The Specific Advancements with Fuels for Airplanes with Naresh Kumar of FlyZero

Hello everyone. Welcome to Conscious Design. This is your host, Ian Peterman, author of Conscious Design book. And today I have with me Naresh Kumar, Head of Sustainability for FlyZero. They're working on how to reduce emissions in our flying that we all do. He's had a career in engineering through in aerospace, working a lot with Rolls-Royce. And your focus has been on sustainability and climate change for a good portion of that. So welcome to the show.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, well, this is exciting for me because I love airplanes and flying and know that it's a big area of impact, right, in CO2 emissions. And it's a huge area that we can focus on. Taking a little bit of step back though, I briefly mentioned you've worked in engineering for a long time in aerospace with that sustainability focus. Could you give a brief history of how'd you get here and what really drove you into looking at the sustainability and climate change side to the aerospace industry?

Sure. So I joined the FlyZero project at the beginning of the project. And the project started in January last year, 2021, with a very specific remit, which was to deliver zero-carbon emissions aircraft that could enter the marketplace by the 2030 timeframe. Timeframe. Now, my personal background and within the project, I have been head of sustainability from the beginning, which has been a privilege. And this challenge is quite a formidable challenge, as you can imagine, with aviation as a sector which is recognized globally as one of the hardest to decarbonize. And that's related to the fact that you need a high energy density fuel to be able to provide the power to the airplanes in which many of us fly for business, pleasure, and meeting family. And visiting friends. So my career in aeronautical engineering started in the United Kingdom, having graduated in the subject, and then spent a fair chunk of my career looking into manufacturing and various different roles. But the most relevant role that I brought to this project was one where I was responsible as Chief of Environmental Technology working for Rolls-Royce Gas Turbines, where I had responsibility for delivering the emissions reductions from aircraft and working across the sector on making sure that the decarbonization of aircraft in service and their operations was handled to the best of everyone's ability. So it was, it was a privilege to join the project at the beginning of last year, and I must say we have achieved a huge amount in that regard over the last 15 months, which I'm happy to explain a little bit more.

Yeah, well, that sounds like a perfect career setup for you, having worked in sustainability, that lens from Rolls-Royce and being able to look at things and then be able to bring that to FlyZero and be able to— it sounds like accelerate What you were doing in— because zero is a very low number for flight. It's like you said, it's such a huge— it's a high density, energy density required, which is a unique challenge.

Yeah.

I've talked to people in the sailing world, container ships, and that's fairly quote unquote simple because old technology sails work still, the wind didn't stop blowing. But with airplanes, you're in a whole new realm. There's not, you know, there's no old tech that I know of. And maybe you have some that has come up, but there's nothing that I can think of that's like an easy, oh, we've done this before in a different, you know, in a relatable way. So what, as you guys are working through this the last 15 months, kind of what is your, What have you been working on? What have you been able to identify as possible? 'Cause 2030 is just not that far away now.

No, not at all. Yeah. So let me explain the scope of the project. So we looked at the bulk of the aviation market where the majority of the emissions are generated by aircraft. So we were looking at the segments of the market that cover regional aircraft, narrow-body aircraft, or single-aisle aircraft, as some people describe them, which includes sort of midsize aircraft. Now, the addition of all of those 3 segments amounts to over 90% of global emissions and global passenger kilometers that—

Mm-hmm.

people do across the planet. And the total global aviation from the sector in 2019, pre-pandemic, when the markets were normal, amounted to about 920 million tons of CO2. And for every kilogram of kerosene aviation fuel that is burnt, you generate about 3.15 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The amount of kerosene aviation burnt in 2019 amounted to about 330 million tons. That's quite a lot of fossil fuel. The challenge for us was, to see what alternative zero-carbon fuels could be evaluated that would eliminate the bulk of those tailpipe emissions from the aircraft. And we have to recognize that there will still be some energy that's used for manufacturing the airplanes and all the components, the materials, the processing. But all of that adds up to a very small amount compared to the amount of emissions generated from the use of the aircraft in service. And we're talking about the order of 1 to 2%.

