Airbus Promised a 'Green' Hydrogen Aircraft. That Bet Is Now Unraveling (msn.com) 73
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:
Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project's budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade...
Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn't be ready by 2035... Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven't been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said...
Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that "required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s," according to the article.
"The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing... Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements."
Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn't be ready by 2035... Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven't been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said...
Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that "required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s," according to the article.
"The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing... Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements."
Probably not going to work for intercontinental (Score:3)
Probably not going to work for intercontinental routes, but would still be useful for places that you have to get to by air, like islands, the Baltic countries etc.
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In fact, probably a big chunk of Europe. And since Airbus will soon become the major economically viable supplier to many markets, such a plane will do just fine.
Re:Probably not going to work for intercontinental (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that the problem they have is that battery powered planes have become viable for short distance flights, while hydrogen has to compete with artificial jet fuel for medium and long range. And storing jet fuel, green or not, is a lot easier. On and off the plane.
If the total system for hydrogen is 4x the cost of traditional, and green jet fuel only double, which has won?
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I still think hydrogen-powered planes are feasible, you just need to modify them a bit: A lot of the energy is being used to lift many tons of metal and meat into the air, so what if you ran the plane along the ground. Then you could lose the wings, change the body shape to accommodate more passengers, and maybe stop at a few extra locations along the route. All you'd need to do is run the plane on, say, metal rails anchored to the ground and you've got a winner on your hands.
In case someone goes with th
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Hydrogen trains are dead too.
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It depends how green the green jet fuel is, for a start.
Re: Probably not going to work for intercontinenta (Score:2)
"battery powered planes have become viable for short distance flights"
When did this happen?
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Indeed, I was thinking of "technical feasibility", which actually puts them ahead of hydrogen planes as we actually have some full electric demonstration planes.
The mass penalty for batteries is a lot less today than it used to be.
I still think the idea of installing catapults in runways to reduce the energy cost (to the plane) for taking off amusing.
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It wasn't completely useless.
California's CARB snuck in a higher level of credits for tech that could refuel/recharge as quickly as gas / diesel in order to benefit those working on hydrogen. This was spearheaded by then CARB chairman Alan Lloyd, a specialist in fuel cells & hydrogen.
Some years later, Tesla demonstrated a battery swapping tech they had no intention of implementing broadly in order to qualify for that higher level of credits.
Re: Probably not going to work for intercontinenta (Score:2)
Solved problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Solved problem (Score:2)
The difficulty is that it would superficially resemble fuel derived from petroleum. And a large segment of the more vocal of the treehuggers subscribe to the "guilt by association" school of thought.
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You know the old saying about how when you are a hammer every problem looks like a nail? Some people are like that with electrification.
Re: Solved problem (Score:2, Insightful)
I realized this probably when I was in the second grade in 1992 in the Philadelphia public schools. "Earth science" (as it was called back then) lessons entailed simple morality tales about saving the environment by shutting down evil dirty polluting factories.
How the output of those plants (whether widgets or electricity) would continue to be available was not explained.
It was only later (perhaps when I was in my early 20s) that I realized that the answer to how the widgets would still be there was third w
Re: Solved problem (Score:4, Insightful)
are there really people opposed to the idea of "synthesized e-fuel made from captured carbon and renewable electricity" outside of your own brain?
I've debated a few of them here so probably. There was much opposition in the EU a couple years ago, and I have no idea what will be allowed here in Canada a decade from now. Fortunately it is just academic for now as there is no shortage of good old fashioned petroleum products.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24... [cnn.com]
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That's because synthetic, renewable fuel is usually used as an excuse to take no action and keep burning fossil fuels rather than an actual plan for the future. "The future is synthetic fuel! ... and it's coming like really soon now and totally won't be impractically expensive, so let's all keep using combustion engines and fossil fuels."
The absurd efficiency means electrification is the best solution unless it's something batteries can't do, like carry enough energy for medium and long distance flight.
Re: Solved problem (Score:2)
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Come on, we are on Slashdot. The site may be going downhill, but still no one will fall for stuff like "it takes a lot of extra energy to move that extra mass" compared to what an ICE wastes.
