Airbus Promised a 'Green' Hydrogen Aircraft. That Bet Is Now Unraveling (msn.com)
- Reference: 0177072965
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/20/2311242/airbus-promised-a-green-hydrogen-aircraft-that-bet-is-now-unraveling
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/aviation/airbus-promised-a-green-aircraft-that-bet-is-now-unraveling/ar-AA1DgoDh
> Five years ago, [2]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...
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> 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...
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> 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."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/aviation/airbus-promised-a-green-aircraft-that-bet-is-now-unraveling/ar-AA1DgoDh
[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/22/0235206/airbus-reveals-plans-for-zero-emission-aircraft-fueled-by-hydrogen
Solved problem (Score:2, Informative)
Jet engines and jet fuel are really good at what they do. Just use synthesized e-fuel made from captured carbon and renewable electricity and leave the whole electric part on the ground.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it also bothers them that it might trickle down to consumers which would then allow ICE to continue to compete with their precious BEVs.
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)
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: (Score:2)
> 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.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24... [cnn.com]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/cars/eu-combustion-engine-debate-climate-intl/index.html
A shame (Score:2)
Kind of a shame. I have been anti-hydrogen for cars for many reasons, but I did think long haul aircraft was a use case where it might make sense. I guess that only leave long haul ships, but I suspect that too is a lost cause. Kind of not leaving any use cases for hydrogen in transport.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
You can't work around basic physics (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:1)
I don't anyone is surprised it failed. They would have been surprised if it succeeded.
Re: (Score:1)
> 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)
Hooray
A hydrogen aircraft? (Score:1)
Oh, the humanity!
Hydrogen is hard (Score:2)
The stuff is the smallest atom there is, so tiny it leaks out of apparently solid metal pipes, where it then can of course find a spark and explode. Even rockets, things that are just explosions that last a long time, don't tend to use it despite efficiency advantages. So it's unsurprising trying to apply it to an entirely novel usage would be incredibly hard, even for a huge engineering focused firm.
Should have been obvious from the start (Score:2)
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 ran
Hydrogen is a difficult fuel to deal with. (Score:2)
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 col
I read (Score:2)
I recently read a long thread that was mostly climate change deniers, for example talking about the benefits of pumping CO2 into greenhouses, what a relatively small percentage of the atmosphere is CO2 and what percentage of that is from man, etc. was surprised at the lack of facts and the number of misinterpretations (or intentional?) but one potentially valid perspective is that many abatement efforts constantly seek funding without delivering results. This would appear to add fuel to their fire. Personal
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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:4, 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?