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When will we have a clean plane?

In recent days, Airbus, the largest European aircraft manufacturer, announced of wanting 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, as two other proposed models called ZEROe (zero emissions), it 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.

Airbus projects
During the presentation of the ZEROe aircraft project, the head of technology development at Airbus, Grace 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 a turbofan (those in which the engine is all inside its housing, which we see in larger airplanes) – which generally allows lower consumption and better performance – able to accommodate from 120 to 200 passengers and to fly for over 2 thousand nautical miles (about 3,700 kilometres); the third, finally, is a model with a much wider body, also 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 more electric engine) that could carry about 100 passengers, but the project ended before the first test, scheduled for 2021.

Data on emissions in aviation
According to what the Air Transport Action Group, a consortium of industry experts dealing with the sustainability of air transport, has reconstructed, commercial aviation contributes to about 2 per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions generated by human activity. Moreover, as some researchers of the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research of Germany (IFEU) explained, when an airplane fly high – usually above 9,000 meters – the combustion of kerosene, the fuel normally used, produces 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 this year the levels of pollution caused by aviation have decreased due to the coronavirus pandemic, the International Civil Aviation Organization – the UN agency specializing in the sector – had estimated that theair transport pollution it would have tripled by 2050, causing major consequences also on global warming. In any case, as the Financial Times, for some airlines the stop due to the pandemic was also an opportunity to accelerate plans to reduce emissions which on some occasions had already been started.

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Come he had explained the International Energy Agency (IEA), already in 2019 the polluting emissions generated annually by aviation increased by only 0.5 percent, much less than the increase in 2 percent which was registered 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 the specialized company LanzaTech to develop fuels made from the capture of carbon dioxide in the exhaust gases.

The alternatives: electric or hydrogen aircraft
Beyond the fuels used to power traditional aircraft, second Forbes the more realistic plan to create a clean aircraft in the short term is that of electrically powered aircraft. Instead of using traditional fuel, which is very polluting, a electric plane it would use rechargeable batteries, such as lithium ones. In December 2019 the first test flight of a fully electric civil aircraft, and there are numerous studies to create electric aircraft models that have been going on for years, but the biggest problem encountered so far is the low battery autonomy: the models already developed are small and can only cover short distances, develop electric aircraft for commercial transport it is still very complex.

The RX1E-A, a two-seater electric aircraft designed by Liaoning Ruixiang General Aircraft Manufacture of Shenyang, China, after an approximately two-hour flight in Liaoning Province on November 1, 2017. (VCG via Getty Images)

An aircraft like the one that Airbus would like to build, as well as the one that was already being conceived as part of the project Zero Avia, backed by the British government, would instead use hydrogen as primary energy source. Hydrogen is the lightest gas there is and 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 one had already observed studio published in the magazine Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews in 1997, in some respects hydrogen-powered aircraft would be safer than those powered by traditional fuels, but this does not imply that there are no risks, and indeed the technologies to make 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 he 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 there will be a need for support of different governments and industrial partners. For this, some believe that the announcement can be read as an appeal to the European Union and 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 it is estimated that 430 billion euros will be invested in the next decade.

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