In recent days, Airbus, the largest European aircraft manufacturer, announced its intention to create “the first commercial aircraft with zero emissions and no environmental impact”. According to Airbus, the new “clean” aircraft will be ready to fly by 2035 and, like two other models proposed called ZEROe (zero emissions), will be powered by hydrogen. For some time the entire aerospace sector has been addressing the issue of how to limit the impact of aviation on global warming, and for this reason both more sustainable fuels and some models of electric aircraft are being studied. However, it is good to know that projects like these require time and a lot of resources to solve a number of significant technological problems.
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During the presentation of the ZEROe aircraft project, the head of technological development of Airbus, Grazia Vittadini, said that “protecting the climate and protecting our environment are the crucial issues on which to build the future of aviation ». This is why the company focuses on hydrogen: its combustion produces no polluting emissions, but only water vapor and does not damage the ozone layer or contribute to the greenhouse effect. The project will be defined by next year, while the technologies to be used for the construction of the new hydrogen aircraft will be chosen by 2025.
The first of the three models proposed by Airbus is a turboprop model (of those in which you see the propeller turning, outside the engine) which would carry up to 100 passengers on short-medium range flights; the second is an aircraft with a turbofan engine (those in which the engine is all inside its housing, which we see in larger aircraft) – which generally allows lower consumption and better performance – capable of accommodating from 120 to 200 passengers and fly over 2,000 nautical miles (approximately 3,700 kilometers); the third, finally, is a model with a much wider body, again with turbofan, which would allow both to have more space for the storage of hydrogen and to distribute the seats in the cabin for passengers.
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Until a few months ago, Airbus had collaborated with Rolls-Royce and Siemens to build a hybrid aircraft (with a classic plus electric engine) that could carry around 100 passengers, but the project ended before the first test, scheduled for 2021.
The data on emissions in aviation
According to what has been reconstructed by the Air Transport Action Group, a consortium of experts in the sector that deals with sustainability of aviation, commercial aviation contributes about 2 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions generated by human activity. Moreover, as some researchers from the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research of Germany (IFEU) explained, when a plane flies at altitude – usually above 9 thousand meters – from the combustion of kerosene, the fuel normally used, they are produced oxides of nitrogen, sulfur and other compounds in addition to carbon dioxide, which contribute to global warming.
In 2019, emissions from aviation amounted to 915 million tons. Although pollution levels from aviation declined this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the International Civil Aviation Organization – the UN agency specializing in the sector – had estimated that transport pollution plane would have tripled by 2050, also causing major consequences on global warming. In any case, as the Financial Times observed, for some airlines the stop due to the pandemic was also an opportunity to accelerate plans to reduce emissions that had already started on some occasions.
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As the International Energy Agency (IEA) explained, already in 2019 the polluting emissions generated annually by aviation increased by only 0.5 percent, much less than the 2 percent increase that had been recorded. every year between 2000 and 2019: this is due to the development of more efficient engines, but above all thanks to the greater use of electric vehicles and biofuels. For example, last year Etihad Airways flew using a fuel made from salicornia, a herbaceous plant, while since 2011 Virgin Atlantic has been collaborating with specialist company LanzaTech to develop fuels made from carbon dioxide capture in gas. I unload.
The alternatives: electric or hydrogen aircraft
Beyond the fuels used to power traditional aircraft, according to Forbes the most realistic plan to build an aircraft clean in the short term is that of electrically powered aircraft. Instead of using traditional fuel, which is very polluting, an electric plane would use rechargeable batteries, such as lithium batteries. In December 2019 the first test flight of a fully electric civil aircraft was carried out, and there are numerous studies to build electric aircraft models that have been going on for years, but the biggest problem so far is the low battery life: the models already developed are small and can only cover short distances, developing electric airplanes for commercial transport is still very complex.
An airplane like the one that Airbus would like to build, like the one that was already being conceived as part of the Zero Avia project, supported by the British government, would instead use hydrogen as an energy source. Hydrogen is the lightest gas there is and it is very light even in the liquid state; it is an excellent fuel, it can be used in particular processes to make synthetic fuels, combining it for example with carbon dioxide to generate synthetic kerosene, and its production from renewable energy sources is a well-established process.
As a study published in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews in 1997 had already observed, in some respects hydrogen-powered airplanes would be safer than those powered by traditional fuels, but this does not imply that there are no risks, and indeed technologies for realizing them will have to take into account numerous problems related to safety, as well as performance. In addition, it will also be necessary to take into account the adaptation of the infrastructures that the use of hydrogen will require at airports.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said that the projects to build the ZEROe aircraft “have the potential to significantly reduce the impact of aviation on the climate”, but that to achieve them will require the support of various governments and industrial partners. For this reason, some believe that the announcement can be read as an appeal to the European Union and to the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance, the European organization that will follow the development of industrial projects that will use hydrogen as a source of energy and for which estimates that 430 billion euros will be invested over the next decade.
