universal hydrogen
Facing a future filled with human-caused climate catastrophes, Universal Hydrogen has set its sights on the sky.
Frustrated that the aviation industry was not moving fast enough to cut down on emissions, former Airbus Chief Technology Officer Paul Eremenko teamed up last year with former Georgia Tech engineering professor John Paul Clarke and Jon Gordon, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, to launch Universal Hydrogen.
The Hawthorne-based company produces a kit that eliminates carbon emissions from regional aircrafts. It's one of several startups working to reduce commercial travel's emissions. But it has even larger ambitions, seeking to develop a hydrogen fuel distribution network that it hopes will be used in airports around the world.
Universal Hydrogen said it is on track for their first flight test using their hydrogen fuel cell powertrain on a 40-person passenger regional airliner in 2022 at Moses Lake, Washington.
"We want to be in the business of supplying hydrogen to the user, in this case the airlines," said Chief Commercial Officer Rod Williams. "We'll be able to take an aircraft and convert it from the configuration today which uses a turboprop engine powered by Jet A-1 fossil fuel to a configuration which uses a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain and produces no carbon dioxide."
Universal Hydrogen hopes to sell hydrogen fuel capsules and module technology to serve as both the fuel tank within the aircraft and the method of transporting hydrogen from where it's produced to the aircraft. Their hydrogen fuel capsules offer 2X weight savings over conventional tech. "That's important because there's no infrastructure that exists today to transport hydrogen," Williams said.
Hydrogen is generally regarded as a cleaner fuel, since it produces only water when consumed by a fuel cell. There are a variety of ways that hydrogen can be produced, such as natural gas, nuclear power, biomass and renewable power like solar and wind.
There's a lot of money being invested in hydrogen, including a $52 million fund announced by the Energy Department in July. But not everyone is convinced of hydrogen's benefits; some research suggests it's still too energy-intensive to produce.
That's because much of the hydrogen now produced comes from natural gas facilities, but converting that production to wind and solar could open the gates to a greener aviation industry.
Mark Jacobson, the director of the Atmosphere and Energy program at Stanford University, and one of the authors of a study published in that found that so called "blue hydrogen," a product the natural gas industry has been promoting, produces a larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning natural gas or coal for heat.
To really make hydrogen green, he said the industry will need to convert to wind and solar.
"If the hydrogen is green hydrogen and it's used in a fuel cell in an aircraft, that's actually the best option for long distance [commercial air travel]," Jacobson said.
For smaller and short haul flights, he said electric planes are promising.
Universal Hydrogen announced last week that they secured $62 million to accelerate the first test flight of a hydrogen-powered aircraft that's expected to take off in 2022.
Investors in the round include Mitsubishi HC Capital, Tencent, Stratos, GE Aviation, Waltzing Matilda Aviation, Fourth Realm, Hawktail, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Jeff Wilke and Spencer Rascoff's 75 and Sunny Ventures. (Full disclosure: Rascoff is the founder and executive chairman of dot.LA.)
The circumstances couldn't be more urgent. Air traffic dumped 915 million tons of greenhouse gas-causing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2019. In 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated approximately 612,000 barrels of pollution-belching jet fuel was consumed each day by U.S. commercial passenger flights. And, given the uncertainty surrounding climate change legislation on Capitol Hill, it's unlikely the aviation industry will face much pressure to change how it operates. That's where Universal Hydrogen comes in.
Clean-burning hydrogen has long been an attractive alternative to petroleum in cars. Yet, due to the cost of implementation, it has yet to really catch on in that sector (though there are a few promising instances of adoption: hydrogen fuel cells have been used in cars built by Hyundai and Toyota). Adoption has been slow in aviation as well.
But that may be changing. Airlines and operators including Icelandair, Air Nostrum, Ravn Alaska, and ASL Aviation Holdings (cargo aircraft) have committed to purchasing Universal Hydrogen's conversion kits.
Though the company did not disclose the price of their kits, they expect the cost of their hydrogen will be far less than the jet fuel used today.
"Our goal is to not increase the cost of travel and we expect that by the time we get to 2025, we'll be able to achieve the same cost that an airline has today," Williams said.
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The local startup is planning to retrofit hydrogen power into aircraft aiming to get commercial flights powered by renewable energy in four years.
Hawthorne-based Universal Hydrogen announced Thursday it raised $20.5 million in Series A financing round with a syndicate involving Airbus Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, and led by Palo Alto-based venture fund Playground Global.
Founded in 2020, Universal Hydrogen is seeking to eliminate carbon emissions during flight using liquid hydrogen, —produced using renewable power — to feed fuel cells.
"The issue is that the aviation sector is one of the last to decarbonize, but the solution exists," Universal Hydrogen co-founder and CEO Paul Eremenko said in an interview.
The company is developing hydrogen fuel cell retrofit kits for existing regional commercial aircraft with between 40 and 60 seats. Universal Hydrogen has a goal of having the first commercial flight with a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2025, with initial running costs it says would be equivalent to a conventionally-powered plane and eventually decrease.
Aircraft account for 10% of U.S. transportation emissions and 3% of the nation's total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA.
But as passenger air travel is expected to grow over the next decade or two, and other sectors — including the automotive sector — are making aggressive moves to reduce carbon emissions, it will become even more important for the aviation sector to decarbonize, Eremenko said.
"We want to be the catalyst for that shift," he said.
Airbus has said hydrogen is increasingly considered one of the "most promising zero-emission technologies for future aircraft." Last year, it released hydrogen aircraft concepts that could enter service by 2035.
Universal Hydrogen says the Series A funding will allow it to continue developing the retrofit kits, as well as build a fuel distribution network that uses existing freight services and avoids significant renovations to pipelines and other current fueling networks. Earlier this year, it received an investment from Trucks Venture Capital to scale its Los Angeles-area engineering operations to build liquid hydrogen modules and work on powertrain development.
Ideally, Eremenko wants airlines like Boeing and Airbus to equip their airplanes, like the 737 MAX, with hydrogen fuel technology for aircraft that will go into service in the 2030s.
Eremenko used the analogy of Nespresso to explain the business model. Nespresso created the coffee capsule technology, but needed to build the first coffee maker to demonstrate how the capsules work. Now, other companies have built coffee makers that use the capsules.
"In the long run, we want other people to build coffee makers that work with our capsules," he said. "We don't want to be in the coffee maker business, we want to be in the capsule business."
Universal Hydrogen's funding announcement came the same day President Joe Biden committed the United States to at least halving the country's greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by the end of the decade. In a separate move, the Biden administration said it would allow California and other states to create their own emissions standards and zero emissions mandates, reversing a 2019 rule by the Trump administration that blocked such measures. California and 23 other groups later sued that administration.
While Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's focus this year has been on plug-in electric vehicles and the charging stations they require, hydrogen is having a moment in California, with several companies championing the technology, especially for commercial purposes.
Toyota has operated hydrogen-powered Class 8 semi-trailer trucks at the Port of Los Angeles since 2017. On Thursday, TravelCenters of America said it would install hydrogen stations through a new eTA subsidiary, with a partnership including heavy-duty truck startup Nikola and a $4 million grant from the California Energy Commission.