It seems like everything
is going green these days but there's one mode of transportation that seems to be clinging to the traditional, fuel-loving ways. And while commercial
aviation has made strides through smarter design
and cleaner engines, many of those gains have been nullified by more air traffic. The challenge is enormous. This is a large industry. It will take decades to convert. The good news is that we
will have a solution as early as three years out that
people can get into and start moving zero emission. And it turns out that the solution could be all around us. Hydrogen is the most abundant
element in the universe. And so if you had to use
something, it would be great. The only product of the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen is water. We looked at the fundamentals of what it would require to
take an aircraft up in the air of significant size, over
significant distance, commercially relevant. You get your hydrogen fuel
cell being the best approach from the cost of fuel, efficiency of utilization of the fuel and the mitigation of the climate effects. Serial cleantech
entrepreneur Val Miftakhov started ZeroAvia following
his previous success in the EV charging industry. So the beauty about hydrogen in general is that the energy density
of hydrogen as fuel is actually three times
better than jet fuel. So you can see any size of aircraft going for any distance that jet fuel aircraft can go over time. It will just take significant amount of time to get the industry over, but this technology can scale to all sizes of aircraft that we use
in commercial service. ZeroAvia uses a hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity
to turn a propeller. Unlike a traditional engine
which uses combustion to create energy, a fuel
cell generates electricity through an electrochemical reaction. In this case, hydrogen
and oxygen are combined to generate electricity, heat and water. ZeroAvia has flown a six-seater aircraft on a hydrogen fuel cell; a world first. Now they're aiming bigger, at 20 seats. That's technically commercial. One side of the aircraft,
the left side, will replace the engine with our power plants. We still got a normal
engine on the right side. And part of this is, in
aviation you want to ramp up risk profile in meaningful steps. So anything happens, we
have the second engine. But even in the first
flight test campaign, what we're planning to do
is to demonstrate operation of this aircraft purely
on zero emission power on the left side engine. Once we take off, we're
able to switch over to completely zero emission power. Hydrogen is used throughout
all sections of a flight, that maximizes the efficiency
of the entire operation that reduces the weight,
provides for best sort of mission capabilities,
payload and range. Building power plants and
fuel cells is one thing, creating a whole new infrastructure for supplying hydrogen is
something entirely different. In automotive a big part of the reason why hydrogen did not take off is because the fueling infrastructure needs to be so distributed. For let's say, United States, you have a hundred
thousand fueling stations. Compare that with aviation
where 95% or more traffic in the United States is
concentrated in 100 locations. So that's a three order
magnitude difference which makes build out of the
infrastructure much simpler. It's much larger, much
more concentrated stations, but they're much fewer in quantity. Calling it simpler might be
underselling the challenge of distributing hydrogen,
which unlike other fuels that can be easily
transported in liquid form, is usually found instead
in a gaseous state. How do you get the hydrogen
from point A to point B? We don't have pipelines
from moving hydrogen around. We don't have all the specialized trucks to move them around and so we got thinking, we need a solution that can be a low capital
expenditure solution and that's the genesis of the company. John-Paul Clarke is the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer
of Universal Hydrogen, a startup that has designed
a modular tank system for the domestic turbo prop market. Like ZeroAvia, it allows
for retrofitting planes already in use. Each module has two capsules and so what we do is
load it into the aircraft as if it was cargo, strap it down, connect it to the aircraft,
close the loading door, and that would be it. When you get to your destination,
you'd basically unload it, put it back in a truck, send
it back to the production site to get refills. We needed to basically
come up with something that could both fit in containers and also fit in the aircraft,
not require increases in the maximum takeoff
weight of the aircraft. This compromise is one
of the biggest hurdles that may prevent widespread
adoption of hydrogen. Obviously, you're gonna
have to take out some seats because the energy density
of hydrogen is less than jet fuel and you can't store it in the wings practically,
so you're gonna have to take away some space in the fuselage. In the ultra-fine margins of aviation, removing 10 to 20% of
your seats is a tough ask, but that hasn't deterred startups like ZeroAvia or Universal Hydrogen. The maintenance cost of a fuel
cell motor system goes down and it goes down
significantly, because motors and fuel cells have
much fewer moving parts than a gas turbine engine. And so the wear and tear is much lower and therefore the time
between overhaul is longer. And so when you put all that
together, our numbers indicate that the CASM, Cost per
Available Seat Mile, actually goes down slightly