Re: Solved problem (Score:2)
Case in point: it's bad *because* it doesn't require tearing everything down, not because it won't work. And let's be honest, tearing the whole system down and reducing everyone's standard of living has always been the real objective; environmental stewardship is just the focus-grouped excuse that works best.
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Yes, because we all know that mass ignorance is the best reason not to do something properly.
Re: Solved problem (Score:2)
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Hardly a solved problem: In Denmark we had lot of investment in "power to X" to work with our huge investment in wind power. All those power to X projects have almost stopped.
Probably because they were stupid solutions to begin with. Like the one we are discussing now. Knowing when to stop is a valuable attribute many people lack.
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Contrails are a problem unfortunately. The weather was considerably nicer after 9/11 and during COVID flight restrictions, and the contrails themselves contribute quite a bit of warming, possibly half of the total climate effect from flying.
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The vast majority of flights are not intercontinental.
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A shame (Score:2)
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I guess that only leave long haul ships
And small scale stationary generation. Generators can power, say, a hospital forever if the grid is down as long as you can haul in fuel. I don't see any hospital running for days on batteries any time soon.
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Not enough, and not at night or on cloudy days.
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Now only if there was some way to account for variable generation, like some kind of mathematical averaging that informed you on how to put more solar panels up to generate more than you use when they are generating, and some way to store that excess generation for times when they aren't generating as much...
Some kind of "battery" where you could store the excess generation...
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I have been anti-hydrogen for cars for many reason (Score:3)
anti-hydrogen has unbeatable energy density as a fuel, but how do you store it safely?
(Its also very expensive to make)
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Either that or I could have worded my views a bit more carefully.
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The only real use for hydrogen is as a stationary fuel source, because it's too expensive to improve the density for use as a transportation fuel. In applications where you can afford to have a really big fuel tank, it can be useful. Think wind turbines with a tank in/as the mast, maybe. There's also some neat applications for small portable energy sources, as man-portable devices can benefit from use of fuel cells. The tanks aren't so expensive when they are small.
Ships were never a good fit for hydrogen b
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Hydrogen is not practical to store for an extended time, like on a long haul ship. If you want to store it, turn it into ammonia and burn that.
However, there are literal deposits of hydrogen sitting around that you can drill into and get close to free hydrogen. Yet no one does that. That by itself shows that the "hydrogen economy" is a lie.
You can't work around basic physics (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a certain about of energy to lift and move mass M from point A to B. You can work around that. It's just basic physics. That's why fuel density matters. Jet Fuel has energy density of 35-37 MJ/L. Hydrogen delivers 8 MJ/L. This means that jet fuel delivers more than 4 times more energy per unit of volume than hydrogen. Why is then anyone surprised that the hydrogen plane project failed?
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I don't anyone is surprised it failed. They would have been surprised if it succeeded.
Understanding basic physics (Score:2, Informative)
You're mixing mass and volume. From the Dept of Energy:
On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline. On a volume basis, however, the situation is reversed; liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L. https://www.energy.gov/eere/fu... [energy.gov]
The study compared gasoline to hydrogen, but Avgas and JetA are similar enough for the comparison to remain valid. Yes, hydrogen will require more volume on the plane to store the same amount of chemical energy, but the mass of the hydrogen will only be slightly higher to make up for the difference. If we accepted less cargo storage in the belly of the aircraft as a compromise, hydrogen could be a viable replacement for jet fuel.
Re: Understanding basic physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. In commercial planes most fuel is stored in wings. You also seem no clue of how much fuel airplanes burn and their tank capacity. Let's take the airbus A380-800 as an example. It's tank capacity is 320,000 liters (227.5 tonnes of jet fuel). Multiply this by 4 and you'll see how impossible it is to put 4 x the volume required by hydrogen for the same range into a plane. Then you'll understand why the prototype was only going to work with 100 passengers and for 1000 nautical miles. It's a tradeoff between size, mass and range and 1000 miles is simply not commercially viable. Could be technically viable as a concept plane but not commercially.
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They are already talking about liquid to liquid volume: "liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L". With hydrogen gas, you are likely in the range of 10-20 times as much volume.
Hint: See subject line.
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I guess unless you are a welder, a scuba diver, or work with liquid gasses, very few people study compressed gasses.
