It's a great easily transported bridge fuel that can replace LNG export until the anti-nukes pull their heads out of their arses.
"Easily transported"? Are you nuts? It has far less chemical compatibility than LNG and is wildly more dangerous to people. It gets even worse if the ammonia has any impurities.
Ammonia is highly corrosive to zinc, brass, and copper. Copper, for example, is often used as crush washers in high pressure banjo bolt fittings used in oil and fuel lines in automotive applications.
It's wildly incompatible with several elastomers (ie fuel lines and seals) and plastics (fuel tanks, sensors, tubing, etc.)
If there are impurities in the ammonia, it starts eating the shit out of steel, too.
I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work.
Then there's the small problem of what happens when any unburned ammonia makes it past the rings into the crankcase....so the entire evap system now has to have ammonia-compatible parts...and since the evap system vents into the intake system, which is often made with lots of plastic, now you've got to replace the intake manifold. And since the oil is going to get contaminated with ammonia, the entire oil system has to have ammonia-compatible parts, too.
In modern direct injection vehicles (diesel or gasoline) you're likely at a huge number of components that would likely need to see ammonia-compatible equivalents developed, manufactured, tested, and then installed on the vehicle. The high pressure pump on most passenger vehicles is driven off a cam and tightly integrated into the engine, for example. It's not just a matter of "swap out the fuel pump." Fuel tanks in passenger vehicles are often plastic and not trivial to remove, at all.
Oh, and: renewable energy sources are significantly cheaper than nuclear, which is why wind and solar are replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1.
You seem a bit outside your lane.
Why would there be impurities in ammonia generated from solar powered water electrolysis? Where are they coming from?
Why would clean NH3 react strongly with carbon-managanese steel pressure vessel used in LNG transport?
>I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work.
Is emissions control installed on large marine diesels and stationary generation in Japan?
>In modern direct injection vehicles
Bzzzt. Wrong. This article is about coal power.
But is practical for ships and peaker plants.
I'm dubious simply because ammonia is so nasty to human life. Spills are far worse than diesel or even gasoline spills.
Natural gas needs to be compressed to be energy dense as a liquid, it explodes, it maybe has some technical advantages but the benefits seem narrow if you're starting from a fresh analysis. We're good enough at it to switch to an ammonia economy, people handle it safely all the time. It's just different risks.
Hydrogen, by comparison, is explosive across a much wider range of pressures and concentrations.
Hydrogen also needs to be stored at far higher pressures than natural gas in order to reach comparable energy density, which makes it more difficult and expensive to handle and transport.
Hydrogen used to get used a lot by the space industry (Space Shuttle, etc), but now days the modern rocket industry has been moving to other fuels (kerosene, methane) - largely because of the greatly reduced costs of handling those fuels!
Rockets are lately designed for methane in large part so that concentrating Martian atmosphere for fuel will be more practical, but also for CO2's greater molecular mass, important in an earthly first stage launcher, which needs absolute thrust, to get moving in 1G, much more than efficiency.
As fuel, LH2 may find use mainly or even exclusively for aircraft, but it is exceedingly valuable as feedstock for other work, including ammonia and, yes, methane synthesis. Methane is itself feedstock for many other processes. Ideally these would not result in released CO2...
Hydrogen is prevented from exploding by assuming all joints leak, and providing continuous positive airflow to keep concentration always below 5%.
Ammonia, on the other hand, just requires nitrogen which is 70% of the atmosphere and very easy to extract in industrial quantities.
When you make methanol, processes like gasification and pyrolysis leave you with excess carbon in the form of carbon black, or ash. If you sequester this before it oxidizes, fuel production becomes carbon negative. Methanol is better than ethanol because a) you can't drink it, b) the single carbon molecule means it burns cleaner, c) you get more fuel for the same initial amount of carbon, and d) it doesn't compete with food production for arable land.