from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
From the Telegraph:
A pioneering hydrogen plane start-up is seeking to raise funds to secure its future amid a US backlash against zero-carbon technologies.
ZeroAvia, based in Gloucestershire, plans to sell a stake to an established aerospace or defence business to raise cash and gain help in commercialising its hydrogen fuel cells.
Christine Ourmières-Widener, the company’s chairman, said the equity sale would be part of a fundraising aimed at generating about £20m, which could take place before the end of the year.
She said ZeroAvia was also close to announcing a new chief executive after Val Miftakhov, its founder, quit the post in May, stoking speculation that the business was close to collapse.
The company endured a torrid 2025 after Donald Trump cut support for a hydrogen sector that had won backing from the Biden administration.
The change in political sentiment meant a fundraising last December failed to raise the targeted £50m, prompting ZeroAvia to scrap plans to develop full hydrogen power-trains.
It also shut down an electric-motor production site in Seattle and dismissed more than half its workforce, consolidating its business at Kemble airfield in the Cotswolds, where around 100 people continue to develop fuel cells.
Ms Ourmières-Widener said ZeroAvia had cash left from last year’s £23m fundraising but wanted to boost its reserves to take its product through to market in the next two years, with the first firm orders expected in the next few months.
The former chief executive of CityJet, Flybe and Portuguese flag carrier TAP said that while 2025 was “really tough”, the dial may be swinging back towards hydrogen as the Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz highlighted the perils of depending on oil.
Full story here.
If it was at all feasible, aircraft manufacturers and the likes of Rolls Royce would be gobbling up the technology.
It clearly is not, which is why the whole business model depends on government handouts.
Ms O-W thinks the Iran war will reignite interest in hydrogen. She obviously is not aware that 99% of the world’s hydrogen production comes from fossil fuels, predominantly natural gas.
Less than 1% comes from electrolysis.
Perhaps she thinks it comes out of thin air?
Oh, the insanity.
First chuckle of my day (-:
Is it too late to get Biden a seat on the first test flight?
I can think of some more useful candidates for that honor.
Fauci
In honor of the beagle puppies, perhaps he should have his vocal cords cut so we don’t have to hear him pleading the 5th in front of congress.
Do we have yet a total count?
Funny isn’t it.
He received a “pre-emptive” pardon from Biden.
He claims he did nothing wrong.
Funny that he pleads the 5th to so many questions when the questions are based on his journal.
This is what we call doing a Dale Vince.
Hydrogen is very difficult to contain, hydrogen is extremely flammable, NASA has had issues with fueling rockets, where they have many people involved with the safety of fueling every rocket that uses Hydrogen, imagine the safety at airports, where many people are fueling many aircraft. Currently a fuel leak is easily visually detected, hydrogen leaks are not easily detected.
…until they are. Bang.
Davy lamps all round…
Hydrogen bomb?
Here’s some more info about hydrogen . . .
To produce 1 tonne of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water requires 52.5MWh of electrical energy. And then real-world efficiencies means that using that of 1 tonne of hydrogen will generate 15MWh AT BEST. Therefore . . . ENERGY INVESTED is 3.5 x GREATER than ENERGY RETURNED . . . which is brilliant, really.
And for this to have any twisted credibility in our idiotic virtue-signalling world, the electrical supply for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen would obviously have to come from wind and solar generating facilities, thus producing “green hydrogen” – the concept doesn’t fly . . . unless it’s “green”, obviously.
But over the last 12 months in the UK, wind and solar combined generation provided 12.97GW, this from a wind and solar combined installed capacity of 58.83GW, which means they operated at a combined Capacity Factor – efficiency – of 22.05% (the least efficient form of grid-scale generation available to us).
So, if you want to deliver 1GW of electricity from wind and solar generating facilities, with a Capacity Factor of 22.05%, those facilities will have to have an installed capacity of 4.535GW, thus demonstrating an Overbuild Factor of 4.535.
In summary:
To make hydrogen by electrolysis requires 3.5x the energy that will be gained from using that hydrogen, and to generate the electricity needed for that electrolysis, the installed capacity of wind and solar generating facilities will have to be 4.5x greater than the electricity actually needed.
You get the picture, I hope – generating electricity through wind and solar, and using that electricity to make hydrogen . . . is an exercise in downright disgustingly idiotic profligacy . . . that the government – and it doesn’t matter which crowd of idiots are the government – will expect you and I to pay for.
Rube Goldberg approves.
Doesn’t seem that they ever claim that it’s a practical idea–other than lining their pockets with other people’s money
Most people – no matter how scientifically ill-read they may be – have at least some facility to respond to, and even recognise . . . practicality.
And this must surely mean . . . children and students are being quite deliberately turned away from having a rational and enquiring brain.
