Professor Robert House, University of Oxford

Powering the future of flight with batteries

The challenge

What if commercial aeroplanes could fly using batteries instead of jet fuel? Aviation remains one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise and currently accounts for 2.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, but a potential change is on the horizon.

The innovation

Professor Robert House is looking to enable battery-powered flight by developing a new rechargeable battery that would store four times as much energy as today's current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries. Using nanoengineering, Professor House’s new battery will be much lighter, smaller, and have a higher energy storage capacity than current lithium-ion batteries, offering an opportunity to help electrify the aviation sector and end the current dependency on kerosene-based jet fuel.  

Through the Green Future Fellowship funding, Professor House will accelerate the technology from an early-stage concept through to testing and deployment, with the ultimate aim of scaling and commercialising the technology for adoption in aviation. If successful, it would not only transform air travel, tackling the air and noise pollution associated with jet fuel-powered flight, but could also offer substantial change to other forms of transport, such as significantly extending driving ranges for mainstream electric vehicles. 

The project additionally aims to support the UK to develop its own battery manufacturing knowledge and facilities, enabling green industrial growth for the automotive and aerospace industries.

The innovator

Professor House is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. There, he leads the House Group, which focuses on materials discovery and understanding energy storage phenomena in battery materials. He was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in 2021, which focused on investigating new energy storage materials based on Earth-abundant sodium and magnesium as alternatives to lithium. In 2023 he was named on Forbes’ “30 under 30” in Science and Healthcare (Europe) for his contributions to energy materials research.

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From concept to lift-off, we are reimagining the battery to power the next generation of flight, with cleaner skies on the horizon.