A ‘pipeline in the sky’
Hydrogen transport by airship.
Airship projects aimed at transporting heavy loads over rough terrain aren’t particularly new. Now a Californian company is going one step further; it wants to fuel the disruption of our fossil fuel-based economies.
The firm H2 Clipper Inc must certainly have done something right. The US start-up, based in Santa Barbara CA, filed its first patent in 2012. In December it was invited by Dassault Systèmes to participate in a ‘3D Experience Lab Accelerator’ programme. This offered the firm a real boost. Now more than 100 engineers are to be recruited to design a prototype of its airship that will be a mere 40% of the original size. This prototype is scheduled to carry out test flights in two years and form the basis for the first airship to be ready for flight in 2027.
The best of two worlds
“The dimensions of a H2 Clipper airship are 300 m (length) and 60 m (diameter). At such a size, it can transport 170–255 t of cargo and achieve speeds of up to 280 km/h, while covering a distance of as much as 10,000 km,” as Robert H. Shelton, H2 Clipper Inc’s vice-president for administration, told the ITJ. As with other airship projects, the H2 Clipper combines the cost advantages of maritime transport with the speed advantages of air transport. It is four to five times cheaper than aircraft and seven to ten times faster than maritime vessels. What’s new is what the company’s name implies: this project relies entirely on hydrogen as its fuel and advertises its capacity to do away with greenhouse-gas emissions in their entirety.
Hydrogen will boost the H2 Clipper’s seven fuel-cell engines to a combined 33,000 hp and get the airship aloft in the first place. “The lifting gas, over 400,000 m3, is placed in gas cells located above the cargo area and fills most of the interior of the exoskeleton,” Shelton specified. The 7,150 m3 cargo hold – the Airbus Beluga XL, in comparison, offers 2,200 m3 – is accessible via a door with a 17.6 m diameter (Beluga – 8.8 m), which facilitates the loading of bulky goods. But H2 Clipper sees its real vocation in the transport of hydrogen between the power plants of the future and the main consumers of the energy source. With rotations, for example, from the future city of Neom in Saudi Arabia, which has designs on producing 500 t of hydrogen every day, and European metropolises, a ‘pipeline in the sky’ could be built.
The H2 airship has beams
Using hydrogen not only for transport and as a fuel, but also as a lifting gas – instead of the finite resource of helium – isn’t a means of bringing airship travel back to life yet. With the impression of the great disasters of the LZ 114 Dixmude 99 years ago and the Hindenburg explosion of 1937 burned into the collective memory, it’s currently not permitted to use hydrogen as lifting gas in the USA or in most countries of the world. However, H2 Clipper Inc is optimistic and assumes that in the medium term the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will recognise the advances in technology and safety compared to the 1920s and 1930s. Earlier reservations about the use of hydrogen as a fuel on the roads, the railways and waterways have also long since vanished into thin air, after all.