The expansion ratio of liquid hydrogen to gas is 1:850 so liquid hydrogen is very compact compared to atmospheric hydrogen. Also very heavy with the insulated containers, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Unfortunately the subject got a little confused when the energy density of compressed hydrogen was not shown. It has an energy density of 7 MJ/L. And because most hydrogen is compress
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China will probably have a successful one in 5 years.
Well, yes. When you don't have to worry about trivial details, like environmental regulations or how many people die, you can do a lot of cool stuff.
Itâ(TM)s fun how promises and bets are interc (Score:1)
A hydrogen aircraft? (Score:1)
Re: Oh the huge manatee (Score:2)
Hindenburg unlike most contemporary airliner crashes had many survivors. That freaked out reporter affected millions of ignorants and the rest is history and a few remaining blimps, rigid airships being out of fashion.
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I'm pretty sure the reason lighter-than-air transport is out of fashion doesn't have anything to do with the Hindenburg fire / explosion, and probably has a lot more to do with the fact that flying London to New York in a blimp takes 2 days instead of the 8 hours that a Boeing or Airbus jet aircraft does it several times a day.
But, you know, keep ironically blaming ignorance. It's so much more hilarious for the rest of us.
Hydrogen is hard (Score:2)
Should have been obvious from the start (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember reading about this and electric planes in Aviation Week and other media long ago. Hydrogen takes up something like 5 times the volume of jet fuel; there's no room for it. Hydrogen jet engines don't exist, and using fuel cells to spin electric motors is going backwards. Batteries might some day be energy-dense enough to be useful, but their weight doesn't diminish during flight like liquid fuel does.
The basic arithmetic just doesn't add up. Short range electric airplanes are not only short range, but their payload is limited. They're solutions in search of a problem.
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Modifying a gas turbine to burn hydrogen is probably the easiest part of it all - gas turbines can run on anything that burns.
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Hydrogen jet engines don't exist
Bullshit!
Hydrogen was successfully used in jet engines and proved to have advantages over kerosene. That is why it (and not kerosene) powered von Ohain's first jet engine in 1937 [wikipedia.org]! Further tests in the US were documented in NACA report 1383 [nasa.gov]. That the Saturn V could use hydrogen in its second stage was due to an existing hydrogen infrastructure for the Lockeed project CL-400 Suntan [wikipedia.org], a hydrogen-powered reconnaissance airplane. Later, the Soviet Union tested hydrogen and natural gas in the Tu-155 test vehicl [wikipedia.org]
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Sorry Mr Pedant. This is 2025, not 1937. Can you show me where one of these hydrogen jet engines is for sale today?
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Short range electric airplanes are not only short range, but their payload is limited. They're solutions in search of a problem.
They don't have to search for a problem, the problem is right there, short hop flights. On such flights a huge percentage of the fuel is burned on takeoff (unlike long flights where it's only 5-10%) and it's done wide open so the emissions are bad too. Electric planes are an ideal way to reduce their emissions, and they are actually feasible unlike long flights.
It's long flights where none of the altfuel stuff makes sense, except maybe biofuel from algae.
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The main problem with limited payload is that you need a pilot or 2 per payload. Eliminate the pilots and this problem goes away.
That obviously still leaves the range problem, but there are a lot of flights that take less than half an hour. They have pretty terrible fuel economy today, so the savings from going electric are huge.
Hydrogen is a difficult fuel to deal with. (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen as a fuel is so difficult to deal with that not even people launching rockets to space want to deal with it.
Hydrogen as a fuel will not produce carbon residue as it contains no carbon, but there's people that found ways to deal with that. Hydrogen has something like twice the energy density of many other fuels available but the thing is though that to get a meaningful amount of hydrogen in a fuel tank that isn't the size of a Zepplin airship means cooling it to a liquid. Liquid hydrogen is so cold it can freeze oxygen solid. That means needing complicated fuel tanks and lots of thermal insulation to keep bad things from happening, like a chunk of ice building up, breaking off, and causing a loss of life like what happened with at least one loss of a Space Shuttle orbiter.
Hydrogen as a fuel creates so many problems that few people want to deal with it. In launching things to space there's a very potent motivation to use the most efficient fuel possible, and after considerable experimentation the most efficient fuel is hydrogen. So, why isn't hydrogen the fuel used in every launch to space? Because hydrogen is a very difficult fuel to deal with, it is just not worth the added benefits versus fuels like methane and kerosene.
