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Jul 11, 2024 — Co-authored by JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO of Joby, and Raffaele Russo, Business Manager for New Technologies at Joby.
The world is rapidly moving towards cleaner methods of producing and using energy. Batteries play a central role in this shift, enabling the storage of enough energy to power personal devices and vehicles – and, at scale, to smooth the supply and demand cycles of entire energy grids.
In aviation, we believe batteries are the perfect solution for short-range flight. We demonstrated that potential in 2021 when we flew a battery-electric prototype aircraft 154 miles on a single charge, including a vertical take-off and landing. Since then, we have completed in total more than 33,000 miles of battery-electric flight and are moving closer to bringing quiet, emissions-free air travel to cities and communities around the world.
Although the specific energy of batteries is improving, their weight will continue to limit the application of electric aircraft to short-distance travel.
To serve regional markets, we plan to use hydrogen to increase the potential range and payload of electric aircraft.
We demonstrated this potential recently by converting one of our battery-electric air taxi prototypes into a hydrogen-electric technology demonstrator. On June 24, the aircraft completed a 523-mile flight, including a vertical take-off and landing. That’s enough range to connect San Francisco to San Diego, or Boston to Baltimore – moving people from city center to city center with no operating emissions.
In aviation, weight is critically important. Hydrogen has one hundred times the specific energy of today’s batteries and three times that of jet fuel. Instead of relying on batteries as the primary source of energy, we use an onboard hydrogen fuel cell system to produce electricity. The result is an electric aircraft that can travel much farther – and carry a greater payload – than is possible not only with any battery cells currently under development, but even with the same mass of jet fuel.
Hydrogen can be produced using diverse energy sources – including solar, hydro, and wind – establishing a critical path towards reaching zero emissions aviation.
Governments around the world have recognized the central role hydrogen will play in our collective energy future and are investing in the clean production, distribution, storage, and usage of hydrogen.
The U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Roadmap, released by the Department of Energy in 2022 and updated in 2024, identified ten Hydrogen Hubs around the nation and dedicated $7 billion in funding to building out these centers of hydrogen development.
As domestic production and distribution of hydrogen in the U.S. begins to scale, aviation should be at the top of the list for its potential applications. We believe hydrogen-electric aircraft are the only technology solution with the potential to enable regional or even nationwide flight while addressing the totality of aviation’s impact on the planet.
Aviation today accounts for 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions and a greater share of total climate impact due to non-CO2 effects. But as air travel continues to grow and other sectors decarbonize, the industry’s global impact could be four times higher by 2050, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
We recognize that broadly commercializing hydrogen will require doing the hard miles on regulation and infrastructure, along with fuel storage and distribution, but we have demonstrated that regional hydrogen-electric flight is possible today.
The world is closer than it has ever been, and so is the opportunity for hydrogen, alongside battery-electric aircraft, to play a key role in decarbonizing flight – to maintain our connected world while preserving the only planet we have for future generations.
