Zero emission ambitions: Aircraft of the future

Transcript

Glenn Llewellyn:

Hello, CAPA Live. I'm really excited to be here with you today and to share with you some insights into what Airbus is doing inside the ZEROe project.

I'm Glen Llewellyn. I'm vice-president for the Zero-Emission Aircraft Project at Airbus. And on your screen right now, what you see are the three concept aircraft we revealed in September 2020. Those three concept aircraft are a part of the suite of concepts that we're looking at at Airbus in order to determine what is the best configuration that we bring to market by 2035 as the first zero-emission commercial aircraft.

On the sort of right of your image, you see two, what I would call, classical configurations. These are tube-and-wing configurations with a turbofan and a turboprop propulsion system powered by hydrogen.

On the left-hand side of your screen, you can see a blended wing body quite different in terms of overall aircraft design compared to what you see on the right. The blended wing body is really good at helping us understand what the maximum potential of hydrogen could be in the future because the blended wing body lends itself to carrying energy storage solutions like hydrogen which require more volume than kerosene. And so it could be seen as the ultimate ambition in terms of performance of a hydrogen aircraft.

What we're likely to bring to service by 2035, nonetheless, is more likely to be what you see or similar to what you see on the right of your screens in terms of tube-and-wing configuration. And we'll talk a little bit about the architecture and some of the technologies in those aircraft later on.

First of all, what I'd like to share with you is a little bit of the rationale for why Airbus is focused on this, why Airbus is pushing these solutions, and why we have the ambition to bring the first zero-emission aircraft to market by 2035.

In terms of context and helping explain the Airbus strategy, I guess many of you will be aware that the aviation industry has set itself very aggressive targets in terms of CO2 emissions reduction. One of the most famous of those targets is talking about reducing to 50% of the 2005 levels the CO2 emissions by 2050. And we know that biofuels are, for sure, part of the solution.

What we also know is that we need to bring onboard synthetic fuels based on renewables to further scale up and accelerate the transition which we have initiated. And synthetic fuels basically fall into two categories.

There's a drop in type fuel, synthetic fuel, sometimes called e-fuel, sometimes called power-to-liquid fuels. That's a very interesting fuel for the existing fleet and for a long-range aircraft. And the other kind of synthetic fuel is hydrogen and hydrogen, we believe, can be extremely cost competitive. We believe it can have the best climate credentials compared to all other kinds of fuel types for aviation, and it's why we're specifically interested in hydrogen.

And these synthetic fuels, really, what's interesting about them is that we're talking about essentially using renewable energy to power our aircraft by powering them with synthetic fuels. Synthetic fuels are created from renewable energy through, for example, hydrogen electrolysis from solar or wind, and then that energy source is a surrogate for renewable energy on the aircraft. Many of you know that we can't put wind turbines and solar panels on the top of large commercial aircraft and be competitive, so we need a surrogate, and these synthetic fuels are that surrogate.

We're very conscious of the very fast evolving societal and regulatory expectation. We saw in the UK that they were the first major economy to pass a net zero-emission law for 2050. We saw New Zealand following suit in November 2019 with a very similar law. The EU Green Deal was first announced towards the end of 2019. And then in 2020, Japan committing, South Korea committing, and the EU Green Deal being enacted into law.

And the dots on the right there are really to say that this trend is going to continue, and what we are doing at Airbus and what, I think, we at large in the aviation industry are doing are preparing for a world where we can fly with no impact on the climate, and we are extremely excited about making our contribution as an aircraft manufacturer to that challenge.

Another important element of context for us when we look at this challenge in front of us is how things are progressing in the renewable energy industry. We spoke already about how these synthetic fuels that we see as really promising are created using renewable energy, so it's important to understand what's happening in the renewable energy sector. And I think many of us who are following how we are doing collectively as a society at large to get towards the Paris Agreement, we would, for sure, say that in absolute terms wind and solar, they're not at the levels we would like, and we need to accelerate over the next decade in order to meet the Paris Agreement.

What, nonetheless, we do see is impressive growth in that sector, worldwide wind electricity production more than doubling over a five-year period, solar electricity production multiplying by five over a five-year period. The figures are being published for 2020. We're seeing exactly the same kind of trend and bear in mind that this five-year period that we're looking at is during a period of time where a lot of renewable energy has been subsidized. We've now entered a phase where, in fact, renewable energy in many regions is cost competitive without subsidies compared to its, let's say, fossil fuel cousin.

