PILOT PROGRAM
Venture seeks to test planes running on hydrogen power.
The dream — and the hype — of hydrogen-powered, zeroemissions aviation will prepare for takeoff from Moses Lake in Washington state.
A new project aims to modify small turboprop aircraft there to fly on hydrogen fuel, test and certify them to carry passengers and potentially offer a long-term solution to aviation’s carbon emissions by demonstrating that hydrogen aviation is economically viable.
Los Angeles-based startup Universal Hydrogen, led by Paul Eremenko, is developing the technology to retrofit midsize turboprop aircraft to run on hydrogen.
Partnering with Universal Hydrogen are aerospace engineering and certification company AeroTEC of Seattle, electric motor company MagniX of Everett, Wash., and New Yorkbased Plug Power, which has a hydrogen fuel cell facility in Spokane, Wash.
“Our goal is to have butts in seats on commercial, revenuegenerating flights as quickly as possible,” Eremenko said, adding that he anticipates Federal Aviation Administration certification in 2025.
First up for retrofit is the De Havilland Canada DHC-8 turboprop. The version that will be converted typically seats about 50 passengers.
The company plans to tear out 10 seats to accommodate the large capsules full of hydrogen that will be the plane’s fuel, reducing the capacity to about 40 passengers.
Later, the project will do the same modification for the ATR 72 turboprop, with seating reduced to about 58 passengers after the conversion.
The technology that must be developed is complex and will require innovation.
Universal Hydrogen proposes to set up an extensive logistics infrastructure to deliver to airports twin packs of 7-footlong, 3-foot-diameter capsules of hydrogen that can be loaded and unloaded quickly. Plug Power, which builds groundbased hydrogen fuel cells that generate electricity from hydrogen, will have to develop much lighter fuel cells that are certifiable to airplane safety standards. MagniX will build the motors that use the electricity to turn the propellers. Linking all this together, Universal Hydrogen must integrate all the ancillary equipment wrapped around the fuel cell and the electric motor.
AeroTEC’s engineers will have to modify the airframe — designing a new cargo door through which to load the hydrogen capsules and holding fixtures for all the equipment — and then shepherd the complete aircraft through the FAA certification process.
Roei Ganzarski, CEO of MagniX, said this work represents the future of aerospace.
Lee Human, president of AeroTEC, said he expects to begin modifying an actual aircraft early next year. Testing will begin with one engine using hydrogen and the other conventional gas before both are converted. Certification will take several years.
Human sees a large market for zero-emissions aircraft, both passenger and cargo, that can fly out of small, underserved airports at very low cost. “There are a lot of candidate aircraft that could be modified,” he said.
Eremenko founded Universal Hydrogen last year, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The startup secured $20 million in initial funding this year, led by Silicon Valley venture fund Playground Global, with backers including Plug Power, Airbus, JetBlue, Toyota and New York-based hedge fund Coatue.
Eremenko estimates it will take about $300 million to achieve certification of the regional planes.
Universal was “born out of my frustration … with the pace of decarbonization in aviation,” Eremenko said. “Biofuels, synthetic fuels, batteries and various other options out there just aren’t going to work on the time frame that you need to make the Paris Agreement targets.”
“The industry is too slow,” he said. “We need to create an external sort of disrupter to get the industry to move.”
Eremenko’s plan is to demonstrate this decade that hydrogen aviation can work on the scale of small regional passenger planes so Boeing and Airbus will also choose hydrogen in the 2030s when they design their next all-new single-aisle jets.
“I founded this company to create irrefutable proof of the fact that you can get affordable hydrogen, you can get it to airports, you can certify it, it can be safe and passengers will fly on hydrogen airplanes,” Eremenko said.