Commercial hybrid airplanes are still decades in the future

Sustainability Times (April 3) -- U. of I. scientists have looked at various configurations of fuel and battery to see which ones would yield the best results in ensuring that planes kept their carrying capacity and range but with drastically reduced emissions. To do so, they explored how much net carbon emissions various hybrid-electric planes would emit based on their fuel use as well as on carbon use needed to charge their batteries. “In the energy supply chain there’s a phrase, from ‘well to wake.’ That is, fuel production begins at the oil well and ends at the wake of the airplane,” says Phillip Ansell, a professor aerospace engineering at Illinois.