Hydrogen to Power Aircraft

Found on another post this morning, very interesting, no doubt a Hydrogen world coming and hopefully Hazer can be involved in one way or another

The article below was published in The Australian today.An interesting development.************************************************************************************************Hydrogen to power up aircraftRobyn IronsideAviation Writer@ironsiderAustralia is positioning itself to power a global fleet of green aircraft 30 years from now.The CSIRO has teamed up with Boeing to explore opportunities for hydrogen in commercial aviation, with the belief the first applications could start within five years, ahead of a complete transition to hydrogen-powered aeroplanes from 2050.Centre for Hybrid Energy Systems’ leader Dr Christopher Munnings said the COVID-19 crisis had presented the perfect opportunity to advance the technology.“What we’ve seen with the COVID crisis is a significant drop in the amount of aircraft flying and the amount of people travelling and that’s really refocused the aviation industry from a production mode,” Dr Munnings said.“Instead of keeping factories going and filling orders, manufacturers are really starting to think about product differentiation and what is the new aviation industry going to look like.”At the same time, governments were looking at building new industries to stimulate their economies post-COVID, he said.“Australia is very well placed to be a supplier of renewable hydrogen. We have the lowest cost renewable energy, we have all the resources we require to make the hydrogen and we have pretty good connections to the rest of the world,” said Dr Munnings.“We don’t have an extensive aviation industry but what we do have is the potential to be the people who provide the fuel and we also need the aviation industry to be strong and vibrant and growing to support Australia.”Coupled with an industry-wide target of reducing airline carbon emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2050, the appetite was ripe for the development of electrofuels, he said.“The aviation industry has been very adept at improving efficiency and aircraft have become much more efficient,” Dr Munnings said.“But we’re quite quickly approaching the limit of what we can achieve by doing that so the next step is really to look at the fuel to see if we can make that have a lower CO2 footprint.”As a first step, liquid renewable fuel could be added to existing jet fuel to improve aircraft efficiency, something the CSIRO considered possible from 2025.By 2050, the goal was to have purely hydrogen-powered aircraft which would require a complete redesign of modern aeroplanes.To that extent, Dr Munnings said Boeing was “critical” to the project.“CSIRO’s expertise is very much in the hydrogen industry and understanding all of the things that make hydrogen such a great opportunity for Australia, but we don’t have that expertise in aircraft so it was really important Boeing partnered with us in this work.”Boeing’s Australian research and technology general manager Michael Edwards said they were committed to furthering the development of sustainable aviation fuels like hydrogen.