Creating a New Fuel Out of Thin Air – For 85 Cents per Gallon

Some things that came to mind as I read it. I have little knowledge of the topic, etc.

The price stated comes from:

> Though the price fluctuates, NH3 typically costs about $0.23 a liter ($0.85 per gallon) and has no byproducts other than harmless nitrogen and water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density says liquid ammonia has an energy density of 11.5 MJ/L while gasoline (petrol) has 34.2 MJ/L. I believe that means it's $2.55 for the energy equivalent of 1 gallon gasoline. Commodity price for gasoline is US$ 1.73/gal https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/XB1:COM .

Second, there's already a big market for liquid ammonia, eg, for agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia says "The global industrial production of ammonia in 2014 was 176 million tonnes". The current rate is something under $500/ton , and strongly dependent on the price of the natural gas used to power the conversion - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/06/anhydrous-ammonia-... .

(It has a density at 40 °C of 0.58 g/cm3 => $0.32 / liter (that is, $500/ton * (0.58 g/cm/cm/cm) * liter ), so the given numbers are reasonable.)

Because there's a big market, there is an incentive to develop new methods to drive the price down.

The invention here seems to be a way to produce ammonia locally, in a small device and using local power sources, rather than natural gas + large industrial production. No doubt that's more expensive, but as the article points out, might be useful for distant facilities where the transportation costs are high.

I'm surprised to see "There’s actually no other zero-carbon fuel out there, so we really don’t have any competition" because hydrogen is often described as exactly that. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy .

This could be a big deal for enabling wind energy extraction far from electric power distribution networks. Access to these networks can be prohibitively expensive to construct, and transmission losses make outlying generators uncompetitive.

Farms have direct uses for locally produced ammonia, both as fertilizer and as fuel, and plenty of room for wind turbines. Any excess production has a ready market in nearby farms.

The excess oxygen produced would be useful dissolved into water to make concentrated hydrogen peroxide, also useful.

Patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8778293B2/en

Nitrogen and hydrogen are combined under very high pressure (2800-3000 psi) in presence of a platinum catalyst.