Okay.

So that aspect is quite small. Nonetheless, we did look into the full life cycle analysis and we looked at how we could reduce the carbon footprint further. For that element. So when we look at tailpipe emissions from aircraft, people have looked into alternative fuels. The biggest momentum in the past decade has been to develop sustainable aviation fuels. So these are alternative fuels which are made from biofeedstocks And indeed synthetic fuels, which can be manufactured using hydrogen and extracting carbon from the atmosphere, either from industry or direct air capture from the air, as some people are already starting to do now. But that would still mean that you're creating a liquid fuel as a replacement of fossil kerosene, which is distilled from crude oil. There are advantages in that the net carbon benefit from biofeedstocks and power-to-liquid type of synthetic fuels can be a lot better, but you're still emitting tailpipe emissions at the end of the day.

Right.

But recognizing that the carbon is captured somewhere else during the manufacturing process of those sustainable aviation fuels. So our challenge was to look for fundamental alternatives that would actually be based on zero-carbon fuels. So we— one of the earliest things that we did in the project was to look at what alternative fuels could be viable. We looked at gaseous hydrogen, we looked at batteries, we looked at liquid hydrogen. We looked at ammonia, and we were conscious that we needed to actually come up with a solution that would be better than sustainable aviation fuels as well as jet kerosene in the, in the medium to long term.

Right.

And I'm very pleased to say that the analysis that the FlyZero team did came to a conclusion that the highest prospects were provided by the potential use of liquid hydrogen for all of those 3 classes of aircraft that I described earlier, the regional, the narrowbody, and the midsize type of aircraft. Now, the propulsion systems would be different from today. So for the regional smaller aircraft that would carry around— let me give you the exact figures. We actually spent a lot of time doing the engineering work to come up with 3 specific concepts where technologies could deliver this zero carbon emissions. And on the regional, we've put together concepts, and these are all detailed in the FlyZero reports, which can be downloaded from the Aerospace Technologies Institute website.

Perfect.

And the regional will enable 75 passengers to travel up to around 800 nautical miles. So that is actually equivalent to current regional aircraft.

Amazing.

This is using liquid hydrogen powering a fuel cell with propellers on the wings which are electrically driven.

Hydrogen to electric. Is most efficient from what you're—

It's very efficient. It's very efficient through a fuel cell. And, and I can tell you that the— from a sustainability perspective, fuel cells are very, very clean. The only byproduct from fuel cells is water. There is no oxides of nitrogen or any other emissions emanating from fuel cells. So this is probably one of the cleanest solutions that the industry could benefit from.

Yeah, I think it's— isn't it Toyota? Toyota is doing a lot of fuel— Toyota or Honda is working on fuel cells because they— because of how efficient it is, actually.

Yeah, absolutely. So fuel cells at a smaller scale are being developed by the automotive industry.

Right.

But the fuel cells that we're talking about for aviation are much more sophisticated. They will be able to generate much more power that is needed by aircraft.

Right.

And liquid hydrogen as a fuel can provide those kinds of things. Land-based transport fuel cells can, can be operated using other types of fuels. Not just hydrogen.

Okay.

So coming on to the narrowbody and the midsize, again, for the narrowbody, we've put together a concept which will enable 179 passengers to travel up to 2,400 nautical miles. Again, so these are sort of the type of jets that take a lot of us on our local holidays. Local meaning sort of, you know, if you take North America, you know, you can go from sort of one side of the country to the other. If you're talking about Europe, you can go from one nation like the United Kingdom all the way to the Mediterranean destinations and beyond.

Okay.

So this is the bulk horse of passenger kilometers that aviation conducts. And the beauty of this one is that working on liquid hydrogen, you won't have any tailpipe emissions. Our engineering teams have evaluated and estimated that NOx, oxides of nitrogen type of emissions, could be reduced by 50 to 70% compared to today's technology. And again—

Oh, wow.

