For years, Airbus held a front-row seat in the theater of climate virtue signaling. With grand fanfare and a hefty €1.5 billion injection from French taxpayers during COVID-era bailouts, the European aerospace titan promised a hydrogen-powered, zero-emission aircraft by 2035. The project was christened as nothing less than “historic” by Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury. Now, like so many green-energy pipe dreams, that fantasy is unraveling fast.
According to The Wall Street Journal article by Benjamin Katz, Airbus is retreating from its hydrogen ambitions—cutting the project’s budget by 25%, reallocating staff, and initiating a new “development loop” after discovering, shockingly, that the laws of physics still apply to aviation .
Let’s step back to 2020. Flush with pandemic cash and climate fervor, Airbus unveiled concepts for three futuristic, hydrogen-powered aircraft, one of which was to fly 200 passengers over 2,000 nautical miles. As Faury boldly proclaimed, Airbus would lead “the most important transition this industry has ever seen.”
But as many of us skeptics warned, this was always a bet against thermodynamics, not a technological revolution. The project depended on storing liquid hydrogen at -423°F, modifying engines to burn it, and constructing a global hydrogen supply chain from scratch—because, of course, hydrogen doesn’t occur naturally in usable form.
Airbus soon discovered what everyone outside the climate policy echo chamber already knew: the technical challenges are monumental, and the economics are worse. Even their “conservative” redesign—a plane for just 100 passengers with half the range—couldn’t dodge the mass-to-energy problem. Hydrogen fuel cells proved too heavy, and their power output too weak for commercial viability.
So why did Airbus press ahead with something so clearly unfeasible?
For the same reason so many corporations have thrown themselves into ESG posturing: taxpayer money and regulatory appeasement. The French government made its pandemic bailout contingent on green promises, while EU policymakers continue pushing decarbonization regardless of engineering feasibility.
As the WSJ notes, Airbus’s hydrogen project helped it tap into a firehose of government funds and green finance. It also attracted engineers and burnished its ESG credentials, particularly in Greta-fied Europe where “flight-shaming” has become a secular penance.
In short, this wasn’t about innovation—it was about compliance and optics. Airbus cashed in on green virtue while buying time to keep real aircraft production humming.
‘We Don’t Think Hydrogen’s the Answer’
Perhaps the most telling contrast comes from Boeing, Airbus’s American rival. Then-CEO David Calhoun minced no words in 2022: “We don’t think hydrogen’s the answer.” Instead of wasting billions on green moonshots, Boeing focused on improving existing designs. That realism now looks prescient.
Even oil giants like BP and automakers like Porsche are walking back their green ambitions. BP is pivoting back to fossil fuels, and Porsche is doubling down on combustion engines. Airbus, meanwhile, has been forced into a rebranding retreat, swapping hype for “development loops” and comparing its hydrogen plane to the Concorde—another technological marvel undone by economics.
The unraveling of Airbus’s hydrogen fantasy underscores a hard truth that no amount of EU regulation or climate activism can obscure: physics trumps policy, and engineering reality doesn’t care about carbon targets.
This is not an isolated incident. From offshore wind cost overruns to the collapse of EV startups and the continued flops of carbon capture projects, green technologies are consistently failing to deliver on their promises. Yet governments remain locked in ideological pursuit of Net Zero, heedless of cost, feasibility, or collateral damage.
As Faury himself conceded, being “right too early” is the wrong move. But the real problem isn’t being early—it’s being wrong altogether. The idea that hydrogen is the fuel of the future was always a marketing campaign disguised as a strategy.
Airbus’s retreat is not just a technical course correction. It’s a tale about the perils of politicizing engineering and treating speculative technologies as settled solutions. It shows, once again, that green policies too often chase headlines, not hard science, engineering, or economics.
The final tally? €1.7 billion gone, timelines extended by a decade, and the “historic moment” quietly shelved.
Hydrogen isn’t the future of aviation. It’s just another expensive detour in the long road of climate policy delusion.
