Can Airplanes Go Green? Val Miftakhov Flew Europe’s Largest Commercial-Grade All-Electric Passenger Plane Last Month

August 07, 2020

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by Ilana Marcus (Washington Post) ... Silicon Valley start-up called ZeroAvia, envisions a future of passenger planes that fly on hydrogen-powered electricity, not jet fuel. ... Miftakhov’s Piper was powered by batteries, but his company is working on integrating a hydrogen fuel cell for aviation.

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Think about the hydrogen tanks plus fuel cell system as a really good battery. You charge it with hydrogen, so you put gas or liquid hydrogen into your tank, but the output of that in the aircraft is electricity. That electricity then is used by the electric motors to drive the propellers. . … We’re already five times better on energy density than the best battery out there, and we can further improve it by a factor of three or four by moving from compressed gas storage hydrogen to liquid hydrogen.

To your point on safety, compressed gas has been used in now maybe over 50,000 ground transportation vehicles worldwide. Most of those vehicles are actually in warehouses — material handling equipment, trucks that move around in Amazon warehouses or forklifts — and a lot of them are powered by hydrogen fuel cells, because it’s a high-density fuel, so you don’t have to recharge so often. The fueling takes just minutes, instead of hours recharging a battery, and there is zero emission. The only emission you have is … water vapor, a little bit of humid air coming out of the system.

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Our plan is renewably powered hydrogen-electric aviation. So renewable power … goes into the electrolysis systems, which is how you basically split water … using electricity, and that’s how you get hydrogen. If your electricity comes from a zero-emissions source, like solar, for example, you have … what’s called “green hydrogen,” and then you use that to power your aircraft. … Solar power has reduced in price dramatically over the last three, five years by factors, not percent, factors. And electrolysis equipment has reduced in price quite dramatically. … The key for this fuel, for hydrogen, is to produce it at the point of consumption.

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The good thing is that the regulators, the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration[, EASA [European Union Aviation Safety Agency] … they have some degree of experience with hydrogen fuel cells, not for primary propulsion, but there were some projects around utilizing hydrogen fuel cells as supplementary power in aircraft.

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In terms of the business challenges, the infrastructure, fueling infrastructure, getting to the right cost of fuel, is probably the biggest variable I would say. … So how we do this, where we install the production systems, are we going to be allowed to install them next to the airports? Because again, I don’t want to transport fuel at all, I want to make it right there. So what’s the permitting going to look like? Can we do it airside? Can we do it roadside? So the infrastructure side is super important and probably one of the biggest variables on the business side. READ MORE