Ammonia Is the Everest Base Camp for Clean Energy | Hacker News Reader

Ammonia Is the Everest Base Camp for Clean Energy

thebreakthrough.org

The article makes a good point that ammonia is an integral part of our modern world, and it's pretty much impossible to get around it.

However, there are also other places in which ammonia will cost energy. That fertilizer we use ends up in our food which ends up in our sewage. In turn, that excess fertilizer causes algae blooms and environmental damage. Therefore, we need to find ways to remove that waste (Europe already does in many places). Sadly, this costs additional energy.

I worked (very briefly) on a technology that helps reduce that impact, there's a lot of interesting work in this area. Some even uses the ammonia itself as a source of energy.

One process using the ammonia as fuel in a way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anammox

Process I helped get some attention at one point:

http://web.stanford.edu/~cantwell/Recent_publications/Schers...

Just to nitpick for a second, the vast majority of ammonia that moves from fertilizer to algae blooms comes just from farm runoff. Many farms still use flood irrigation and many others end up timing fertilizer right before big rainstorms in the spring. The water runoff is how the ammonia makes it into the water supply, not from the food and then sewage.

Absolutely true, that's why there is a dead zone at the bottom of the mississippi.

However there are literally tons of ammonia flowing out of places with high density and where that high ammonia still ends up in water ways after passing through a sewage system. In particular this has been true in Western Europe, and there are issues in various areas around the country here (Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, SF bay is weird so for now we seem to be not as affected on this particular front). In the US human sewage is thought to contribute 11% of the problem and in Europe 25%. Not everything, but surely it'd be nice to solve the problem. Also some of these technologies could be applied to other sources such as manure if treatment standards were imposed on agriculture. Runoff is harder for sure, but there we can maybe look at more targeted application of fertilizers. It helps nobody to pay for fertilizer that ends up in a river and not growing more food.

Useful Source:

http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/eutrophication-and-hypox...

Is cutting out fertiliser going to change the level of ammonia in our sewerage? Don't we need to take the humans out of the equation?

excess fertilizer causes algae blooms

I was just hearing an Ohio farmer complain that they won't let him spray manure on his fields while the ground is frozen anymore, and he doesn't have sufficient storage to hold all the manure through the winter. What's a poor farmer to do?

Spraying frozen fields is not "fertilizing", it is just dumping manure and letting it wash into the streams. He may as well have been dumping it straight into a stream all winter.

It makes one wonder, is there an 80-20 rule for farmers? Are 20% of them causing 80% of the fertilizer runoff?

One supposes he could invest in an anerobic digester[1] and start turning all that manure into electricity for the grid. Honestly, any farmer not doing this yet is leaving money on the table.

[1] http://www.energy.ca.gov/biomass/anaerobic.html

That all depends on how long the payback is, which isn't clear from that reference. Farmers are businessmen, aren't going to do something if it doesn't make financial sense.

In California, which has pretty extortionate electricity rates, the payback for an anerobic digester is under 5 years, but there is more information here: http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$Department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agd... which includes the US case study here: https://www.epa.gov/agstar

Ammonia-as-fuel introduces numerous problems of toxicity and handling difficulties while being based on much the same process, particularly energy-intensive electrolysis, as other alternatives. Both Fischer-Tropsch and Sabatier process synthesis using seawater for CO2 feedstock result in direct analogues of present hydrocarbon fuels: petrol, kerosene, or diesel for F-T, methane for Sabtier. They have higher energy requirements than present fossil fuels, but are zero-net-carbon and infinitely miscible and compatible with existing fuel sourcing, transport, processing, storage, and utilisation systems.

Hydrocarbons are near-zero emissions -- the primary combustion products are CO2 and H2O. The problem to date has been that this CO2 is from fossil sources, and we've been reintroducing millions of years of sequestered carbon to the biosphere each current year. Sourced from the biosphere, that particular problem disappears.

You still need an energy source. Probably solar. Fuel synthesis would be a good application for soaking up excess supplies.