And so the market is going to take over, and we're going to see continuing acceleration in renewable energy production, renewable energy landscape. And our view is that these curves are going exponential. These trend lines are going to go vertical, and we want to position aviation in order to take advantage of this trend.

It's also important, in terms of context, is what's happening around hydrogen. When I first started this project at Airbus in 2017, we, for sure, saw a few signs of hydrogen being necessary to meet the Paris Agreement at a societal level, at a global level. But there was very little in terms of concrete announcement, concrete demonstration. Since then, things have moved dramatically in the direction of highlighting that hydrogen is going to play a major role, not in aviation, but across several sectors in allowing us to meet the Paris Agreement.

And there are nine truck companies now who have either revealed hydrogen truck concepts, or, in fact, have hydrogen trucks on the road today. We have the train industry looking at hydrogen to replace diesel trains where it's not cost-effective to put electric lines overhead. We have the shipping industry looking at hydrogen for intracontinental, so the shorter distance shipping, not necessarily for the deep sea shipping. Fuel cell buses are starting, already, to operate across several regions.

And this is hugely important for aviation because if it was just aviation that was pushing the hydrogen ecosystem to exist, it might not happen. But because we have a momentum from several industries pushing all in the same direction for a hydrogen ecosystem to exist, I think we are gaining confidence in the fact that hydrogen will be more available, and the cost will come down.

What's really important for us in the context of aviation is that trucking, in particular, and shipping are also very focused on liquid hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen is the only solution for us. Liquid hydrogen for these sectors is also the best solution in terms of payload and range like for aviation. And so, we're working with several players to not only encourage a hydrogen ecosystem, but to encourage a liquid hydrogen ecosystem and rather than invest in gaseous hydrogen infrastructure, 700 bar gaseous hydrogen infrastructure, 700 bar gaseous hydrogen technology, we're interested in going in one single step to the best solution for all of these sectors which is liquid hydrogen and therefore, reducing the total overall investment.

Perhaps another important note, which I think it's very important for the aviation community to be aware of, many of the technologies which we're interested in for commercial aviation with hydrogen are coming from space, automotive, and the energy sector. What is going to happen is that we are going to take those technologies, invest in them, improve them, take the performance to the next level, and that technology is going to find its way back into a ground transportation and energy sector, in particular.

And I think that highlights how this challenge of aviation's transition to hydrogen and to climate neutral flying is not just something that's of interest for aviation, but is something that's of interest for society at large and something that we will need support to deliver. And in fact, we already have some of that support established, but we're going to need more and more support to achieve what is a hugely ambitious challenge for aviation, but also where aviation can contribute to the challenge in the ground transportation and in the energy sector.

I spoke about how the scale up of hydrogen is going to reduce the cost of hydrogen. And this is just showing a few data points from independent consultants or institutes showing how they predict hydrogens cost to reduce over time. And I guess it's worth highlighting that we're not just interested in a technology demonstration. We're not just interested in making something fly. That's relatively easy. What we're interested in is making climate neutral aviation economically viable. And so that's what we're focused on. And that means that we need to consider the aircraft, the technologies, but also the energy and the ecosystem all the way up to getting green hydrogen at airports.

So why hydrogen? Hydrogen is zero-emission. If we have hydrogen, which is created from renewable energy and electrolysis, it has no CO2 impact when you look at the overall life cycle. It also has more potential than any other energy carrier to reduce what we call non-CO2 emissions of aviation [inaudible 00:14:17] and persistent contrails and potentially bringing it all the way down to zero. And that's clearly the focus of this project. That's what we are engaging the wider technology ecosystem to help us to deliver.

Hydrogen is energy-dense, so it contains, for example, way more energy in a kilogram than what we would have in a battery which is another good alternative if you want to fly with zero emissions, but unfortunately, batteries are just way too heavy. On the downside, however, hydrogen needs a lot more volume than kerosene does, and so you'll see in a little bit how that changes somehow the shape of the aircraft.

It also has declining costs, and we believe that as everybody pushes to the Paris Agreement, we're going to see hydrogen coming down in cost. We see players who are beating some of what we have as our internal forecasts for how hydrogen is going to evolve already in the 2020s. And that makes us very excited that we can bring something that's cost-effective to airline customers.

So the aircraft that we revealed in September 2020 are on your screen right now. I spoke already about some of the features and which ones are likely to come to service or which types of concepts are more likely to come to service by 2035. What, maybe, is remaining to say is how hydrogen has a huge versatility. We can see that all the way from general aviation up through 100-passenger to 200-passenger aircraft up to 1000 and 2000 nautical miles, hydrogen is relevant. It's not yet relevant for long-range flights, certainly in this generation of technology that we're targeting to mature in the next few years, but it is relevant for the sort of ranges and the sort of passenger-carrying capacity that you see here. And in subsequent generations, we could imagine this technology finding its way on to longer and longer range aircraft.

