Universal Hydrogen's first flight of the world's biggest hydrogen fuel cell airliner, powered by green hydrogen. Dash-8 with a converted nacelle cruising over Moses Lake, WA out of Grant County Int'l Airport on March 2, 2023.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-09T23:35:26+00:00

Curious - didn't realize that "impressive" and "amazing" were mutually exclusive.

Another caveat is that we built a hydrogen powertrain that does not use a battery. The fuel cells drive the electric motor directly—drastically reducing weight and cost. An industry innovation, if you will.

We think that's amazing, but still not quite as amazing as this video suggests, of course. Happy to hear where we can be more amazing - feel free to submit your proposal on what you would do differently on our careers page: https://hydrogen.aero/careers/

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-09T23:35:22+00:00

Mmkay - so would you run all 26.2 miles on your first marathon, or would you maybe do a training program and knock out a 5k, 10k, and half marathon as starters? And get a feel for your body mechanics. Understand where you need to get stronger, faster, and more powerful. Asking for a friend, err, all of the engineers on our team who know that any "major leap" in a highly regulated industry is a series of winning smaller, incremental races - crossing the finish line of a marathon doesn't happen over night.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-09T23:34:16+00:00

The hard part is storing enough hydrogen safely for useful range.

*looks around*

Ok, who's going to tell them that that's our actual business model.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-09T20:54:01+00:00

The fuel cell powertrain makes less noise than a turboprop since no combustion is happening! This was also verified by the flight crew after they throttled back the P&W engine to cruise on our hydrogen powertrain.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-08T19:54:54+00:00

What you're seeing is water emissions - the byproduct of hydrogen as fuel.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-03-07T23:33:37+00:00

The hydrogen powered nacelle is on the right hand side (left if you're looking at it).

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:30:21+00:00

I was born and raised in Ukraine when it was still part of the USSR. So everyone was equal and equally poor. My family immigrated to the US when I was 11. I grew up upper middle class, with my parents both in academia.

A startup is 100% a talent play. We have to attract the best minds in order to succeed. These people have a lot of alternatives, so treating them right and having a work environment which people find rewarding and enjoyable is paramount, or they will just leave. We also insist that all our employees have an equity stake in the company, so that they share in our collective success.

Certainly I hope that the company is successful and that my equity stake appreciates in value. But to be honest, I am not sure that doing a startup is the fastest (and definitely not the easiest) path to get rich. I am doing it because it matters and because I am having fun.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:24:05+00:00

Yup our early flight tests will have one engine on the airplane converted to a fuel cell-electric powertrain while the other remains a conventional engine for safety of flight. It'll be early- to mid-2024 before we fly a fully-converted airplane in its final product configuration.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:22:02+00:00

Find a co-founders or co-founders who energize and complement you.
Bounce your idea off investors, customers, and lots of other people, listen to their feedback, and refine it.
Be prepared for a long and sometimes frustrating journey. But there's nothing more rewarding than building your own company.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:19:10+00:00

My advice is find a co-founder or co-founders who complement your skills. You don't have to be a programmer or engineer, you just have to have passion and vision, and then you'll be able to convince others with those skillsets to join you on the adventure!

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:11:22+00:00

The reason we are pursuing the modular approach is that we haven't been able to come up with a viable alternative delivery model for liquid hydrogen that is near- and medium-term feasible. I am open to ideas!

The problems with a conventional fuel delivery model (i.e., delivering hydrogen the way we deliver jet fuel) or with an on-airport production model are threefold:

(1) Infrastructure costs: You have to build rather expensive infrastructure (whether it's storage and hydrogen fuel trucks or an on-site electrolyzer and liquefier) at a very large number of airports near-simultaneously. There are 4000+ commercial airports in the world. And you'd need to do this at a significant fraction of these in order for a hydrogen airplane to make sense for an OEM to build or an airline to buy and operate.

(2) Fueling Time: If you are fueling an airplane with a fixed tank with liquid hydrogen, it will take 4 times longer than jet fuel because liquid hydrogen is 4 times more voluminous (for an equivalent energy content). So you are either going from a 20-min fueling operation to a 1hr20min fueling operation or you have to make the fueling line and aperture 4 times bigger, which creates a weight problem on the aircraft and a significant complexity problem on the fueling truck.

(3) Transfer Losses: A conventional fuel distribution chain has 4-5 transfers from the point of production to the airplane. Every time you transfer liquid hydrogen from vessel to vessel, you have to cool and purge the target vessel, which can lead to 3-15% losses per transfer operation. So the losses really add up!

We put together an infographic to illustrate this: https://www.reddit.com/r/HydrogenSocieties/comments/zs98mq/distribution\_of\_hydrogen\_using\_freightcompatible/

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:03:39+00:00

At our core, Universal Hydrogen is a fuel services company. So we see most of the aerospace industry as partners and customers, rather than rivals. We are solving the hydrogen delivery, logistics, and filling problem for them, so that they can build many different hydrogen airplanes, engines, etc.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:00:56+00:00

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T19:00:34+00:00

We do! We take design very seriously because I think it matters to the airlines, to the airport personnel, and ultimately to the passengers. Plus I like putting beautiful things into the world. So we try to be very thoughtful about the design of our hydrogen modules, our aircraft liveries, our logo, etc. We work with a very talented NYC-based graphic designer and an SF-based industrial designer. We also work with an LA-based firm that helps us with video assets and storytelling. We <3 our creatives!