Source:
Benjamin Katz, Airbus Promised a Green Aircraft. That Bet Is Now Unraveling, The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2025. Archived version here.
Burning hydrogen in a jet engine is probably feasible. Hydrogen has great energy to weight. It’s problem is that it’s bulky and just too flammable to be really safe.
The more likely alternative is synthetic AvJet. (Jet A-1).
Cheap off peak nuclear power plus a reasonable feedstock of carbon rich material like organic waste could make this more feasible than hydrogen.
Another non carbon based fuel is ammonia, but that end up producing nitrogen oxides typically.
The thing is that all these limitations were known about years ago. The exploration of them was simply virtue signalling by oil companies. Now its no longer disgusting to talk about fossil or nuclear energy, there is no reason to continue.
“Cheap off-peak nuclear power ,,, “
We can’t even build nuclear power plants anymore. Someday maybe, but not soon. The same people moaning about CO2 are standing in the way of nuclear power.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Even if someone totally buys into the “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” hoax (deceitfully named “Climate Change”), there is a serious problem looming that prevents any short-term implementation: There is a serious shortage of “green energy” and there is no solution for it even on the horizon. Wind turbines and solar panels are only producing a small fraction of consumer energy used today and will be even more impractical when transportation and HVAC are added by government fiat. Almost all of the known schemes for energy storage like batteries, pumped hydro, stored hydrogen made from electrolysis of water, and others, are by themselves extremely inefficient, requiring even more “green energy”. It doesn’t take great analysis to understand this. Simply accepting reality is all that is needed. There is no known technology that will make, store, and deliver “Green Hydrogen” to the consumer as his only energy source where and when he needs it, over the next few decades.
PR and politics have always been 4/5 fantasy. Reality is hard to sell, but people pay dearly for dreams. Add a dose of crisis, and reality doesn’t stand a chance.
I was more thinking….add a dose of crisis and reality takes over….
Let me rephrase. A dose of manufactured crisis.
We already did this dance with our mate Nick Stokes.
The hydrogen emits 2.6 times more water vapour a greenhouse gas at 40,000 feet along with un-burnt hydrogen and the effect may be little different to burning aviation gas.
There are a number of studies on it that I think is latest
https://www.aef.org.uk/uploads/2024/01/NonCO2-Impacts-of-Hydrogen-Leeds-AEF.pdf
Like all the green crap, activists an media get sold a story which often doesn’t quite pan out on closer inspection.
“Off Peak” power does not work for almost anything that requires significant capital.
Fischer Tropsch can convert coal or methane or organic materials to various flavors of hydrocarbons, but it is extremely capital intensive, has a 40% energy loss in the process and simply does not work intermittently.
Then there is the supply chain. The problem with “organic waste” is that it is an enormously inefficient and expensive supply chain. You have to collect it, you have to transport it, you have to process it. We already know what the impact of supply chain difficulty is – it is why natural gas is so much cheaper than oil per unit of heat.
If you have no choice, you do this but the problem is that there ARE better choices.
The vast majority of green/alternative energy solutions are nothing more than partial and more expensive replacements of existing working solutions.
I call it Rube Goldberg with billions.
There is no such thing as cheap off-peak nuclear power. Nuclear is THE most expensive way of producing dispatchable electricity.
Synthetic fuel is more expensive than regular, otherwise market forces would have replaced conventional fuel with synthetic, just as the markets would have replace coal and gas with wind and solar, and internal combustion engine vehicles with battery electric vehicles.
Hydrogen has a great energy to mass ratio, but only if you can get the oxygen without having to transport it.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27245/what-are-the-energy-to-mass-ratios-of-some-fuels-oxidizers-when-including-the-o
“So why did Airbus press ahead with something so clearly unfeasible?”
On the one hand it sounds so utterly virtuous, what’s not to like, and on the other there was the small matter of a “€1.5 billion injection from French taxpayers during COVID-era bailouts”
And as per usual reality bit hard. What a waste.
They have far more success in burning public money – and conventional kerosene.
It goes along with their A380. Finally they could produce a bigger plane the Boeing!
