the nutrients.
Farming on arable land both keeps fertilizer relatively well contained and land crops are much easier to give a head start against weeds.
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Sea water is expensive to pump,
It's cheap to do with heat pipes, and not egregiously expensive to do with tesla turbines.
but more importantly the salt content in the ponds will go through the roof in no time. You can't continuously pump water and just flush them, because the ponds will be fertilized and you can't afford to lose all the nutrients.
Yes, you can. Algae doesn't need to be fertilized.
Farming on arable land both keeps fertilizer relatively well contained and land crops are much easier to give a head start against weeds.
If you're making biofuel you don't really have to care much about weeds, especially if you are making butanol. They're feedstock too. But topsoil-based fuel is still dumb.
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You make it from algae.
Oil from algae costs about $100 per gallon.
Decades of research have failed to find techniques for making it cheaper.
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It's more the "Stored in tanks" bit that irks me. Pressurized H2 needs heavy-duty storage - and that's most of your carrying capacity taken up right there.
I bet those Airbus engineers never even thought of that! I bet they'll be really red-faced when they read your critique. No doubt they'll be calling upon you to set them straight.
NOx (Score:4, Insightful)
Burning hydrogen still produces NOx. It will take more than just switching to a different fuel to make flying green.
Re:NOx (Score:5, Informative)
Compared to CO2 NOx is a virtual irrelevancy.as a pollutant (except in city streets) its atmospheric half life is approx 35 HOURS. CO2 is around 200 years.
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Burning hydrogen still produces NOx. It will take more than just switching to a different fuel to make flying green.
Not according to the VW emissions regulators....
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With a "lightweight" 100 MW fuel cell, right?
Re:NOx (Score:5, Interesting)
Burning hydrogen still produces NOx. It will take more than just switching to a different fuel to make flying green.
Let's see 2H2 + O2 --> 2(H2O) + Energy (Were is the pollution?)
The only problem is the possibility of uncontrolled combustion. There is a reason why Hydrogen was banned in dirigibles since 1937.
A major source of NOx is the high temperature oxidation of the diatomic nitrogen found in combustion air [wikipedia.org] - if you combust the hydrogen it will form water. The high temperature will cause some of the N2 in the air to oxidise, so you will still see NOx pollution.
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Re:NOx (Score:4, Interesting)
So the problem is the oxidizer being plain air? There's not much anyone can do about that except to stop burning air and have a tank of oxygen instead. At that point you might as well go all the way and replace the jets with rockets, since jets depend on the air for reaction mass as well as oxidizer.
The problem is that the nitrogen in the "plain air" is being oxidised - how much is adjusted by at least temperature, pressure and time. To avoid it/reduce it, you can use fuel cells [wikipedia.org] rather than combustion.
However, for airplanes NOx is probably less of an issue than for cars etc. NOx is a pretty bad local pollutant - e.g. in cities - but I'm not sure if the amount released by planes would be large enough to affect the ozone layer or not (Some NOx can react with Ozone to become NO2 and O2).
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Burning it seems kind of silly when electric motors are so simple and efficient (and a ducted fan will still probably weight less than a jet engine. You'd end up with the same (or slightly better) efficiency, but really no emissions at the point of production.
I guess they're not expecting fuel cells to be light/high power enough in 15 years?
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:3, Informative)
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Its so much safer flying aircraft with tons of kerosene on board. Not at all said by the instigators of 9-11.
Suicidal pilots have taken hundreds of lives before. Hardly takes the threat of hydrogen or terrorism. We're never going to mitigate 100% of this risk, so might as well at least try newer cleaner designs and be as safe as we can be.
Re: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:2)
You donâ(TM)t think technology has advanced a little since the 1930s?
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Said the designers of the Hindenburg . . .
. . . especially because we have made no technological progress since 1937.
Re:What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
An aircraft burning and crashing with only 30% fatalities? Sounds good to me. Compare that to, for example TWA Flight 800. Or to the Concorde crash. Jet fuel burns and explodes very well, you know.
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Or you could just use a regular plane (Score:3)
and generate the jet fuel by sequestering CO2.
Yes, sequestering CO2 takes electricity, but in not too long there will be a big surplus of solar energy available at midday to power it.
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Jet fuel has all kinds of additives and a lot of sulphur. Hydrogen might seriously boost the airport air quality.
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A half-way step would be to capture CO2, add water and energy, and create methane instead of jet fuel. If Airbus can modify a turbofan engine to run on hydrogen, it certain can modify it to run on methane. It would be cleaner burning than jet fuel, require less processing to produce, and is a lot easier to store and handle than pressurized or cryogenic hydrogen.
As a bonus: methane (natural
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Not serious (Score:3)
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Hydrogen is an easy win for the aviation industray - they can pretend its green (it most certain ly is not if steamed from natural gas) and RR & GE would only have to tweek their engine designs a little to run on it. Of course what they don't ask is who would want to travel on a plane that had tons of an explosive gas pressurised to 1000 bar beneath their feet? Liquid fuels are dangeorus enough but highly pressurised flammable gases are a whole different ball game.
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Bullshitology! (Score:3)
0. Whatever we manufacture, being that a hydrogen fuel cell, a lithium battery or a bicycle, we create byproducts and emissions.
1. 0-emission doesn't exist. Those planes would emit water vapor as the byproduct of burning hydrogen. Lots of water is better than lots of CO2? The fact that we drink water doesn't imply that filling the atmosphere with vapor is a good idea.
