Airbus boss warns of delay in decarbonising airline industry – “green” hydrogen and SAF not available in large amounts
Head of Airbus, Guillaume Faury, says there is a shortage of allegedly low carbon fuels, so-called “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF). He said this is slowing the uptake of SAF. He said he had concerns about the pace of investment in facilities to produce “green” hydrogen and SAF. “Green” hydrogen, produced from water using zero-carbon electricity, offers one possible solution, while SAF, made from plant or other wastes or using carbon from the air, can be used in existing gas turbine engines. The hope is that, although SAF burns to create CO2, there is less overall CO2 in the fuel lifecycle than using conventional jet kerosene. Airbus wants to fly zero-emissions hydrogen aircraft in commercial service by 2035 but Faury said this may be later, due to the lack of “green” hydrogen. With every other sector aiming to use genuinely low carbon, renewably generated electricity, is there enough to use on producing jet fuel, largely for discretionary leisure trips? Rolls Royce and EasyJet are also making efforts to test engines fuelled by hydrogen. So far it has been burned in a jet engine, on the ground, not on a plane in flight. SAF supplies are likely to remain relatively limited for years.
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Airbus boss warns of delay in decarbonising airline industry
Guillaume Faury expresses concern at pace of investment in facilities producing alternatives to fossil fuels
By Jasper Jolly @jjpjolly (The Guardian)
Wed 30 Nov 2022
The launch of commercial flights of aircraft designed to reduce aviation’s damaging impact on the climate could be delayed by a shortage of net zero fuels, the chief executive of Airbus has warned.
Speaking at a briefing about the European manufacturer’s emissions-cutting plans on Wednesday, Guillaume Faury said he had concerns about the pace of investment in facilities to produce “green” hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Aviation is proving to be one of the hardest industries to decarbonise because battery technology is not yet advanced enough to power aeroplanes beyond relatively short journeys.
Green hydrogen, produced from water using zero-carbon electricity, offers one possible solution, while SAF, made with plant sources or using carbon from the air, can be used in existing gas turbine engines without adding to the total carbon in the atmosphere.
Airbus has said it aims to fly zero-emissions hydrogen aircraft in commercial service by 2035 but Faury said a lack of green production of the gas “could be a reason for delaying the launch of the programme”.
He said: “Availability or lack of availability of clean hydrogen at the right quantity in the right place at the right price in the second half of the decade is a big concern for me. The infrastructure for producing and distributing green hydrogen is still in the early stages of development. But the clock is ticking for it to be in place to fuel commercial aviation by the 2030s, and probably many other sectors much earlier.”
Several companies are trying to develop hydrogen technology. The British engineering company Rolls-Royce and the airline easyJet on Monday announced they had started the world’s first ground tests of an aircraft engine run on hydrogen combustion. Airbus is working with the US multinational GE and the French engine manufacturer Safran to mount a hydrogen combustion engine on an A380 superjumbo. Airbus’s biggest rival, Boeing, has made some tentative steps towards testing hydrogen technologies, although it is more focused on SAF.
Airbus on Wednesday said it was working on an aircraft engine powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, which produces electricity with water as the only emission, to start flight tests in about 2026. The propeller engine could potentially power a 100-passenger aircraft with a range of 1,000 nautical miles, the company said, although it would be unlikely to ever be used for long-haul flights because of the amount of hydrogen storage that would be required.
The manufacturer also said it would work with the French carmaker Renault on battery technology including solid-state batteries. These could store twice the energy in the same weight as the lithium ion batteries used in cars.
The industry’s preferred method for decarbonising long-haul flights is SAF. New Airbus planes are certified to fly using as much as 50% of SAF already but Faury said the company was not pushing to certify them for 100% SAF flights as quickly as possible because it did not foresee enough supply by 2030. Airbus announced it had signed a preliminary agreement with Neste, an oil refining company, to work together to advance SAF production.
“By 2030, SAF will need to be produced at many times the level of today,” Faury said. “Ambition is not yet matched by action. There needs to be more investment in new refineries and production facilities, and more ambitious mandates and objectives for sustainable aviation fuel.
“I believe it is difficult to overstate the scale of the energy challenge.”
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Rolls-Royce tests a jet engine running on hydrogen
29.11.2022
By Theo Leggett, Business correspondent, BBC News
In a windswept corner of a military site on Salisbury Plain a small aircraft jet engine is undergoing tests that could one day lead to huge changes within the aviation industry.
The engine itself is almost completely conventional. It is a Rolls-Royce AE-2100A gas turbine, a design used widely on regional aeroplanes around the world.
What is wholly unusual about it is the fuel being used. This is the first time a modern aircraft engine has ever been run on hydrogen.
Devoid of bodywork, with its intricate wiring and pipework exposed, it sits securely fastened to a sturdy test rig, while engineers cluster around an array of screens in the control room, a safe distance away.
The tests are being carried out by Rolls-Royce, after development work in Derby and in partnership with the airline easyJet.
The immediate aim is a simple one – to show that it is possible to run and control a jet engine using hydrogen fuel, rather than conventional aviation fuels.
In the longer term, the plan is for hydrogen power to play a major role in allowing the aviation industry to continue growing, while cutting climate change emissions dramatically.
“The reason we’re looking at hydrogen is really the drive for Net Zero,” explains Alan Newby, director of aerospace technology at Rolls-Royce.
“Normally we would run this thing on kerosene. Kerosene is a hydrocarbon and therefore produces carbon dioxide when it burns.
“The beauty of looking at a fuel like hydrogen is that it doesn’t contain any carbon and, therefore, when it burns it produces no CO2”. [It creates water vapour, which also has impacts on global heating] – one of the components of the non-CO2 impacts of aviation].
The project is being supported by easyJet, which has contributed several million pounds towards the initial trials.
The company believes that hydrogen power offers the best route to reducing emissions from short haul aviation.
“We started a few years ago looking at what might power the aircraft of the future,” explains David Morgan, easyJet’s chief operating officer.
“We looked at battery technology, and it was quite clear that the battery technology was probably not going to do it for the large commercial aircraft that we fly.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that hydrogen is a very exciting proposition for us.”
The advantage of hydrogen over batteries is that it provides much more power per kilogram. Batteries are simply too heavy to power larger planes.
Yet hydrogen aviation remains a very long way off. The tests carried out so far have simply shown that a jet engine using hydrogen can be started up and run at low speed.
Hydrogen requires more elaborate storage and more space than jet fuel
But to go from there to building a wholly new engine, capable of powering a passenger aircraft safely will take a great deal more research – and significant investment.
The aircraft themselves will also need to be redesigned. Hydrogen, even in liquid form, takes up about four times as much space as the kerosene required to fly the same distance.
To make it into a liquid in the first place, it needs to be cooled to -253C. Then, before being burned, it must be turned back into a gas.
“There’s a big change from the aircraft point of view,” says Alan Newby at Rolls-Royce.
“They’re going to have to have a tank containing the hydrogen. You’ve got to keep it at this really, really cold temperature.
“Then there’s the issue of how you feed it through to the engine as well.”
Many engineering problems have to be solved to make hydrogen work as fuel, says Alan Newby from Rolls-Royce.
The other key question is where the hydrogen itself comes from, because that will have a dramatic impact on the environmental benefits it can provide
The fuel used in the tests is so-called green hydrogen produced at the European Marine Energy Centre in the Orkney Islands.
It is made by using an electric current to split water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity required is produced using wave and wind power. This makes it a very clean fuel.
But most of the hydrogen produced for industrial use today is obtained from a process which involves mixing high temperature steam with natural gas under high pressure. [Called Blue hydrogen, IF the CO2 is captured and stored permanently. Otherwise it is Grey hydrogen, with the CO2 not captured. See link ].
However, this produces a considerable amount of carbon dioxide, which is then released into the atmosphere. It also requires a considerable amount of energy – which is often provided by burning fossil fuels.
One alternative is what’s known as blue hydrogen. This is produced in the same way, but the carbon dioxide is captured and either stored or reused.
In theory, this should make it a cleaner, low-carbon fuel. But that view was challenged in a paper from researchers at Cornell and Stanford universities last year.
They suggested that in fact, using blue hydrogen could still be more harmful to the planet than burning fossil fuels. See link
“At the moment there’s a lot of hydrogen hype,” says Matt Finch, UK policy director of campaign group Transport and Environment.
“A lot of people are saying ‘we can use hydrogen, we need hydrogen’. You hear it for cars, for trucks, for ships, for planes, for home heating, for chemicals.
“At the moment the UK effectively produces zero green hydrogen. To fulfil all the needs everyone wants is absolutely impossible.”
Mr Finch believes this means supplies of green hydrogen will probably have to be rationed for decades to come, and he says aviation may not be a priority for governments.
All of this means it is likely to be decades before zero-emission hydrogen planes become an everyday reality.
Even then, they are likely to be confined to short haul markets, at least to begin with. On long haul routes, synthetic sustainable fuels are widely expected to offer a more practical solution.
Nevertheless, these first tests on Salisbury Plain may one day be seen as the first, tentative steps towards a technological revolution in the industry.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63758937
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