I have long suspected that the reason that some people are democrats is because they are detached from reality, in general, particularly the one’s with ‘woke’ agendas. They want the world to operate as they want, not as history has shown that it does.
And that is a very optimistic energy requirements estimate. Also required:
And that’s just energy. Never mind CAPEX, OPEX and maintenance expenses.
It will be insightful if the new energy minister Ms Fahnbulleh resists the call for more funding for this white elephant hydrogen distraction.
I suspect the government will stump up some more tax payers hard earned money to keep the myth that hydrogen is a potential replacement option for fossil fuel.
I have more faith in battery powered flight than so called green hydrogen and that is an indication of how ridiculous they both are.
how ridiculous they both are.
Spot on.
Existing airliners are already hydrogen-fueled. It’s just that the harmless carbon stabilizer also contributes to the fuel value of Jet A.
All of these way-too-clever ideas for utilizing molecular hydrogen directly as fuel are based on the not-clever-at-all idea that emitting CO2 out the exhaust is a bad thing for the “climate.” It is nuts.
That is all for now.
Thanks David. Marvellous thought.
Why not burn the H2 directly in a jet or IC engine if you insist on using it? You would not have to cart the fuel cells around all over the planet.
Wasn’t there a move in the UK to building buses powered by hydrogen? At the time I labeled them Hindenbuses. These people have a serious thinking or investigating problem!
Please stop, I’ve already had my fist chuckle of the day !
I hear they can really light up your day.
The message is definitely illuminating. Even progressives will get a bang out of it.
As a kid I used to make hydrogen for party balloons out of common household ingredients since nobody would buy me helium.
About a third of the balloons spontaneously exploded while filling because of friction between the gas and the balloon, and whatever trace of oxygen I failed to squeeze out of the balloon before filling. Sometimes they exploded after filling for no apparent reason.
Hydrogen is nasty stuff. There is no way I would ever put a significant quantity of hydrogen next to anything I cared about.
We used to play around with gunpowder – from fireworks that failed to go off.
The Genie: Make a pile of the gunpowder and toss on a match – and in my case blow your eyebrows off. Mother was not best pleased.
We did that too. My grandpa was an ex WW2 artillery machinist. When I was 7 he said “I know you’re going to mess with fireworks and explosives, so I’ll show you how to do it right”. Best grandpa ever.
Yes, well you didn’t grow up in the bomb sites of London, I guess. And they were with us up until the mid 70s
Kids nowadays don’t know what they’re missing. A different world.
My neighborhood pal who I grew up with and I used to build a lot of model cars and ships. When we had leftover fireworks after Fourth of July, we poured the gunpowder from a bunch of firecrackers into an empty glass Testor’s model paint bottle, punched a hole in the metal lid, and inserted a long fuse. It’s a good thing we thought it a good idea to contain the explosion behind a garage wall and wooden privacy fence. After the startled neighbors had gone back indoors and no one called the police, we examined the carnage — glass shards embedded in the wooden walls, fence and gate. Such fun for a couple of 12-year-olds.
Those were the days! 😀
😎
When I was a kid (my dangerous years), we lived in a new house on the edge of several acres that were bulldozed for further development. The developer bought a strip of land that bordered the area and shifted his building there for a few years.
We used to get a gross of Cherry Bombs (and/or M-80s, Silver Salutes) every year. (For those who don’t know know, a gross is 144 of something.)
Lots of fun memories that we survived uninjured.
One memory is gathering a bunch of dead grass in the bulldozed area and making a fort. It was about 4 foot square and the walls at least a foot high.
We placed a number of Cherry Bombs spread out in all the walls.
At twilight, we lit the walls and ran to the top of a mound and waited.
As it got dark and the cherry bombs began to go off and blow glowing grass embers into the sky … awesome!
Of course we blew up a bunch of other stuff also, but that was one of my fondest memories of those explosive years from my youth.
Because I had a deficient education, I didn’t realize that to get the maximum amount of work from an explosive, one had to confine it. Therefore, when I was still in my teens, I had an interesting experience. At the time, I was into cave exploring. A friend and I had exhausted all the tunnels in a particular cave and were looking for something we had perhaps overlooked. Just above the only room that was big enough to stand up in, there were a couple of tunnels accessed by short chimneys. In one of them, there was a hole too small to get my head into, but I could see a wall about 3 feet away, across a gap. I decided to try to blast it open to get to it. I came back another day with some cherry bombs. I placed one on a ledge next to the hole. I lit the fuse, turned and quickly crawled about 6 feet away, put my hands over my ears and waited very briefly for the explosion. When the cherry bomb exploded, it snuffed out my carbide lamp flame and felt like the Jolly Green Giant had quickly squeezed my torso with his hands. After re-lighting my carbide lamp, I turned around to see how much damage I had done. To my disappointment, all that had happened was to smear some red paper on to the rock wall. I was incredulous that I hadn’t moved any rock! So, I tried it again — with exactly the same results! I went back down the chimney to report to my friend what had transpired. While we were sitting there talking, some white smoke slowly rolled down the adjacent chimney, demonstrating that the wall I had observed while looking in the hole was a chimney we had already explored.