2. By 2035, 15 years from now, is a very looong timespan. You could even predict men on Mars and Venus by that time and even flying cars and bikes, terabit-per-second mobile tech, a cure to all cancers and viruses and so on.
That article sounds more like a "stock exchange shaker" than a real thing.
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1) no shit Sherlock
2) water vapour is emitted either way - that is what the contrails are made of
3) 15 years from now is about the time when Airbus was planning to develop the A320 replacement. It is not a long timespan in aircraft manufacturing at all
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1) no shit Sherlock
OK
2) water vapour is emitted either way - that is what the contrails are made of
It's all about the emission rates, dude. Even oxygen emitted too quickly would kill everyone alive here!
3) 15 years from now is about the time when Airbus was planning to develop the A320 replacement. It is not a long timespan in aircraft manufacturing at all
This is not about a new aircraft, it's about a new aircraft with new engine technology and new fuel mass production. All within 15 years.
I am arguing that in 15 years none will remember anything unless it will be a reality. This is why I say that's more vaporware than anything else.
Unless Elon Musk kicked in...
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Emitting water vapour into the atmosphere is not a big problem, where as CO2 emitted up there is. It's worse than emissions on the ground. While it's not perfect shifting those emissions to somewhere they can potentially be contained, or even mostly eliminated if we use renewable energy to produce the hydrogen, is worthwhile.
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Emitting water vapour into the atmosphere is not a big problem, where as CO2 emitted up there is. It's worse than emissions on the ground. While it's not perfect shifting those emissions to somewhere they can potentially be contained, or even mostly eliminated if we use renewable energy to produce the hydrogen, is worthwhile.
For water vapor I think it's all about emission rates.
For "renewable energy to produce the hydrogen" I wish that a process existed *without* emitting more trash in the atmosphere!
And in the unlikely case it actually existed, it's still about the emission rates.
Hydrogen is not a fuel (Score:2)
It's a storage method. So these aircraft are "zero emission" only if the energy stored in the hydrogen (and that needed to get the hydrogen) is zero emission. You can fly a "hydrogen fuelled" aircraft on energy that comes from burning rubber tyres if you really want to.
So they're only potentially zero emission. And that only if we decide that water vapour and cloud seeding are not problems.
Re:Hydrogen is not a fuel an that is the point (Score:3)
Batteries in electric cars are also not a fuel.
The whole idea is to have carbon neutral enegy sources (like windmills etc) and make that energy mobile such that no other (not carbon neutral) sources would have to be used.
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Batteries in electric cars are also not a fuel.
The whole idea is to have carbon neutral enegy sources (like windmills etc) and make that energy mobile such that no other (not carbon neutral) sources would have to be used.
Sure, but that's not Airbus's territory. They've no way of knowing whether any given flight is zero emissions or not. But they want the PR.
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And then in any discussion about energy storage (like hydrogen) people say, "this isn't even an energy source, where would you ever get clean energy!!"
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It's funny because in any discussion about clean energy (wind, solar) people say, "you can't use it because the output fluctuates!!"
And then in any discussion about energy storage (like hydrogen) people say, "this isn't even an energy source, where would you ever get clean energy!!"
The point is that you don't get the clean energy from Airbus.
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This fucking guy. Because water's such a big problem.
That's a good point: water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, so I guess you can just filter the hydrogen out with a really fine mesh, right? I feel such a fool.
Oh, the humanity! (Score:3)
Ok but... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Extra Weight? (Score:2)
Toyota's Mirai, their hydrogen vehicle, has 2 tanks that weight a combined 87.5kg (193 lbs), rated for 10,000 PSI, and gives it a range of 500 kms.
Granted, Toyota over-manufactures their product for safety and durability -- but factoring that tank weight up for what is needed for an airplane would increase the overall weight of the plane considerably.
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Yup batteries appear from butterflies, they dont require mines running big machines sucking down enormous amounts of oil, All those factories in unregulated countries they dont require oil either and they dont turn their local surroundings into a toxic wasteland where everything dies. Last but not least we all know that China for starters will basically just dump millions upon tens or 100s of millions of batteries into kill whatever is left after they overfish now.
The same applies to fossil fuel mining and its subsequent consumption except that activity generates orders of magnitude more CO2 that lithium mining and battery use. Now do yourself a favour and stop making an ass of yourself in public.
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orders of magnitude more CO2 that lithium mining
What about mining the other materials? WHY DID YOU JUST CHERRY PICK A SINGLE MATERIAL? A MATERIAL ONLY YOU MENTIONED?
Nickel mines are the worst environmental disasters on the planet. Not only didnt know that, there is an active effort to conceal this fact from you, BY THE GREENS.
Mach+ jets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh the irony - you have a go at the elites then suggest the solution is supersonic travel for - the elites! Guess who travelled on Concorde? Hint , it wasn't mum, dad and 2+4 kids going to disneyland and if you think a new generation of supersonic airliners would have bargain basement ticket prices then I've got a bridge for sale you might like to view.
And thatys before we get on to the massive carbon footprint supersonic jets by their very nature have.
Re: (Score:2)
It was only chance that the Concorde that crashed was a charter flight. It would have been a hell of a thing to have so many of the "elites" gone at the same time.
You're sick.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact you consider Skype and an in-person exchange to be comparable shows exactly how many deals you've closed.
Re: (Score:2)