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Comment by maliker

Electric aviation for aircraft larger than 4 passengers is extremely hard. Batteries don't have the energy density needed, and fuel cells are barely at the prototype stage for aviation. ARPA-E has been looking at this for while, see slide 6 in [1] for an overview of payloads by energy storage medium. If you read a little more through the deck you'll see there are also issues with power output of electric motors in this application.

I'm much more optimistic about low-carbon jet fuels. Biofuel options here have already been trialed successfully. And some new synthetic fuel companies [2] that use direct air capture CO2 are looking promising.

[1] https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/Grigorii-Solov... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering

parent maliker 7 years ago

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