Hydrogen fuel cell aircraft for the Nordic market
The Swedish government put forward an initiative in 2018 to fully de-carbonize regional aviation by 2030, and a more ambitious goal of de-carbonizing all aviation departing within its borders by 2045 [1]. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and technology improvements in current propulsion systems are proposed as short-term paths for achieving this. In the long run it is intended to replace kerosene combusting aircraft with fully electric and hydrogen powered aircraft.
The 2030 and 2045 emission goals are to be met without harming economic growth and globalization. Regional aircraft are estimated to have an 80% higher CO2 intensity than narrow and wide bodied aircraft [2]. CO2 intensity simply refers to the mass of CO2 produced per passenger kilometer for a full aircraft. A large portion of this efficiency difference is believed to relate to the greater improvement efforts that have gone into narrow and wide body aircraft
In addition, it is estimated that more than a third of global CO2 emissions can be attributed to passenger flights under 2000 km [2]. It should therefore be possible to motivate a targeted effort on reducing the climate impact of aircraft optimized for flights under 2000 km [3]. The fact that shorter range aircraft also offer a better potential for being electrified, motivates the combined study of high efficiency aircraft targeting electrification. These aspects have together contributed to a number of recent aircraft development efforts in the area of electrification