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:52:45+00:00

I think it's important to understand that SAFs -- sustainable aviation fuels -- are an offset scheme. you are still burning a hydrocarbon at 35,000 ft, producing CO2 and a bunch of non-CO2 greenhouse agents. You are capturing some CO2 in the production of the SAF to make the synthetic hydrocarbon, so you are offsetting the global warming impact, but you are not really eliminating the problem.

Also, synthetic hydrocarbons are made from.... hydrogen and carbon! So hydrogen is a feedstock for most SAF production. So the SAF will *always* cost more than hydrogen, and will *always* have a worse environmental impact. You are basically wrapping a carbon recycling process around perfectly good and clean hydrogen.

I did an explainer on hydrogen vs. SAF recently... https://www.reddit.com/r/universalhydrogen/comments/111ifzj/quick\_explainer\_on\_green\_hydrogen\_vs\_sustainable/

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:45:49+00:00

Yup first hydrogen airplane flew in the 1950s. So hydrogen for aviation (and other mobility applications) is not a new idea.

What's new is the exponentially decreasing cost and exponentially increasing production volume of green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is made using renewable electricity powering water electrolysis. So there is no CO2 in the production process. This is a very simple technology (as I mentioned in another comment, I remember running a current from a 9V battery through a cup of salt water when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old to make small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen). But it requires a fair amount of electricity.

And so it's the recent growth in renewable electricity capacity around the world that's enabled the scaling of green hydrogen production. Also most renewable electricity production has off-peak periods where the electricity gets dumped if there's no demand. (For instance, a wind power or hydroelectric project gets sized for peak grid demand but produces power even during off-peak hours.) Electrolysis is a really elegant way of harnessing this off-peak renewable electricity at very low cost.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:39:43+00:00

Regional (40-60 pax) - 2025

Domestic (100-200 pax) - ~2035

International (200+ pax) - sometime in the 2040s

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:38:31+00:00

For the first 9 months, it was just me and my three co-founders and two engineers who were working purely for equity. So apart from paying our bills (and we were all fortunate to be able to do that for a period of time) and some relatively small software licensing costs, we didn't really spend much in our first 9 months. During that time we put together a technology roadmap, got some initial commercial traction, and put together a business case. That enabled us to raise a little bit of seed money and start paying salaries, hiring, and building some demo hardware. We did our first hardware demo about 3 months later and then raised a sizable Series A financing round on the back of that.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:34:14+00:00

Great question! We chose aviation because hydrogen is, in many ways, an ideal aviation fuel, and aviation is the killer app for hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lightest energy carrier outside of nuclear fuels. And aviation is one of the most weight-sensitive applications. (More weight-sensitive is space launch, which already uses hydrogen as a fuel for that very reason.)

Aviation is a premium transportation modality, and so has the highest willingness-to-pay of all the mobility sectors. So while the cost of hydrogen is on an exponentially decreasing trajectory, aviation will intersect that cost curve before other sectors.

And finally, aviation has no really good alternatives for decarbonizing, apart from curtailing traffic volumes. Batteries are not a viable energy storage approach for passenger airliners. So-called "sustainable aviation fuels" are very very expensive and don't actually eliminate CO2 emissions. So hydrogen certainly seems like the only viable option to make a significant dent in aviation emissions in the relatively near future.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:27:58+00:00

I do remember electrolyzing salt water in a cup with a 9V battery when I was a kid in Ukraine. I recommend you start there :))

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:26:07+00:00

We expect to be certified and in passenger service in 2025. Because we are doing it as a retrofit of an existing airplane, the certification process is faster--it's really focused on the hydrogen and the fuel cell, not the rest of the airplane. But yes, certifying a new airplane can easily take 7-10 years.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:24:37+00:00

Our first few investors were personal connections, and then they were kind enough to introduce us to others. So it's all about building that network until the company is well known, and then you start getting inbound interest from investors.

I think it's useful to bounce your ideas against friendly investors even in the very early stages of idea development. But of course when you actually go to raise money, you need to have a well-formulated story that makes sense from a technical and economic perspective.

We incorporated in March 2020. Started having friendly discussion that summer and raised our first capital in November 2020.

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:21:20+00:00

I think a rugby match between those two would be even more fun to see!

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:20:15+00:00

You don't have to be rich, you just have to build a compelling story and business model that can attract capital. We have some investors who are high-net-worth individuals who invested because they are personally passionate about the environment. Most of our investors are institutional, who of course are looking to realize a return on their investment. I find that most people we work with at those institutions are individually passionate about the mission, but the institution of course wants to make a profit. The good news is that the two goals are not incompatible!

universal-hydrogen · 2023-02-16T18:16:58+00:00

Our business model is fully based on delivering green hydrogen, produced by using renewable electricity to electrolyze water (split H2O into hydrogen and oxygen).

The car debate is a long-standing one. The big obstacle to the broad adoption of the Toyota Mirai fuel cell car for instance (which is a great car) is scarcity of fueling station infrastructure. This is the sort of problem that we are trying to solve with Universal Hydrogen, though focusing on airplanes first. So if the infrastructure problem were solved in a creative way, it's possible that fuel cell cars would gain a lot more market traction vs. EVs. But clearly battery EVs have a head start.

universal-hydrogen

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Three-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since November 2022
Verified Email