We also revealed in December last year, a fuel cell powered aircraft, so this aircraft is 100% fuel cell powered. It's a fuel cell that creates electrical energy which is then converted into shaft power by electric motors which are connected to the propellers. This is one of the options which we're looking at among many. We've communicated some of them, and you see them in this presentation today. We have others. Internally, we're looking at mixes between some of the different concepts, and over the next months and years, we'll be maturing the technology and making choices about which final concept we take to market.

Clearly, hydrogen is a challenge. It is not an energy carrier that we use today in aviation. We have many things on our side. For example, gas turbines have already flown with hydrogen. In the 1950s, the US Air Force has flown with hydrogen on a B-57 aircraft. In the 1980s, a Tupolev 155 was flown with the gas turbine cooperating on hydrogen. The technical feasibility is demonstrated at a certain level. What we now need to do is make that technology compatible with real commercial aviation applications. Fuel cell technology exists, but we want to get higher performance levels out of it. Liquid hydrogen storage technology, again, exists. The automotive industry have actually developed it, but at the same time, we want to improve it and bring it to commercial aviation standards.

Infrastructure is another element which, clearly, we need to change dramatically. At the same time, what we will see as a step-by-step approach to introduction of hydrogen aircraft. And what we have been looking at in terms of modeling is how there are a huge amount of flights which can be operated, in fact, with relatively small number of airports equipped, and we're looking at taking advantage of that kind of effect in our planning for the introduction of this aircraft. And I already spoke about availability and cost and how, for sure, the ecosystem needs to change compared to where it is today in order for us to be successful in aviation.

Some of the technology that we're talking about on the aircraft, and I just chose this aircraft as an example. We have hydrogen-powered gas turbines, liquid hydrogen storage at the rear, and you can see how the shape of the aircraft changes because we need to store hydrogen which has more volume than kerosene. There are several options for where to store hydrogen, and this image reflects one of the options that we're looking at. We have fuel cells at megawatt scale which are used to provide electric power into the gas turbines in a hybrid configuration, but can also be used to provide full electric power in the type of concept that I showed earlier, the fuel cell power concept and then power electronics and electric motors to convert the electrical energy into shaft power.

Architecture of a hybrid, propulsion system looks something like this. We have a liquid hydrogen storage, and essentially, you're feeding hydrogen in two pathways, one towards your electrical propulsion system and two, towards your gas turbine where the hydrogen is combusted. And the combination of the two in a hybrid electric configuration allows for a very high performing propulsion system.

I mentioned that we have the option to... or we're looking at the option to have a fully fuel cell powered aircraft. That's one of the images I showed earlier. And the only change in terms of architecture would be, essentially, to remove the gas turbine and the pathway of liquid hydrogen towards the gas turbine.

I've already hinted that this challenge is a challenge which involves other sectors like ground transportation and highlighting that, I guess, is the joint venture which we've established with ElringKlinger who are an automotive player. We've set up a company called ArrOW Stack GmbH in Stuttgart in Germany, where we're planning on taking the fuel cell stack from an automotive application and increasing the performance level so that it's appropriate for aerospace applications. And like I said earlier, that technology will eventually find its way back into the automotive and energy sector, and that's really interesting from a societal perspective.

Our overall timeline is summarized here where we have an entry into service targeted by 2035. We plan to select the final product in around 2024-2025 timeframe. In the same period, we want to achieve Technology Readiness Level 5 and 6 for the different systems. That means flight testing many of those systems. If we work backwards, we then have a Technology Readiness Level 3 in around 2022. And at that same point in time, we want to select which propulsion system we move forward with at architecture level.

We had the pre-program launch in 2020 which coincided with the communication we did, and inside Airbus, the project started in, let's say, officially in 2018. The infrastructure and ecosystem piece is as important as the technology development in getting us to 2025 when we hope to be able to have a program launch, a product launch. And we have teams working on this with airports, with energy providers in order to plan and de-risk that stream which is obviously vital for the success of ZEROe aircraft.

Hopefully, very quickly, that's given you an overview of ZEROe, of Airbus's ambition to bring a zero-emission aircraft to service by 2035. We will need help to do this. I hope we can count on your support to make this happen, and we are looking forward to working with you on this adventure.

Thank you.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.