Can airplanes go green?

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/07/31/electric-airplane/

Source:  By Ilana Marcus, The Washington Post. 

Excerpt: When Val Miftakhov touched down at Cranfield Airport in England last month, his Piper Malibu Mirage six-seater became the first commercial-grade, zero-emission airplane to fly in Europe. That test flight was just 21 miles. But Miftakhov, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley start-up called ZeroAvia, envisions a future of passenger planes that fly on hydrogen-powered electricity, not jet fuel. Air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — much less than produced by cars. Despite a temporary dip due to the coronavirus, demand for air travel has been dramatically growing and planes are projected to produce as much as 25 percent of global carbon emissions by 2050. Miftakhov’s Piper was powered by batteries, but his company is working on integrating a hydrogen fuel cell for aviation. ...Think about the hydrogen tanks plus fuel cell system as a really good battery. You charge it with hydrogen, so you put gas or liquid hydrogen into your tank, but the output of that in the aircraft is electricity. That electricity then is used by the electric motors to drive the propellers. … We’re already five times better on energy density than the best battery out there, and we can further improve it by a factor of three or four by moving from compressed gas storage hydrogen to liquid hydrogen. ...To your point on safety, compressed gas has been used in now maybe over 50,000 ground transportation vehicles worldwide. Most of those vehicles are actually in warehouses — material handling equipment, trucks that move around in Amazon warehouses or forklifts — and a lot of them are powered by hydrogen fuel cells, because it’s a high-density fuel, so you don’t have to recharge so often. The fueling takes just minutes, instead of hours recharging a battery, and there is zero emission. The only emission you have is … water vapor, a little bit of humid air coming out of the system…. So, 50,000, give or take, of ground vehicles operating for a number of years, a lot of them with unqualified operators, regular people, and all of those run through all the safety procedures, crash testing and all that, so it’s pretty safe fuel and a pretty safe way to store it.... 

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