It is a wonder that any of us made it into our 20s.
Funny, we used carbide – add water – locked up in a large milk container. The exothermic reaction produces acetylene gas and after a minute or so, kaboom. Then try to locate the lid of the milk can.
We used paint cans.
We were educated by my dad to the hazards of all of these and left to do our experiments.
We used to make our own from regular household products, I was going to post the recipe but on second thought, best not to..
Our neighborhood kids gang once build a foot-high “volcano” of gunpowder and I think sulphur.
It went off with a bang, and most of us got showered with sizzling paper & stuff.
Burns on foreheads, arms, legs.
Being the 1950s, of course we all also got beltings when we got home 😰
As a kid, I would make my own gunpowder from KNO3 I got from the grocery store, sulfur from my chemistry set and carbon from beating charcoal briquettes. (I obtained the recipe from the encyclopedia Britanica.) I sent a number of my old model ships to Valhalla in that fashion.
Ingredients like lye and aluminum foil? What fun that was!
😎
I used to think about filling a Mylar, oval shaped balloon with hydrogen. Mounting a string of colored lights on the perimeter with a tiny fan to spin it.
The setting it loose over a beach full of UFO believers where the wind was blowing out to sea.
A timer would set it a small charge off over the ocean.
Nice day dream but totally impractical.
Just like this “hydrogen powered plane”.
Hydrogen planes, free fireworks in the sky.
If you have to beg the government for money then there isn’t much believe in it right?
One has to ponder what the consequences to a hydrogen powered aircraft in the event of a lightning strike.
I’m seeking investment in BandAvia, my new company that plans to produce the world’s first commercially-viable elastic band-powered passenger plane. Please send cheques to the address below. Remember, your investment may go down as well as up.
You forgot to mention nuclear fusion in the prospectus…
Makes me think of the Flintstones.
We had balsa rubber band powered planes.
It is “merely” a matter of scaling, right?
I don’t want to say too much in case the competition are reading, but our head of research (a smart cookie – she has a PPE degree from Oxford) has developed a theory that flight endurance is proportional to length of the elastic band.
Or, your investment may simply explode in place.
But is it carbon-neutral? Apply now for funds to the Australian Capacity Investment Scheme. Mention that you worked on Snowy 2.0 (otherwise known as Turnbull’s Folly). You should also stress DEI in your prospectus.
Extracting hydrogen from its source is possibly as efficient as producing ethanol from corn; about 1.2 to 1 for corn, and .8 to 1 for hydrogen or extracting hydrogen has a negative efficiency ratio..
Bah humbug! Aside from the difficulties of dealing with hydrogen like energy density, metal embrittlement and containment, using fuel cells means they are betting on using electric motors instead of turbofan engines on airliners. That is ridiculous on it’s face. Seimens has developed/certified the largest electric motor for aircraft at roughly 1 megawatt. A Boeing 777 at takeoff speed is generating 57.6 megawatts of power from it’s two 14 foot diameter turbofan engines.
The technology is simply not there to convert airliners to electric no matter the energy storage system. And that same B777 is burning 25,200 kg/hour of JetA fuel at takeoff, and at cruise it drops to about 14,000 kg/hr. Yeah there are electric airplanes. Small lightweight trainers that have a 20 minute range on batteries, while the same airframe with a gasoline engine has a range of 4-6 hours. But electric aircraft are going to be limited to novelty levels, not commercial or personal transport as in general aviation.
All true.
So join in the fun. Add some ridicule. 🙂
boom, BANG, bust….do we really need more of these “petardos” (spanish for fireworks cracker) asking for our money?
Don’t know anything about ZeroAvia but do know that the much much bigger Airbus has delayed its hydrogen aircraft project’s original target of 2035 by 5-10 years due to the slow development of essential tech and infrastructure.
Customer in the boarding queue: “How much longer before the fuel arrives?”
Airline representative: It is being airlifted here as we speak.
It likely will be a boom and bust proposition.
Much more than “a flash in the pan.”
Air is thin, yes. 🙂
I have the perfect application for hydrogen powered aircraft.
It requires a law or a mandate.
Transportation for politicians!
2 birds, 1 stone?
The walking dead
I at first glance read “lifeline” as “lifetime” and immediately thought, “of course”…
When we see this technology being able to fly 200 passengers across a continent or ocean in the same time and as consistently as currently operational jets can do, we’ll know they’re made it. But when all they can currently offer is only a short hop across a school yard in an aircraft weighting maybe 10 lbs. we’ll know how far they still have to go and why the big manufacturers aren’t willing to start supporting them probably even without government subsidies.