You— because there's no carbon in the fuel, you're not going to get much particulate matter, so it's good for air quality, and you're not going to get any sulfur oxides because there's no sulfur in the fuel. We've had independent assessments done on the configurations in terms of noise assessments, and those assessments tell us that these aircraft concepts will be competitive on noise Compared to future aircraft that are likely to enter the market. Now, the really fantastic news is that the mid-sized aircraft, which is even bigger, will enable about 279 people to be carried and a distance of about 5,750 nautical miles. So that's from UK to New York to Los Angeles, from the UK all the way to Hong Kong, certainly the Middle East. So with one stop, you could circumnavigate the entire globe. So this is really, really good news that such aircraft—

That's amazing.

Such aircraft could come into service and provide air travel for all of the public and enable them to travel guilt-free. That's one of my personal objectives, you know, and that was one of the reasons why I joined this project, because I want to make sure that I, I have the opportunity to travel around the globe, and I want to do it guilt-free without emissions. Amazing.

So, so you basically— and those are standard, those are, those are the same ranges a regular, you know, regular jet-fueled aircraft flies. So there's absolutely no compromise, it sounds like, in, in this process?

No, not from a technical point of view. Now, there are quite big challenges that we have to work on because today we don't have hydrogen infrastructure at airports. And we know that, and you mentioned, you mentioned land transport with Toyota and a number of other companies already using hydrogen for land-based transport, industries using hydrogen, and We're reminded that many of the countries in the world, particularly the developed world, there are a lot of nations who have a hydrogen strategy recognizing the potential of hydrogen as a clean fuel going forward, particularly with the developments that we've got around the globe in renewable electricity. Now, one of the challenges is that in order to make hydrogen, the cleanest way to make it is electrolysis from water. Water is made of H2O.

Right.

So 2 hydrogen atoms in every molecule of water, but you need a lot of electricity to actually release that hydrogen and then capture it liquefy it, store it, transport it to where you need to.

Right.

So in order to supply globally aviation's need for hydrogen, let's look forward 40 years because typical airplanes stay in service for about 25 to 30 years. So if we have the right investment, we have the right research and technology, and the first aircraft start to enter service in the 2030s we anticipate. And there are a number of companies like Airbus who have already declared an intent to put hydrogen aircraft in service by 2035. So if we get motoring, then the amount of energy that would be needed by all of aviation around the sort of 2060 timeframe would need about 12% more energy in the world compared to today's world energy. That's a lot.

Yeah, that's a large amount.

It's a huge amount. Ideally, you would want that electricity to be from renewable sources, whether it be from solar panels, from wind turbines, whether they're offshore, onshore, even low-carbon nuclear. energy. And we know that there are lots of people working not on tradition— not just on traditional nuclear, but fission technology for the future. So provided these energy sources come on stream, and there's no reason why they shouldn't, because a lot of nations— sorry, excuse me.

Okay.

A lot of nations have signed up to net zero goals as part of the United Nations drive through the Conference of Parties process that we're all familiar with to try and get to net zero by 2050. And that really demands that the bulk of the energy provided across the globe is as much as possible from renewable sources. So provided that that energy is available, then there's no reason why hydrogen industry cannot progress at the rate that we would want it to. Now, the, the other point I should make is that I mentioned sustainable aviation fuels, which is where industry is today in terms of providing a replacement to fossil kerosene.

Right.

To make synthetic fuel in quantity that the aviation sector needs, there is really one viable solution, and that's power-to-liquid. That's basically making synthetic kerosene, but it starts off with using hydrogen, and then it uses carbon, which is captured from either the atmosphere or from industry sources, and then combining the hydrogen and the carbon to make the synthetic fuel. So you can see that that process is going to be a bit more onerous than simply making the hydrogen in the first place and using the hydrogen directly. Right.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on conscious design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book, We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Is there a benefit in that you can use this synthetic kerosene in an existing engine? Would you be able to put it—

Yes.