Also ammonia can be substitute a refrigeration liquid in some cases replacing freon derivaties. Ammonia itself (not the process used to produce) I think is pretty safe for the environment, compared to say HFCs.

It has the slight inconvenience of being rather lethal to people however, which is why it's not used in air conditioning anymore, or if it is, it has to be separated by an extra heat exchanger.

Still not uncommon to find it used in industrial chillers, older ice rinks, etc.

It is dangerous, but I wouldn't call it immediately lethal. My dad is a engineer specializing in large refrigeration systems and in 10-15 some years, they had 1 ammonia fatality in a company of 40 people or so -- worker opened valve of refrigeration system while it still had ammonia in it, large concentration of it got blown pretty much straight into their face (and obviusly lungs) he died at the hospital.

But they had other accidents (welder welding a fuel canister with fumes still in it and other such crazy or stupid things) -- this was post-Soviet environment with almost no safety controls.

The nicer property about it, is it is easy to detect leaks due to specific smells.

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that any gas molecule with more than 2 atoms contributes to the greenhouse effect. I don't think there's currently much ammonia in the Earth's atmosphere but if we started producing it in large quantities wouldn't it also cause warming, just like CO2 and CH4 ?

You might be right. I was thinking compared to HFCs (like Freon) damaging the ozone layer.

Interestingly even after the so many years of banning some HFCs, there is a healthy black market in some places. People have stored it in hopes the prices will rise. And they did rise. Some installations were reliable enough and worked using older stuff and owners never upgraded. So those owners would rather pay black market prices for it.

Last I heard, some governments were providing incentives (using the carrot approach) instead of just the stick, to upgrade older systems to safer compounds.

For me, even a highly inefficient process that was small enough would be interesting. Living in a corrupt country (the Czech republic) there is no way to hook a solar panel up to the grid. But if I could plug a solar panel into an amonia generator, and sell the amonia, that could let me and many other people who are unable to use solar for political reasons get into solar. I certainly spend enough emotional energy worying about the environment, that a few hundered or even thousand bucks for solar panels wouldn't really be a hurdle for me.

Grid power is a convince and money saver when it comes to solar, but it's not needed. You can just hook up solar to a battery system and then use battery power without hooking up to the grid. You can enegy just unplug and appliance from your solar system and use grid power when nessisarily. However your much better off setting things as that quickly becomes incredibly annoying.

It sounds like for him, being able to sell some of the power is important- which does not work well with batteries.

Watch out for toxicity, though; ammonia refrigerant leaks have killed lots of people---bad enough that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd together invented a new refrigeration technology that didn't rely on rotating seals that might leak.

His argument for cleaner energy is that we use Methane?

Isn't methane 30x more potent as a green-house gas?

No, his argument for cleaner energy is that we stop using methane in the ways that we are already using it, and that if we must keep using it we do it a way that eliminates the CO2 emissions- cracking off the hydrogen and leaving behind solid carbon. Methane is quite a potent greenhouse gas, but nothing in that article suggests releasing methane into the atmosphere.

There are currently huge methane leaks in multiple places in the US as we speak, that we've spent months trying to plug.

Why wouldn't increased methane use lead to increased methane mining and therefore more leaks? Are we honestly planning to trust the regulatory bodies to handle this when they've never shown any serious oversight ability in the past?

Nothing in the article suggests using more methane. In fact, there is quite a list of potential alternatives to methane. It merely also mentions that, if we must continue to use methane in ammonia production, which is convenient because the infrastructure is already there, then we should do it in a manner that does not release greenhouse gasses- specifically, via methane cracking.

TFA describes a process that takes methane and converts it to hydrogen (used in ammonia production) and carbon (inert waste material that may simply be dumped anywhere). Consuming methane is the opposite of releasing methane.

Raw methane, dumped straight into the atmosphere (whether through leaks like the one in Southern California last fall, clathrates melting, cow farts, or otherwise), yes. Give or take.

Burning methane yields ... CO₂ and water.

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