When every mention I saw said that market studies could find no use for it, and Boeing, which was still competent at the time, went with the 787 and made money.
Its landing gear tore up runways and restricted it to a very few airports. It was a vanity project implemented poorly. Absolutely typical of government bureaucrats.
And yet there are reports that airlines are bringing back their A380s. Of course, travel may be down because of the financial turmoil. The A380s may not be full.
Reminder: Socialist French and Socialist British Governments signed a treaty to build Concorde. The agreement was so tightly worded that neither side could pull out when it emerged nobody would buy the finished product because the operating costs would be too high, capacity (100) too low, and capital cost exorbitant.
So they continued, cost over-runs, delays included, to develop the aircraft then build 18 production models and then forced the State-run French and British airlines to buy them.
Meanwhile: all the resources in UK and France were misallocated to a political, prestige project and not available to design and produce aircraft for which there was a ready and developing market. So the US aero-companies dominated.
The Airbus nonsense is par for the course. Fortunately, the British pulled out ages ago.
I believe that Airbus wings are still made in the UK, with substantial UK Government support.
It should have taken any competent and ethical aeronautical engineer less than an hour to determine that hydrogen power aircraft won’t fly – literally and figuratively. Airplane design is largely a matter of eliminating unnecessary weight. Storing the equivalent amount of hydrogen to the energy content of aviation Jet-A fuel requires massively heavy storage tanks. 10,000 kg of hydrogen, the equivalent of about 30,000 kg of Jet-A, would require ranks weighing about 200 tonnes. An A320 weighs about 42 tonnes.
“ Airplane design is largely a matter of eliminating unnecessary weight.” It is critical to get the weight down, but there is a lot, lot more to airplane design than just weight control.
At least reality is biting fairly quickly in this instance.
They really should look into fairy dust and unicorn farts. “The fuel of the future”.
Indeed! Farts have been helping unicorns to fly for years.
Take whatever “Green” idea, it fails.
The use of “Green” as a virtue signal for a cleaner, more life-filled world is erroneous from the get-go. It’s based on the idea that carbon and carbon dioxide (CO2) are poisons — which they aren’t.
In fact, carbon is one of several elements necessary in large amounts for all life on earth. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is how carbon enters the food chain, when photosynthetic plants metabolize CO2 into cellulose, wood, carbohydrates, and oils on which all other life forms must feed.
CO2 is the bringer of life, not death. You can argue about what level of atmospheric CO2 is optimal. Nobody knows precisely, but natural history suggests that the optimum is higher than it is now. However, you can not argue that less, much less, must be achieved, lest life as we know it perish from the earth.
This is biology. Unfortunately, actual biology is of little interest to the school-skipping Gretas and semi-adult virtue signalers of the world. Even the word “organic” — originally the study of compounds containing carbon — has been turned upside down into a propaganda buzzword signaling that everything manmade is poison. Most discussion of climate and science generally has been detoured into ideology touted by ignorant hysterics.
Also unfortunately, ignorance might prevail. History is replete with examples.
Dismissing biology goes well beyond the atmosphere.
One young lady proclaimed in the future there will only be XX chromosomes.
I will not pull that thread further. It is only one of many examples where biology is dismissed as merely guessing and therefore wrong.
What’s about gender fair maths? Will be offered to study in Germany afaik.
Read more here
What does that have to do with biology dismissal?
No, no, no – math is racist. It is geology that needs to become feminine.
That young lady grew up to be a Supreme Court Justice.
Way Off Topic I know and apologise, but we are having a good chuckle – despite net zero – over the latest lunacy. It took the highest court in the realm to confirm what we already knew, what any toddler knows…
Starmer has told regional reporters this morning that a “woman is an adult female” and that he actually “welcomes the [Supreme Court] judgement.” Not what he said before…
https://order-order.com/2025/04/22/starmer-a-woman-is-an-adult-female/
The Supreme Court has pulled the rug from under the lot of them…
Can a man have a cervix?
