Hydrogen

Australian company Aviation H2 hopes to clean up commercial flight by converting existing aircraft to burn green ammonia instead of jet fuel. Director Christof Mayer tells us the team plans to have a 9-seat business jet flying on ammonia by mid-2023.

The Moon may look like a big dry ball, but there’s more water up there than you might expect. In a new study, scientists have shown that at least some of it could have been showered onto the lunar surface from the Earth’s atmosphere.

Green Launch says it can fire a space vehicle skywards three times faster than SpinLaunch's kinetic launch system. Its huge hydrogen gas cannon can produce hypersonic launch velocities upwards of Mach 17, enabling orbital altitudes up to 1,000 km.

Mindful of the significant carbon emissions generated by the marine industry in general, America's Cup reigning champion Emirates Team New Zealand has been developing a hydrogen-powered chase boat, and has now taken it out for its first spin.

Hydrogen will be one of humanity's key weapons in the war against carbon dioxide emissions, but it must be treated with care. New reports show how fugitive hydrogen emissions can indirectly produce warming effects 11 times worse than those of CO2.

A kilogram of hydrogen holds 39.4 kWh of energy, but typically costs around 52.5 kWh of energy to create. Hysata says its capillary-fed electrolyzer cell slashes that energy cost to 41.5 kWh, smashing efficiency records and lowering green H2 prices.

Hydrogen City will eventually harness 60 gigawatts of solar and wind energy, and use it to produce over 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen a year, keeping it underground in storage caverns at the Piedras Pintas salt dome before transport.

Airbus, in partnership with CFM International (a joint company of GE and Safran Aircraft Engines), is developing an A380 flying testbed called the ZEROe Demonstrator to examine how hydrogen combustion can be used to power turbofan jet engines.

The Extreme E electric off-road race series is either going to expand to include an Extreme H hydrogen-powered zero-emissions race series, or flat-out switch to hydrogen-only from 2024. It's quite an announcement from a one-year-old championship.

Hydrogen combustion engines are inefficient, costly to maintain and worse for the environment than fuel cell or battery powertrains. But they're also noisy and fun, so automakers are starting to pitch them as a greener option for die-hard motorheads.

Electrolysis is a key component of the cost of green hydrogen, and a Korean team says it's made a huge breakthrough with an anion exchange membrane that's not only cheaper than current proton exchange tech, but offers some 20 percent better performance.

Developing a zero-emissions fuel-cell off-roader to compete in Baja 1000 is hard enough. But using cryogenic liquid hydrogen that stores at -423 ºF as fuel? That's just lunacy. Lunacy reigns at SCG, where a cryo-hydrogen Baja Boot is in development.