or is at the worst equivalent to what you have now. So what you'll have is a smaller cabin or smaller number of seats. However, the cost for each of those seats to operate it is the same
or better with the hydrogen. Like ZeroAvia, Universal Hydrogen is
also working on engines, successfully testing their
two megawatt iron bird that will allow them to
retrofit planes carrying up to 55 passengers. ZeroAvia is aiming for their first commercial
hydrogen electric flight between London and Rotterdam
with their 19-seater by around 2024. But much like the range
anxiety that has plagued some battery-powered
electric vehicles on land, hydrogen fuel cells are
also fairly limited. At this point, they still
don't have the capacity to power a common 100-passenger jet. Beyond fuel cells, however,
there is another hope for our lightest, most abundant element: Burning it. The first eureka moment,
I suppose, is when we saw steam in the exhaust because we are thinking
to ourselves, "Huh? We're burning something
here when you're producing absolutely no CO2." An expert in gas turbine combustion, professor Bobby Sethi leads research at Cranfield University in the U.K. Built on a former RAF base, the college runs multiple
aeronautical programs. But what Bobby is focused
on is burning hydrogen, as cleanly as possible. So what we are trying to demonstrate in this rig is how we can conceive some hydrogen combustion
technologies that can be integrated in the next generation aircraft engines, which will deliver not
only zero CO2 emissions, but also ultra-low NOx emissions. NOx or nitrogen oxides
are a significant source of air pollution globally. They're the dirty particulates
that cause smog in cities, usually spat out by diesel
cars, scooters and buses. Hydrogen is characterized by much wider flammability limits, which means we can go to
much leaner combustion. And as a result, we can burn at much lower flame
temperatures and that's better for reducing NOx emissions. Going leaner means burning
fuel with an excess of air in the engine. Using something like
gasoline, lean burn emits far fewer hydrocarbons. Doing it with hydrogen also
delivers cleaner emissions. While NOx is a pollutant,
hydrogen combustion produces up to 90% less nitrogen oxide than kerosene. So while burning hydrogen
isn't technically as clean as using it inside a fuel cell, it's still a huge
improvement over jet fuel. Unfortunately, like
any radically new idea, there are other potential
byproducts of the process that aren't fully yet understood. NOx is clearly one of the
main emissions we need to consider, but the aviation community is also asking themselves
and the community in general, what about all the water vapor emissions? And some studies have shown, albeit there's still a large
degree of uncertainty about it, that contrails and cirrus clouds that may be induced from
contrails could contribute to global warming about four
times the amount than CO2 does. We know that if we are going
to be burning hydrogen, we are going to produce much larger amount of water vapor emissions. And if we are going to be
producing a much larger amount of water vapor emissions,
then the propensity for contrail formation is
also going to increase. In spite of all these challenges, hydrogen is being taken seriously by the broader industry. Companies like Universal Hydrogen and ZeroAvia are gaining the
attention of investors looking for viable and eventually
profitable solutions. Industry giant Airbus wants to introduce a hydrogen-powered
passenger aircraft by 2035. Recently announcing plans to retrofit a gas-guzzling Superjumbo with a hydrogen-burning engine. The modified aircraft
will add a fifth engine, adapted for hydrogen, and will be mounted on the rear fuselage. The A380 is the largest
passenger aircraft in existence, so it offers plenty of room to store the 400 kilograms of hydrogen. The company's designs for
a blended wing concept to store extra hydrogen
also offer a glimpse of our flying future. Apart from the complex
engineering challenges faced by airplane manufacturers,
there are also difficulties in production of hydrogen itself. Nowadays, most of the hydrogen
used in fuel is derived by splitting it off from
molecules of natural gas. But that requires a good deal of energy and also produces carbon dioxide. To make green hydrogen,
the electricity used to run the electrolyzer must come from a renewable resource, which is currently a lot more expensive. As with any new technology however, initial costs are daunting, but time may be the best remedy here. If you look at economics of
hydrogen fuel production, for example, versus fossil
fuels, for instance, the cost of hydrogen is all based on capital expense and very
little operating expense. So it's sort of similar to solar power. You put solar panels out there, and they produce power for 20-25 years. The operating expense is relatively low. What that means is that as scale grows, as we've seen with the solar panels, the cost of output drops dramatically. So the first phase is not about the most efficient aircraft. It's not about the aircraft that will deliver the
lowest NOx emissions. It's about demonstrating that we can carry
hydrogen safely on board, we can burn it safely on board, and can be used to fly
a passenger aircraft. The key thing is that we
don't try to put everything in the first generation or we're just gonna delay
the entry into service. So to try and keep it
as simple as possible. If there are some questions on the margin, they're all in the sort of business model and market adoption realm. It is very hard to create a technological argument or impossible to create
a technological argument that says, "Well, it's not gonna work." It is going to work.