Keir Starmer says it is “not right” to say only women have a cervix – BBC
Can a woman have a penis?
“I just don’t think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run. ” – Keir Starmer https://order-order.com/2022/03/28/starmer-cant-say-whether-women-can-have-penises/
June 2021: Starmer doubles down on vow to reform Gender Recognition Act and introduce self-ID for trans people.
March 2022: Starmer flounders on LBC for a whole three minutes without being able to say whether a woman can have a penis or not”.
June 2022: Starmer says: For the vast majority of women, biology is what matters and it’s very clear that they don’t have a penis…99.9% of women, it’s all biology”. At that time then-shadow equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds says women can’t have penises, then-party chair Stella Creasy says they can…
December 2022: Starmer vows again to support transgender self-identification.
April 2023: Starmer tells The Times women can have penises, saying: “For 99.9% of women, it is completely biological… and of course they haven’t got a penis. Some people identify as a different gender to the one they are born with.”
https://order-order.com/2025/04/16/flashback-all-the-times-starmer-couldnt-say-what-a-women-is/
They say Dylan Mulvaney is considering moving to England. Pass the popcorn, he will have to use the men’s facilities; as he was born a male.
The United States has a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who is unable to define a woman, even though she is a woman.
There’s a lot of mental illness going around.
What [I think] people want to hear syndrome
Nailed it.
It is all political and does not reflect reality one iota.
Nobody should believe a word Starmer says about anything.
Charles
Hope all is good with you, what is your kranky moderation objecting to, now??? Another Scunthorpe?
“Way Off Topic I know and apologise, but……”
I didn’t expect a Starmer response.
“reallocating staff”
IOW, headcount remains the same, and the related expenses (and pension benefits) grow.
Hydrogen air travel was once a real thing. The idea crashed (literally) in New Jersey almost 90 years ago.
Had the Hindenburg not had a flammable cloth skin, we probably would be having a different conversation. It was the skin that initially caught fire. Then of course the H2 went.
Waddabout this?
R101 (5th October 1930, France)
Which predates the Hindenburg by 7 years.
Location, location, location….
That’s one theory. Nobody knows for sure.
I was unaware of R101 until now.
https://www.airships.net/blog/british-airship-r101-crashes-killing-48-day-1930/
Calcium flares in the control car may have ignited, activated by exposure to water, but whatever the source of ignition, the fire destroyed the ship in minutes and killed most of those onboard, including Lord Thomson.
There were plenty of engineering deficiencies and horrible political decisions that resulted in that.
The first hydrogen airship disaster occurred 29 years before the Hindenburg.
Funny. The Hindenburg was constructed with recycled scrap from the R101 crash.
Funny. The Hindenburg originally was helium, but to facilitate additional cabin space it was filled with hydrogen. It’s first hydrogen flight ended in disaster.
The websites counter what was understood decades ago (including TV documentaries). The new data suggests that it was caused by electrostatic discharge from the cloth skin (which could hold state charge) and a gas leak.
The story that i Heard was that the Hindenburg was designed to use Helium, but the US would not allow export of that strategic material to Germany.
The idea is so silly, not only from the point of view of thermodynamics, but also engineering, materials and economics, that I’m inclined to believe Airbus knew this all along
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. As with the car manufacturers, they were not really given a choice, especially the auto industry
I think they were all buying time, playing along with the politicians, getting as much of the development funded via taxpayers as possible
It was probably also influenced by the ESG policies set by the big lenders
I’m not absolving any of them of their mistakes, but this was not happening in a vacuum. There were several forces pulling in the same direction and the biggest culprits are the ones who were setting policies and agendas
“The idea is so silly, not only from the point of view of thermodynamics, but also engineering, materials and economics,”
This also applies to trying to use hydrogen gas to replace natural gas in homes.
Net Zero insanity has driven a lot of politicians right off the edge.
