H2 Clipper

Clean hydrogen is set to play a central role in cutting global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Wood Mackenzie, hydrogen exports could reach 150 million tonnes by 2050—about one-third of the world’s seaborne energy trade in a net-zero scenario.

The key obstacle to achieving this growth lies in economically transporting hydrogen to market. Trucks are impractical, while ships and pipelines are extremely costly, rigid, and slow to deploy, often falling short of the purity requirements for fuel cell vehicles. The greatest challenge ahead is building acceptance of modern airship technology as a viable and scalable solution to this global logistics bottleneck.

H2 Clipper airships are the ideal hydrogen infrastructure solution. H2 Clipper foresaw in 2008 the need for conceiving a better way to transport hydrogen; and used the time since then to engineer and secure patents on a solution to address today’s challenges.

H2 Clipper provides the fastest, most flexible, and efficiently scalable way to get hydrogen to market worldwide.  It is the result of radically innovating and re-thinking lighter-than-air flight for global fuel and cargo transport.  The result is an airship with unprecedented speed, payload, and cost advantages: 30-50% lower cost while carrying 4X more volume than the largest of today’s wide body air freighters, payloads up to 225 tons (205 tonnes), 7 to 10 times faster than shipping by truck or cargo vessel, and 100% carbon-free.

H2 Clipper contributes directly to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through its groundbreaking airship-based hydrogen transport technology.

• In alignment with SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, H2 Clipper’s “Pipeline in the Sky” enables access to affordable, reliable, and scalable supplies of 99.999% pure hydrogen, delivered efficiently to the markets where it is most urgently needed.
• For SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, the company provides a transformative, sustainable infrastructure for global industry. By using green hydrogen for both propulsion and lift, H2 Clipper offers a 100% carbon-free solution for transporting cargo and freight directly from factories to distribution centers, bypassing congested ports and airports with vertical takeoff and landing capability.
• Finally, under SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, H2 Clipper bridges the gap between remote regions where green hydrogen can be produced at the lowest cost and the urban centers where it is critically needed to power zero-emission cars, trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft. This solution empowers cities and communities to meet—and even exceed—the United Nations’ clean mobility and sustainability objectives.

H2 Clipper has used Dassault Systèmes' CATIA applications since 2018 to develop a significant body of design and intellectual property assets.  Based on its admission into the Accelerator Program, H2 Clipper will be able to dramatically expand its team’s use of other software capabilities on the 3DEXPERIENCE® Platform for work involving aeronautical, mechanical, composites, fluids, and electrical design and engineering.

H2 Clipper plans to use the Platform’s project management, design, modeling, and simulation apps to optimize every aspect of the airship’s design, engineering, manufacturing, regulatory compliance, and marketing processes in anticipation of completing detailed design and construction of a 40% prototype that it targets to fly in 2025, with the goal of flying its first full-sized airship in 2029.

Being part of the Accelerator program provides H2 Clipper with access to the powerful 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, as well as Dassault Systèmes' mentors, and Dassault’s worldwide network of industrial partners and clients.

H2 Clipper plans to use the collaborative management and engineering tools available through the Cloud-based Platform to develop a fully-integrated process encompassing product design, manufacturing, certification, delivery and oversight.

H2 Clipper also plans to use access to top level contacts across industry and cultures to forge long-term, mutually-advantageous collaborations with leading organizations who share the vision of a world operating on clean, sustainable, and disruptively-efficient renewable energy.