During World War Part Two the Allied Forces were using a fuel for aircraft that was in effect a high octane gasoline. When trying to pack a lot of power into a small aircraft they needed a fuel that could express a lot of energy quickly, meaning they used a volatile fuel. That proved to be deadly when there was an airplane crash or an attack on an aircraft carrier. To compromise on safety versus performance the US military settled on what we know as JP-5 and JP-8. Both JP-5 and JP-8 are roughly analogous to what the civil aviation industry uses.
JP-5 has a higher flashpoint than JP-8 and so is considered safer to use on aircraft carriers. By having a higher flashpoint though means it can more easily jell up in cold weather. For the Navy this works well for them but for the Air Force they needed a fuel that would not turn to molasses in an Alaskan winter so they use JP-8. If speaking in broad strokes there is an analog in civil aviation where JP-5 is like jet-A fuel and JP-8 is like jet-B fuel. Most airlines use jet-A for the fire safety but airlines in colder climates choose jet-B as it works better in the cold.
Would hydrogen fuel operate any different in a warm climate than a cold one? Not likely since the hydrogen would be at something like -430F there's not much difference on if the outside temperature was -40F or 120F, the hydrogen would be wanting to boil off and create a fire and explosion hazard regardless. Any liquid hydrogen fuel would still have a tendency to turn oxygen in the air to a solid, certainly any water in the air to a solid. Solid stuff building up on an aircraft would not be helpful in retaining aerodynamics or keeping the mass of the aircraft to a minimum.
You want compressed hydrogen than liquid hydrogen? Okay, I can give a list on how that is a bad idea too.
Hydrogen as a fuel is rarely practical. If hydrogen is "green" and cheap then expect people to use that hydrogen to make fuels that are "green" and cheap but far easier to handle like ammonia, methane, octane, and some kind of analog to the kerosene used in aviation and rockets to space.
Re: Hydrogen is a difficult fuel to deal with. (Score:1)
Fantastic post!
Add to this that hydrogen molecules diffuse through pretty much every material, making tanks that hold it brittle over time, prone to failure.
Hydrogen wants to react with oxygen extremely badly. The atmosphere has a lot of oxygen, and with a bit of heat, any volume of hydrogen that gets in contact with atmospheric oxygen will combust in an explosive way.
I don't want to be among the people who pioneer travel in hydrogen-propelled vehicles. I would have to see it operating safely at a commercia
I read (Score:2)
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Personally, I never thought hydrogen had any chance at scale. Nuclear...
Nuclear doesn't make sense at scale, either. Uranite is the least concentrated ore that we bother to mine. If you scale up the nuclear then we need to do a lot more mining to support it, and there is just not enough readily available ore to support our needs for long if we convert to using more nuclear anyway.
There is more than enough solar and wind energy available to support all of our needs for the foreseeable future, if we make efforts to a) use the energy industrially while it's most available and b) s
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I learn so much from this website, mostly from the comments. Really still one of the best places on the Internet, but requires a bit of a thick skin sometimes.
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Hey hey hey what are you doing?
Actually reading what someone wrote, thinking about it, and then modifying your own views based on the new information? What do you think this is, 2005?!
This is the new Slashdot where you're supposed to argue in bad faith, shit all over facts, and throw out non-sequitur after irrelevant tangent to distract from the core point of the conversation!
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Hydrogen transportation projects serve one purpose (Score:2)
To separate fools from their money. People have been bilking investors for decades. Decades. On foolish Hydrogen transportation projects. Only to rediscover laws of Physics. A recent example is Nikola Motor Company and their attempt to swindle investors. Trevor Milton, the founder was convicted and facing a long prison sentence, until pardoned by Trump for being an upstanding guy.
They did it for the subsidy (Score:1)
Got fuck all to do with hydrogen an sich (Score:2)
This is because of the inevitability of net zero getting pushed back and geopolitical instability.
Before Trump v2 hydrogen was planned to start competing with synthetic fuel in a little over 10 years for new planes. After drill baby drill, which is unlikely going to get reversed in 4 years because American politics will have other things to think about, it's competing with fossil fuel again for 2 decades at best. Also trade wars are completely destroying global supply lines, so who's got time for looking th