That’s true Tom. I think they’ve settled on injection at anywhere between 10 and 20%, with I think only Germany going to the higher value
The limit of course is set by practical considerations, but it’s still not a viable, sustainable, economic option even at these levels
It’s like a scientist who is unwilling to give up on a hypothesis even after its been falsified
Trust me, there are a lot of such sacred cows in science and beyond 😁
“It’s like a scientist who is unwilling to give up on a hypothesis even after its been falsified”
In other words unwilling to give up on CO2 as the master climate control knob. Their theory has more holes in it than a colander, but it has to be defended no matter what.
That’s the biggest for sure, but there are countless others that don’t get so much attention because their implications are not as dramatic
The AIDS/HIV “hypothesis” is another, full of gaping holes from start to finish and dodgy beginnings with Robert Gallo, who some years earlier had implicated exactly the same retrovirus as the cause of leukemia (published in Science I think), only for it to be roundly rejected as a theory by the scientific community – at that time the scientific review process still worked reasonably well and the majority of scientists were honest
Notice how it’s been quietly dropped after failing in the big drive to shuttle big sums to Africa via the WHO and UN, only for the money to be recycled back to western pharma to line a lot of pockets
It served its purpose, there is not much more to gain from it
String theory, collesterol theories,…, the list goes on and on
The problem is worst when you mix science, politics and money.
Arguing with facts and evidence becomes in itself almost futile because the other side resorts to all sorts of dirty tricks to redefine black as white and 2 plus 2 as 5,painting anyone who says otherwise as a heretic, or worse, a “denier”
“The problem is worst when you mix science, politics and money.” As pointed out by Eisenhower.
Hydrogen gas was used for heating in homes for many years in the UK, after the discovery of natural gas reserves in the N sea the country switched over to Natural gas.
The kerosene jet fuels of today lose weight as the flight progresses, through getting burned and pushed out of the tail pipe.
Hydrogen fuel cells stay much the same weight through the flight. Their hydrogen does deplete, but it is less of a weight to lose because the fuel cells are so heavy.
Geoff S
Why would they pursue fuel cells instead of turbines? The weight difference is surely going to override any efficiency gains.
Yes, hydrogen-powered airplanes would not use fuel-cells – they’d burn the hydrogen in turbines.
Wrong comparisom, it is same as to say, that conventional jet must hold its engines, which are not losing weight during flight.
Fuel cell is only part of engine, they are consuming hydrogen, losing weight during flight.
It is all about maximum power vs. weight ratio.
Few years ago it was impossible to build battery powered flying object. Electric motors too heavy, batteries with too low energy density.
Now drones up to personal sizes are flying without problems.
Jet petrol has energy around 12kWh/kg, while liquid oxygen only 4kWh/kg. Although thermal efficiency of jet engine is somewhere between 30-50%. While efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell can go up to 90%, so it looks viable at least on the paper.
On the other side, there are already working prototypes of cars with fuel cells, Toyota Mirai, it has equivalent of 66MPG or 3.6l/100km consumption, so it looks good not only on paper.
Fuel cells plus motor are much heavier than jet engines.
There is also the fact that the tank to hold hydrogen is many times heavier and bulkier than is a tank that holds an equivalent amount of jet fuel.
Airbus has not completely given up on hydrogen. They are apparently still looking into zero emission propeller planes able to carry 200 people using electric motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
MS Copilot
A job for every tool and a tool for every job. Perhaps we should replace today’s airplanes with rockets. Landings might be a little rough — but — Oh, What a Ride!
LOX – Hydrogen is not the most common propellant-oxidizer combination.
Concorde at least used fuel you can get almost anywhere. Also the engines were conventional, at least for jet fighters.
The only problem with Concorde was the noise. Olympus engines were phenomenally loud.
Notably, SpaceX went to using liquid methane in its reusable boosters. Maybe there are issues with LH?
How many SpaceX vehicles became 4th of July displays before they got the engineering right?
H2 just makes the mistakes and faults more visible.
I’d like to compare that to the number of NASA rockets that crashed and burned before they got the H2 engineering right.
In my younger days we called those Canaveral Jobs and set off steam bottle type rockets to celebrate, most of which exploded due to the cork inserted too tightly.
