Flying is amazing. But planes burn oil and pollute the planet. Yuck! No wonder passionate pilot Valery Miftakhov has got fellow fans of air travel excited since he took to the air in a plane that’s basically powered by clean water…
Aeroplanes can give us lots of freedom and fun. But they burn oil and create lots and lots of CO2, adding to global warming. Using clean electricity instead is hard, because electric batteries are very heavy.
If you use clean electricity to produce hydrogen from water, you can power a plane with the hydrogen. It emits water, not CO2. First tests have been successful and clean hydrogen planes could carry passengers in a few years.
Details of Valery “Val” Miftakhov’s career and vision are drawn from the website of his company, ZeroAvia, whose engineering base is at Cranfield, north of London, and also from these recent interviews in The Daily Telegraph and the Russian-language business website incrussia.ru.
You can see Val speaking to The Economist in this comprehensive 8-minute video, published last week, on the green future of flying.
Scotland’s Herald newspaper has this detail on how ZeroAvia forms part of a British-government backed plan to trial a network of zero-carbon regional air links from 2023, starting from a test base in the Orkney islands where wind-generated electricity is in abundant supply.
Like many new technological solutions that are emerging, hydrogen is not without controversy – not least because some of its biggest boosters are the oil companies, fuel refiners and pipeline networks, who all see in it an easier alternative to slowly going out of business as solid fuel batteries take over the world.
Extracting hydrogen today is generally a very polluting process that burns natural gas and gives off CO2. This “grey hydrogen” is really no solution at all. And it is not yet very practical to extract hydrogen using solar, wind or other renewable electricity sources. However, “green hydrogen” is a real possibility as industry and economies adapt. And in the air is one area where it has a clear advantage due to being much lighter than batteries – at least as things stand today.
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