Paris wants to be Europe's aviation hydrogen hub

Picture: Airbus

Hydrogen has been touted as one of the most promising alternatives to decarbonize aviation.

Yet, the challenges of hydrogen as an aviation fuel are two-fold, one one side there is the propulsion technology itself, on the other hand the need to adapt the whole refuelling infrastructure, this latter one perhaps not so much a technological as a financial and logistical challenge.

Companies like Universal Hydrogen are working to solve this issue (see for example their modular pre-filled hydrogen capsule concept) and, now that hydrogen has taken center stage, there will be possibly be many more joining the fray.

Still early days for the aviation hydrogen ecosystem, but the region of Paris, France, aims to get a piece of the action. In a move that mimics (some of the organisations involved are indeed the same) its urban air mobility hub initiative to make of Paris-Vatry airport the European hub of UAM development, the Choose Paris Region and Paris Region government are joining forces with Groupe ADP (the publicly listed company that runs Paris’ airports), Air France-KLM and Airbus to develop an hydrogen hub for aviation.

These 5 players have jointly called an Expression of Interest (EoI) for hydrogen-based projects to be developed and tested at this in-the-making hydrogen hub at Paris airports. Would be participants can submit their applications between February 11th and March 19th, 2021, via a website hydrogenhubairport.com (which, however, was not working at the time of writing these lines).

The projects are expected to cover any of these 3 main aspects of the hydrogen economy:

The (aforementioned) storage, transport and distribution issue, the development of use cases for hydrogen at airports, and this includes all sort of ground uses, including land transport and vehicles, and the recycling and recovery of hydrogen in this aeronautical context.