Gas turbines power everything from commercial airliners to entire city electrical grids. They work by compressing air, mixing it with fuel, igniting the mixture, and using the expanding hot gases to spin a turbine at high speed. That spinning motion either generates electricity or directly drives machinery. The global gas turbine services market was valued at roughly $41 billion in 2024 and is projected to more than double by 2034, reflecting just how deeply embedded these machines are across industries.
Electricity Generation
Power generation is the single largest use of gas turbines. In a simple setup, known as a simple cycle plant, a gas turbine spins a generator directly and converts between 20 and 35 percent of the fuel’s energy into electricity. That’s useful when utilities need power quickly, since gas turbines can start up in minutes compared to the hours a coal or nuclear plant requires. Simple cycle plants often serve as “peaker” plants, kicking in during high-demand periods like summer afternoons when air conditioning loads spike.
The real efficiency gains come from combined cycle plants. After the gas turbine does its work, its exhaust is still extremely hot. A heat recovery steam generator captures that leftover heat, produces steam, and drives a second turbine. This two-stage approach pushes efficiency past 60 percent, nearly doubling what a simple cycle plant achieves. Most new natural gas power plants built today use this combined cycle configuration because it extracts far more electricity from each unit of fuel.
On a smaller scale, microturbines (compact gas turbines producing under a few hundred kilowatts) serve individual buildings and campuses. In combined heat and power setups, a microturbine generates electricity while its waste heat produces hot water for space heating, absorption cooling, or other thermal needs. This makes them practical for hospitals, universities, and manufacturing facilities that need both electricity and heat around the clock.
Aviation and Aerospace
Nearly every commercial and military aircraft in the sky runs on some form of gas turbine engine. The specific design varies depending on the aircraft’s speed, altitude, and mission profile.
Turbofan engines power the vast majority of commercial airliners, including the Boeing 747 and 767 and the Airbus A300 and A330 families. These engines route a large volume of air around the core combustion section rather than through it, which produces thrust more quietly and efficiently at typical cruising speeds of around Mach 0.8. They’re optimized for long-duration, subsonic cruise at high altitudes.
Low-bypass afterburning turbofans fill a different niche entirely. Engines like the Pratt & Whitney F100 and General Electric F110 are built for supersonic-capable fighter jets, where the priority shifts to raw thrust at transonic and supersonic speeds while still maintaining reasonable fuel economy during subsonic cruise and loiter.
Turboprop engines, such as the widely used Pratt & Whitney PT6, pair a gas turbine core with a traditional propeller. They excel at lower speeds (up to about Mach 0.6) and lower altitudes, making them ideal for regional commuter aircraft, general aviation planes, and military transports like the Lockheed C-130 Hercules. Their high efficiency at shorter ranges and slower speeds keeps operating costs down on routes where a large turbofan would be overkill.
Naval and Marine Propulsion
Over the past 40 years, most of the world’s navies have shifted to gas turbines as the primary power source for surface warships. The reason comes down to a collection of practical advantages over diesel engines. Gas turbines produce enormous power relative to their size and weight, which matters on a vessel where every square meter of space has a competing use. They also create less vibration, respond faster to changes in load (critical during combat maneuvering), and have shorter warm-up times.
Maintenance is simpler too. Naval gas turbines, many of them derived from aircraft engine designs, can be swapped out as modular units rather than torn apart in place. Their emissions profile is also cleaner: lower nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide output compared to diesel engines, even diesels equipped with exhaust scrubbers. These qualities make gas turbines the standard choice for destroyers, frigates, and other fast combatants that need to accelerate quickly and sustain high speeds.
Pipeline Compression and Industrial Drive
Natural gas doesn’t move itself across continents. Compressor stations spaced along pipelines use gas turbines to keep the gas flowing from wellhead to end user. The turbine’s spinning shaft connects directly to a compressor, which squeezes the gas and pushes it down the line to the next station. This mechanical drive application is one of the oldest and most widespread industrial uses of gas turbines.
The same principle applies in oil and gas extraction, where gas turbines power compressors and pumps on offshore platforms and at processing facilities. Their compact footprint and ability to run on the same natural gas they’re helping to transport make them a natural fit. Beyond oil and gas, industrial gas turbines also drive large pumps, blowers, and compressors in chemical plants, refineries, and steel mills wherever a reliable source of high-speed rotational power is needed.
How Efficiency Has Improved
Gas turbine performance hinges largely on how hot the combustion gases can get before entering the turbine section. Higher temperatures mean more energy extracted per unit of fuel. The materials that make this possible are nickel- and cobalt-based superalloys in the turbine and burner sections, paired with titanium alloys and composites in the cooler compressor and fan stages. These materials withstand extreme heat and mechanical stress without deforming.
The U.S. Department of Energy began pushing turbine firing temperatures higher in 1992. By 2001, its industry partners had developed systems reaching 2,600°F, enabling combined cycle efficiencies that broke the 60 percent barrier for the first time. GE’s H System became the first gas turbine platform designed with the capability to reach that 60 percent threshold. Today’s most advanced heavy-duty turbines continue to build on that benchmark.
The Shift Toward Hydrogen Fuel
Gas turbines have traditionally burned natural gas or liquid fuels, but manufacturers are rapidly adapting them to run on hydrogen, which produces no carbon dioxide when combusted. Several turbine models already operate on hydrogen blends, and some handle pure hydrogen. A combined cycle plant in Fusina, Italy, has been running on 96 to 100 percent hydrogen since 2010, generating 12 megawatts at roughly 42 percent efficiency.
Major manufacturers have set aggressive timelines. Siemens has targeted 100 percent hydrogen capability across all its turbine models by 2030. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has a similar 2030 goal. Some aeroderivative engines (gas turbines adapted from aircraft engine designs) already accept 100 percent hydrogen using specialized combustion systems that inject steam or water to control nitrogen oxide emissions. As hydrogen production scales up and costs fall, these turbines are positioned to generate electricity with a fraction of the carbon footprint of today’s natural gas plants.