Or is that—

that is That is definitely an advantage. And a lot of these fuels sometimes are termed as drop-in fuels. So this is why industry is focused on trying to deliver the sustainable aviation fuels. And it's exactly the right thing to do in the short term. Now, we're not going to get hydrogen into airplanes for at least, you know, until the early 2030s. In the meantime, we have made it absolutely clear that the sector should be investing in both sustainable aviation fuels in order to achieve an immediate reduction in CO2 savings— sorry, achieve a reduction in CO2 emissions, and at the same time invest in hydrogen technology for the medium to long term because that is the ultimate solution.

Got it. Is there, when you're looking at technology, are there any big hurdles on like the engine side of using hydrogen? Is there still, are you creating just a, even the long, long-range jets, is it still an electric Is it an electric motor? Is it using hydrogen as a fuel and something like a jet turbine?

Yeah, so let me clarify. I should have clarified it earlier. The narrow body and the midsize, the bigger airplanes, are based on gas turbines, so not electric motors. So the gas turbine will provide the power in much the same way as today's aircraft. Now, the hydrogen engines don't exist today, but the engineering team within FlyZero has done extensive work, and we have not identified any impediment that would prevent us from developing hydrogen combustion engines. Now, as I said earlier on, the supply, the manufacture and supply of hydrogen from an infrastructure point of view is certainly a big challenge. And there will have to be significant amount of research and technology investment put into making sure that these aircraft have the necessary certification, the safety credentials to make sure that we maintain aviation's safety record as we go forward. So there is a lot of work to be done on the engineering front in order to actually do all of those pieces of work to translate the technology concepts that we have put forward and to realize those technologies with the building blocks that could then actually be transformed into the configurations of the aircraft that will actually go into service over the next decade.

Got it. And when you're, when you're looking at those vehicles, are you looking at pretty similar designs? Because I know like Airbus has come out with some concepts at one point of, you know, wing bodies and, and things like that. So is also the aerodynamics part of how you're being able to achieve these kind of vehicles were actually working, or is Or is it just the liquid hydrogen is powerful enough you don't need to redesign the plane itself?

Oh, there's, there's a, there's quite a significant design activity that has been already undertaken. So just picking up on the points that you've raised quite rightly. So in current aircraft, most of the fuel is carried in tanks which are mounted in the wings. So you can see when you're sort of boarding an airplane, you can sometimes see a tanker with a hosepipe connected underneath the wing, filling it up before passengers take off. Now, for liquid hydrogen, in order to keep the hydrogen liquid, it'll have to be kept at a cryogenic temperature, very low temperature. And therefore the tanks need to be as spherical as possible. And therefore these tanks are designed to be contained in the fuselage, typically at the back of the airplane in the tail, in order to allow sort of passenger capacity towards the front. For the larger aircraft, in order to make sure that the center of gravities are managed appropriately, there might need to be 2 tanks, one main one at the back of the airplane and maybe smaller tanks forward off the wings. Now, by putting the tanks in the fuselage, it gives you the option to make your wings much more aerodynamically efficient. So these are so-called dry wings. So they're smaller because they don't have to have tanks inside them, and they can be more aerodynamically efficient. And much lighter in weight. So, so much so that the lighter weight of the wings more than offsets the additional weight that we envisage in adopting the cryogenic tanks for the liquid hydrogen in the fuselage. So this is where some of the benefits actually come through.

That's, that's a lot of weight. Because I know cryogenic systems aren't exactly lightweight. So to reduce by just pulling the fuel out of the wings, that's a lot of weight to pull off.

We've also actually spent a lot of— I should have said, actually, we've had about 100 very, very highly qualified experts working on FlyZero. in this endeavor.

Amazing.

And these experts have been seconded by and large from very well-known companies like Rolls-Royce, Airbus, GKN, and many other organizations that are key players in the aviation sector. So we haven't left any stone unturned. So the materials that are traditionally used for cryogenics aren't necessarily the materials we would look to for the future. There are more advanced materials available and being developed today. particularly in the arena of carbon fiber composites and matrix type of alloys, which we would want to bring on to help with making the tank structures as light as possible in order to carry, carry the fuel. Now, the one thing I should say is weight for weight, Liquid hydrogen is three times more energy dense than kerosene.

