Will the majority of new passenger aircraft sold in 2050 be hydrogen fueled?
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The airline industry is expected to be one of the industries which struggles most with moving towards a more sustainable future. This is in part due to the fact that the specific energy of batteries is too low for longer distance flights. Weight is a much more significant factor for aircraft compared to cars or ships. Hydrogen has a higher specific energy than jet fuel but it comes with it's own engineering and operational challenges.

Airbus is investing in research into hydrogen fuel as a possible alternative: https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/low-carbon-aviation/hydrogen/zeroe . They expect to release their first commercial hydrogen aircraft in 2035.

This question regards new aircraft being produced and entering the market. If the majority of the global fleet is not hydrogen fueled but the majority of new additions to this fleet is the question will resolve YES. If the majority of new aircraft sold in 2050 is not hydrogen fueled it will resolve NO.

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I think the industry is heading more towards SAF (bio or synthetic) for aviation decarb. Compressed/liquid hydrogen storage is expensive both from a pure energetic perspective as well as a containment/materials perspective (thousands of bars of pressure, cryogenic temps, hydrogen embrittlement, etc). rapid H2 refueling is also a challenge -- a typical airline refueling truck pumps ~1000 gpm of jet fuel and takes an hour to refuel a 747, during which it maintains an effective power transfer rate of ~2 GW (!) -- this is nearly impossible to replicate with current hydrogen pumping tech (incidentally, one of many challenges that killed the hydrogen trucking company Nikola)

I expect that most of the existing aircraft will not be hydrogen based. However, I also expect the industry will be moving in that direction at this point. This means most companies will not be willing to invest in aircraft based on older technologies. They will continue to operate jet fuel based aircraft, but transition to hydrogen by purchasing hydrogen fueled aircraft going forward.

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