Podcast- Aviation Pulls Back From Innovation⁠↗

If you actually look at Airbus’s statements, they don’t actually say that the technology’s not going to be ready, they say the infrastructure’s not going to be ready.

Now you then switch over to the startups, the ZeroAvias on the hydrogen side, the many others on the battery side, and they’re starting a different thing. They say, “I can go into the Shetland Islands, I can go into North Norway, I can go into New Zealand, and I can re-engine a Caravan, or I can re-engine a twin altar, or I can re-engine a Dash 8 or something like that. I can put hydrogen production, put solar panels into an airport, put a hydrolysis plant onto the airport, and generate enough hydrogen to serve that market.

So what Airbus was trying to do and what the startups are trying to do was very different. The fact that Airbus has delayed because the technology or the infrastructure is not ready, doesn’t mean that the startups can’t still get going, right? They have less ambition in the short term. So I think we will see that happen.

The truth is there’s huge backlogs. There’s no commercial incentive or not enough commercial incentive for the industry to move ahead faster.

SAF is a sleight of hand, it’s an accounting sleight of hand for carbon. You don’t reduce carbon emissions, you account for them differently. You say that they’re removed from the atmosphere in some way. We are still polluting, but we’re removing it from the atmosphere in some way. He said that is not sustainable. At some point or other that will come back and bite us. Hydrogen is the only way to get out of that.

China is going to hydrogen and it’s going to hydrogen in a big way and it’s going to hydrogen in the Chinese way of doing it, which is everybody in the government from the central government to provincial government, all aligned in the same direction. So, 10 years from now, the world will be very different when it comes to hydrogen.