Oh wow!

That's a lot. So these are the kinds of sort of you know pieces of data that has been fundamental in our evaluations in order to come up with these concepts.

Yeah, three times. So, so does that mean you actually have less fuel? Is that in a per, per weight fuel weight? Does that mean you can actually— it's a weight savings to use hydrogen because it—

Yeah, exactly.

It's 3 times more dense energy-wise.

So that's why it's better to carry liquid hydrogen. In gaseous form, you would have— you, you'd end up having a penalty by volume because you need to carry a much bigger volume. But if you, if you carry it at a low enough temperature as a liquid, then weight for weight, hydrogen is 3 times more energy dense than kerosene.

That's amazing. So I see why you guys have selected it as the right fuel to use.

Well, this is why, this is why a lot of other industries are actually looking at hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very, very powerful fuel.

Right. And when you're— obviously there's risk with it. One of the risks that gets brought up with cars is, well, if you hit the tank, will it blow up? Will it have that problem? And with hydrogen, is that when you liquefy it, does that help mitigate any of those risks that people, you know, because we're— people are a little bit psychologically— they don't like pressurized containers, even though we sit and drive cars that are basically doing that. So is there a benefit on that side as well to using liquid hydrogen instead of a gas?

So I mentioned earlier on that certainly the aviation sector has a track record on safety.

Right.

And reliability. One of the reasons why aircraft stay so long in service is because of the reliability. Now, that reliability needs to be developed. The materials will need to undergo the necessary testing in order to fulfill the certification requirements. which would include all of the operational activities as well as the risk of any damage type of scenarios that you would conventionally have to cover as part of the sort of certification requirements. So all of that process will still have to be satisfied and fulfilled before any of these technologies can be put into service.

Got it. So I'm curious, you released some reports, right? You have some findings. Is there anybody that's working, or is there interest in starting to develop prototype aircraft and be able to prove out some of this technology or build the engines? Are you getting into that real development phase, or are you still Do you still have more research that needs to be done before you get into the building a prototype and actually starting to test out things?

So one of the key things that the project has identified is a number of technology building blocks, technology bricks we call them, and these technologies have been identified as key to being able to deliver this decarbonization strategy for aviation. And those technology roadmaps actually detail step by step what needs to be done in order to realize those technologies. Some of those technologies are at a higher point of development than others, but quite a few of them still require substantial research to be undertaken by a variety of expert areas in order to verify the validity of those technologies and their applications. So there are comprehensive recommendations that have been detailed in our reports. I would urge all of your listeners to look at those reports. We have been engaging with a huge number of stakeholders in order to provide visibility of those roadmaps and recommendations so that in their responsibility, they could look at what they could contribute to towards their development. So when I talk about stakeholders, these are folks that not only are the current industry players in aviation, but also the authorities, the government, the Department of Transport, business and industry departments. We've also been talking with research organizations. We've been extensively talking with academia, where a lot of advanced research tends to take place. And I can tell you that all of the people that we've been talking to are really, really excited by the prospects of actually supporting this work going forward. Now, the tricky bit is to get enough momentum and priority so that there is sufficient investment that is put towards actually realizing these technologies so that we can get to decarbonizing aviation as quickly as possible. The quicker we get there, the more CO2 savings we can deliver. We did a calculation actually on the 3 types of aircraft that I described earlier on.

Mm-hmm.

We calculated that they— if the midsize, the largest aircraft, goes into service by around 2033, 2035, then by 2050 we could achieve a saving of CO2 of 4 gigatons. And with the market penetration rates that we would envisage in the decade after, by 2060, that saving could go to 14 gigatons. So these are big numbers. This is a huge prize to be able to deliver.

Right.

