By P Gosselin on 2. April 2022
Green hydrogen powered dirigible could revolutionize long haul cargo transport worldwide.
More than 80 years ago, the Hindenburg Zeppelin LZ 129 exploded and crashed as it approached landing at Lakehurst New Jersey on May 6, 1937.
The behemoth 250-meter long vessel rigid airship had been in service for just under a year. At the time, numerous such vessels had been produced and employed with relative commercial success between the 1900s and the late 1930s. But the dramatic, fiery explosion of the Hindenburg spelled the end of dirigibles as a mode of transport.
Green resurrection
That may be about to change. In the latest video, Die kalte Sonne’s Energieschau features California start-up H2 Clipper, which wants to bring the dirigible back to life with “a 100% green 20th century version of the hydrogen dirigible”.
According to the company’s promotional video, the new vessel uses “green hydrogen” for propulsion and with it the company hopes to transform air freight and shipping worldwide.
Using liquid hydrogen and fuel cell technology, the H2 Clipper is claimed to “operate efficiently at service ranges from under 500 to well over 6,000 miles” and travel at 175 mph. It would be able to “deliver goods directly from a factory in China to a distribution center in the U.S. in less than 36 hours.”
The H2 Clipper also boasts a massive cargo volume capacity of over 265,000 cubic feet (7,500 cubic meters), which is “8 to 10 times more cargo space than any other air freighter”.
Air freight cost less than a quarter of traditional
The cargo transport cost: between $0.177 to $0.247 per ton, which is “less than one-quarter the cost of traditional air freighters”. Moreover, using today’s modern navigation technology, it could transport unmanned.
According to H2 Clipper’s site:
By using modern fuel cell technology, fresh water is the H2 Clipper’s only operating by-product. It is not only 7X to 10X faster than a ship and 4X less costly than an air freighter, but also the only climate pledge friendly alternative for long-haul transport.”
Sounds highly promising and thus may be a great example of an effective and even impressive way to put green energies to use.
Unmanned? Not for long. Pirates will take care of them.
If nobody has made this work with gas engines, why is the hydrogen fuel cell going to make it work? Do hydrogen fuel cells have magical powers that make the dirigible fly lighter, faster and cheaper?
I remember one of these concepts doing the rounds in the late 90’s as a way of transporting mining equipment in the Arctic regions.
lol opex nightmare in 3…2…
in theory air has even smaller friction losses than bearings (trains) and water (cargo ships)
in practice, the savings are orders of magnitude from offsetting the many additional costs of air transport
for a fun exercise, remove all the fuel costs from air transport and then compare it to water or land with fuel
Just wonder what the envelope membrane is. Hydrogen permeates just about anything so this airship will be no exception to loss of lift gas
It would seem to me that a significant cross wind, especially very gusty winds, would be a major impediment to this working as planned. Or flying into a headwind would slow things down, and not operate as per the original spec. If it had been viable all these years, you would have thought someone would be doing it already.
I did buy some stock in a start-up company with almost the exact same plan as this about 10 years ago, promising to deliver supplies to the remote Arctic and mines in the north when the ice roads melted in the spring. They ran on news releases and was really being hyped and pumped. The stock doubled within a few months, and I sold. Never heard that they ever became operational, and now I don’t see any evidence of this company still around.
This is a lot of Pop Sci, and sounds good on glossy paper, but practically, I doubt we will see this working anytime soon, just because they don’t address all the complexities and/or even things like weather, and what they do when they are parked somewhere unloading their cargo, and giant thunder storm forms in the afternoon with temporary gale force winds. That’s a lot of square footage exposed to the wind and you just can’t escape the weather.
This is sort of like the hydrogen economy being promoted in the late 1990’s and into the early 2000’s which didn’t go anywhere. A lot of hype, but we still don’t have much of a hydrogen economy for transport as was the advertisement. Of course we have a very large hydrogen economy for traditional industry, such as making it on the fly from steam reformation, and using it in 1001 industries for everything from making steel, oil refining, producing fertilizers, processing foods to hydrogenated margarine. Green hydrogen is just so expensive when you can make it so cheaply from nat gas. More green hype IMHO.
In Germany we already have had it but it never worked:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter_AG
Does this balloon use hydrogen or helium as the buoyancy gas?