Hydrogen

Air travel produces around 2.5% of all global CO2 emissions, and despite decades of effort in developing alternative fuels or more efficient aircraft designs, that number hasn’t budged much. However, NASA, also the US’s Aeronautics administration, has kept plugging away at trying to build a more sustainable future for air travel. Recently, they supported another step in that direction by providing an Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to Phillip Ansell of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to develop a hybrid hydrogen-based aircraft engine.