Watching those early rockets explode on the launch site or shortly thereafter, made me appreciate the astronauts who climbed on board the next time around.
Let’s go back to the fifties and see how many rockets blew up on the pad, or shortly after liftoff. It is a good thing to look into history, and lessons-learned.
If you want reusability and long lasting components you do not want Hydrogen. Its atoms are small and can permeate solid metals. Once absorbed, hydrogen lowers the stress required for cracks in the metal to initiate and propagate, resulting in embrittlement.
Methane on the other hand…
But it is a GHG.
Wikipedia says the fuel is RP-1, “highly refined kerosene formulation”.
SpaceX has several booster series.
I believe the heavy lift uses methane.
Depends on the rocket.
The only part of renewable energy to survive will be that Not connected to the grid, with the exception of Hydro, geothermal, and maybe biomass.
Connecting to the Grid puts wind and solar into negative economic territory.
I weep for what could have been achieved with that misdirected capital.
John, get with the program…high level modern economic theory says that somebody got the money so it wasn’t “lost” to the economy. In fact the more liberally you throw it around, the sooner it is in someone’s bank account, to be lent out by the banks as mortgages and car loans that stimulates the velocity of money. Even if governments just burnt the money, it forces the central bank to issue more to the institutions that distribute it, thus stimulating the economy in desired areas.
No economic “broken window” fallacy…governments now have whole departments whose job is to break as many windows as possible….disguised somewhat so that citizens don’t do the same thing and leave the government short of tax revenue, of course.
The whole “net zero will make us rich” is this kind of program…
Pres. Clinton once told a group of businessmen that he wanted to give them tax cuts, but he was afraid that they wouldn’t spend the money wisely, and that would end up hurting the economy.
Or what it would be like today if we just hadn’t spent it.
Less inflation. We’d all be wealthier today, for sure.
Another shoot-ready-aim climate change “solution” bites the dust. A little bit of research would have saved them the time and money but then they’d lose the virtue signaling which was the real reason to do it all along.
Story tip from Climate Change Dispatch:
Study: Leafy Moss Found In Antarctic Glacier Points To Warmer Temps 1,000 Years Ago – Climate Change Dispatch
2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O
This defeats the reason they are thinking of doing this.
Guillaume Faury is still CEO of Airbus!
The most amazing thing about this.
Very nice. We wouldn’t be dealing with any of this nonsense if government money, mandates, tax preferences and environmental forgiveness weren’t involved. Get the government out of the energy and transportation business. They have screwed thing up bad enough already.
Meanwhile….hydrogen production plants in Europe are closing down because well, it doesn’t work.
INTERESTING STORY
Can operators keep up with Golden State mandates? | WorkBoat
The product they are expected to use isn’t commercially available yet. It’s California, what can I say…..
(“WorkBoat” also has quite a bit to say about offshore wind.)
There is NOTHING wrong with H2 as an energy carrier, in theory.
As Yogi Berra reportedly said,
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are NOT.”
In order of magnitude of waste, the couple of $billion wasted on AIRBUS is nothing compared with the tens of $trillions being wasted on wind and solar. The West bankrupts and de-industrializes itself, while the East eats our breakfast, dinner, and lunch.
Yesterday I again enjoyed my solar electric heated hot tub. Definitely not subsidized.
Natural gas motor vehicles can run on a 10%-30% hydrogen mixture with no engine modifications. A commercial product is, or was, available called Hythane which has a 20% H blend. Because these are stored as gases they mix freely and can be stored in the same tank and distributed in the same lines thru the same pumps and injectors. I would guess tanks and the delivery systems need to be carefully monitored, but this is probably the easiest and safest way to meaningfully utilize hydrogen for transport. But it will never work in airplanes except in very short hops where the fuel can be stored as gas. If liquified and combined with liquid methane the hydrogen temperature is so low that it would immediately ice the methane, so seperate tanks would be required plus a lot of heavy gas conversion equipment.
Is that 20% by mass, or by volume?