This post is taken from the newsletter ” Human warmth “, sent every Tuesday at 12 p.m. Every week, journalist Nabil Wakim, who hosts the Chaleur Humaine podcast, answers questions from Internet users on the climate challenge. You can register for free by clicking here.
The question of the week
“ In your episode on hydrogen, you quickly evacuate the hydrogen plane when it could be a solution to replace oil, I didn’t really understand why? » (Question asked by Sophia at chaud [email protected])
“I was surprised to hear that hydrogen is too large a gas to be used in aviation. I would have thought it could replace kerosene as a fuel without having to completely rethink the design of the plane. Isn’t that the case? Could hydrogen be liquefied to solve the volume problem? » Question asked by Will at chaud [email protected]
My answer : No, we won’t see hydrogen planes in the sky any time soon. Research is underway, but at this stage there are many reasons to believe that few planes will fly on hydrogen before 2050, for technical, economic and industrial reasons. We talked about it in another episode of “Human Chaleur” with researcher Isabelle Laplace: should we stop flying?
1/Can this happen by 2050?
Not really. To fly planes with hydrogen, the engines of current aircraft must be changed. And not just the engines: the entire plane must be overhauled. Airbus announces that it is working on a first hydrogen plane for 2035 – but many specialists believe that this date is very optimistic. If this deadline is met, it will be a single device, of an experimental nature. Then we have to produce the new planes, modify the airports, train the pilots, and finally for the airlines to renew their fleets – so we are already in 2050 and, in the meantime, we have not decarbonized much.
Especially since this cannot work for long-haul flights, such as transatlantic flights, since hydrogen is a gas that takes up a lot of space, so a much larger tank is required. (This is also visible on the Airbus website)
2/Why not make hydrogen liquid?
There are several options being considered for this, but they all have major flaws. One of them is to make synthetic fuels from hydrogen and something else (e.g. CO2 or biomass). This fuel could be used in part in current aircraft engines. But the production of this fuel is extremely expensive, and for the moment the tests carried out represent microscopic volumes. Here too the deployment time would be very long.
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