And it's a huge contribution that we could make to net zero, not just for the United Kingdom, but the world over. And just to put into context, you know, as I said, in 2019, global aviation emissions added up to around 920 million tons. So that's just shy of 1 gigaton. So by 2060, if we can deliver 14 gigatons saving, you know, that's 14 years worth of aviation. Think how many passengers can travel guilt-free with that.

That is a— yeah, for 14 years of travel, that is a lot, a lot of travel to have to have replaced that with. That's amazing. Well, so are you, are you UK-based? So are you working with primarily UK, or are you seeing interest from other countries and businesses outside of the UK also starting to pool into this?

So the project was funded by the United Kingdom as part of the Prime Minister's 10-point plan, within which there is a program called Jet Zero. And the Jet Zero Council triggered this project about 2 years ago.

Right.

And this is why the project actually took place. So although the UK actually has done this work. We recognize that aviation is a global industry and the supply chains are very much global. So we, we have on that basis made sure that the, the reportings and our findings are available to, to, to everybody to have a look at. Because the more we can work together and collaborate, the sooner we can actually deliver this huge decarbonization that we all want to see.

Amazing. Well, Kyle, to wrap things up here, I want to talk a little bit about long term, right? So you've produced these, these reports, you've done that work. What do you see? Because you're probably not making your own engines. But what are you seeing the next, we'll say till 2030, the next 8 years? What is your guys' own goals to this? Is it supporting other people? Kind of what do you see moving forward now that you've started producing research?

So we, as I said earlier on, we've been working with stakeholders in terms of engagement. And basically sharing our findings, our recommendations, with the view that those stakeholders will take the findings under their wing and select the pieces of work that they can contribute to within their activities. Much more directly, the reporting that we've done will be held by the UK Aerospace Technologies Institute. Institute, the ATI.

Okay.

That's— it's on their website where our reports can be found. And the ATI has, for the UK, aviation technology funding, which will enable certain amounts of technology elements to be developed. But there are other aspects which clearly other stakeholders will have to take responsibility for. Right. So things like infrastructure, the supply of hydrogen, because it's going to be common to many other sectors. The order of the day is to collaborate as widely as possible in order to address all of the aspects that we've been able to evaluate and assess.

Got it. So you guys are going to be acting basically as a hub to say, here's, here's the goal, here's everything needs to be done, and helping, helping all the different moving pieces keep, keep on track and move towards, towards this, because this is a huge, huge undertaking. To convert over to hydrogen and build that infrastructure, which we're still, even here in the US, we're still getting electric infrastructure in for cars. And it's been over a decade of putting it in.

Yeah.

And there's still places you just can't really go to. Those are getting fewer, but still it's been a decade rollout. Or more to get to, you know, 80%, 90%.

And this is why we, from a transition point of view, it's very, very important to recognize that whilst we're developing these breakthrough type of technologies which will make a fundamental difference in the medium to long term, that we carry on with the best available technology today that can carry on delivering some CO2 savings whilst the breakthrough stuff is being worked on. And that's why, you know, the work on sustainable aviation fuels must carry on.

Yeah, well, I think that's— yeah, I think that's a great point. We can't We can't skip the now for the long term. That doesn't, that doesn't help anybody. We gotta, we gotta do all of it kind of at once in order to hit our goals, which is—

Absolutely.

Amazing. Well, I really appreciate you taking time today to talk about this, talk about Flight Zero and what you guys are doing. This is exciting for me. I've always loved aerospace and now it has a chance of being way better and not being a huge pollutant. And then we can, we can enjoy those guilt-free flights that you were talking about, which I'm looking forward to. So yeah, I really appreciate your time. And, and for anybody, we'll put links in the description to— I'll get that from you and we'll put that up. So anybody who wants to look at those reports, we'll make sure that's easy to get a hold of. And for anybody that's wanting to potentially partner, start working on certain portions of this, what would be the best way to get a hold of, of you guys?

So get in touch with the Aerospace Technologies Institute, uh, where the reports are. Uh, there's contact details there, um, and they will be able to direct, uh, inquiries to the right place.

Awesome. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining me on the show.

Well, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks.