Sneak peek: Airbus seeing a convergence towards hydrogen

Sneak peek: Airbus seeing a convergence towards hydrogen

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Whether it be the world’s first manned hot air balloon flight in the 18th century or NASA’s Centaur, Apollo and space shuttle vehicles in the 1950s and 1960s, hydrogen has fuelled some of mankind’s earliest attempts to reach the sky. Versatile, zero-emission and storable, hydrogen has all the qualities of a future game-changer in the global energy transition; it’s not hard to understand why it’s so appealing to a company like Airbus.

“Hydrogen offers us the biggest potential to reach that zero emissions target and our net zero ambitions, and there are a number of key reasons why,” Mark Bentall, Chief Operating Officer to the Chief Technology Officer at Airbus, told H2 View.

“One is that hydrogen offers the possibility to significantly reduce the greenhouse gas effect. If we’re talking about green hydrogen – certainly our focus on all of our capability and everything is based on green hydrogen, anything that goes towards pushing forward the production of green hydrogen is where we’re going to be – that kind of solution offers no CO2, low nitrous oxide and soot emissions.”

Airbus recognises in its Hydrogen:An energy carrier to fuel the climate-neutral aviation of tomorrow report that whilst water vapour would still be emitted via hydrogen, by eliminating soot, persistent contrails can be significantly reduced or eliminated.

Bentall continued, “Second, green hydrogen is expected to ramp up to a large scale over the next decade or so, and that’s got to make hydrogen increasingly more cost-competitive compared with existing options, such as jet fuel.

“And thirdly, another major advantage of hydrogen is that it can complement existing refuelling operations at most of our major airports – it’s not just about the aircraft, we also have to focus on the infrastructure.”

It’s not just the aviation sector that is recognising hydrogen’s potential, Airbus is also seeing very strong momentum for hydrogen from many other industries.

“We are seeing a convergence towards hydrogen,” Bentall enthused. “There are many other industries that see hydrogen as an intermittent way to store energy, whether it be – and I’m thinking about green hydrogen here – solar or wind.
We see it with our rockets and launch vehicles, but we also see it with automotive and the car industry, and we certainly see it with the trucking industry. With the shipping industry, there’s also a convergence towards hydrogen there as well.

“The development of these technologies will certainly make the global population, whether it be from the US, EU or China, less dependent on fossil fuels and are more competitive globally. So yes, I think there’s a sort of a sequence of events. But when it comes down to hydrogen, we do see cross-industrial demand for this and cross-industrial alignment across the different sectors.