Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]
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People freak out about EV battery fires now (never mind that this is not actually the problem it is made out to be), can you imagine the hazmat situation from a couple of cars carrying who knows how many KG of Anhydrous Ammonia crashing into each other? I mean, you might make the fuel tanks extremely robust (and heavy) but fuel lines etc will still break. Ammonia in the air at 300 PPM will cause SEVERE injuries to anybody in the area not wearing a respirator.
And how are you supposed to fuel these cars? Have you seen the PPE you have to wear when handling Anhydrous Ammonia?
Looking like quite a problem over in Luton
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67073...
Maybe better phrasing would be "not actually the new problem it is made out to be"?
1,400 cars burn, not an EV in sight: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-k-parking-garage-fire-destroy...
and it seems fires at airport car parks are surprisingly common...
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
Most of the damage from the 1906 quake was caused by fire.
The entire city, if you’re asking what started the fire ruptured gas mains caused quite a few.
> Has anything relevant changed since then?
The city is full of Lithium Ion batteries that can burn uncontrollably when crushed or punctured. These fires cannot be extinguished quickly unless special chemicals are used.
SFFD has 43 engines and 19 ladder trucks.
https://sf-fire.org/about-sffd-operations
SF also has the Auxillary Water Supply System (AWSS) but extinguishing many EV fires will not be practical with only water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Fire_Departmen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#...
Ammonia got an easy electrity to fuel process, easier than methane that starts with hydrogen. Ammonia is kinda nasty but used plenty (for example in cooling) without a terrible safety record. Not sure that safety is a better argument against it than the lack of distribution network.
I think ammonia will find its niche in shipping, but I just can't see it on the road.
Fuel cells are close cousins of batteries anyway.
And there are even redox flow batteries that are even more intermediate. The energy density isn't high enough (these things are actually used for static energy storage, with vats the size of buildings), but imagine a "fuel station" that exchanged Vanadium in different oxidation states with a car, or that swapped some hydrocarbon that can store energy like ATP in biology.
Heck, including the atmosphere in the system could be ok too (e.g., CO2 capture), so long as everything balances to zero and the thermodynamics work out (even just mixing and unmixing CO2 with oxygen and nitrogen is an expensive trip up and down in entropy though).
I'm quite happy for this kind of work to continue.
And like you say, people are putting big money towards running container ships on ammonia. It's sure better than bunker oil. And we're also definitely not going to use big batteries.
So, good on Toyota. Somebody needs to keep exploring alternatives.
The LN2 doesn't actually burn. It's more like a steam engine, where the pressure from the vaporizing nitrogen drives pistons or turbines.
The nice thing here is that the LN2 comes straight from the atmosphere and goes straight back into it. Net zero emissions from the car (obviously producing the energy to compress the nitrogen in the first place isn't going to be net zero, but that's basically the same issue as with hydrogen, electricity, or this ammonia system).
When you vaporize LN2, you apparently need 0.2MJ/kg of heat. The amount of mechanical energy you extract out of vaporizing that (when heat is provided by the environment) can't exceed the heat required to do so (because condensing the nitrogen back into LN2 is exothermic). Apparently current Li-ion batteries have ~250 Wh/kg = ~0.9MJ/kg energy density, which is significantly higher than the upper bound above.
Am I mistaken somewhere?
For one, energy efficiency. For hydrocarbons you need carbon. Either you take carbon from existing renewable hydrocarbon waste streams (biomass) or you pull CO2 from the air. The first doesn't make much sense because those hydrocarbons would better be used to produce chemicals. The second (direct air capture DAC of CO2) is - as everyone knows - hugely energy intensive, because CO2 comes in concentration of 420 ppm.
Yes, I know the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia is hugely energy intensive as well.
But if you regard ammonia synthesis as well as synfuel synthesis as fundamentally the same processes - both reduce elements in their oxidized forms (C as in CO2, H as in H20, N as in N2) to store energy in them - you need one extra heavily energy intensive step to get synthetic hydrocarbons compared to the sythesis of ammonia: pulling CO2 from the air where it's got a really low concentration (420 ppm).
Compare that to nitrogen which is the main component of our atmosphere (780,000 ppm) and thus much less energy intensive to isolate.
So neither source of carbon to produce CxHy makes sense in the long term IMO.
Also, as soon as you use/burn the synthesized hydrocarbons, the carbon ends up back in the atmosphere (at least in mobile applications where you can hardly capture it) which goes against the main goal of putting less CO2 in there.
Ammonia on the other hand requires nitrogen which is abundant in the atmosphere and thus relatively easy to get (compared to the carbon from DAC). The hydrogen that's needed is also readily available in many places, in the worst case from sea water.
As the goal is a reduction of the amount of CO2 emissions, in the really long-term, hydrocarbons will probably just be the less efficient option compared to ammonia. And since all existing infrastructure does get exchanged/altered in the long-term anyway, slowly switching to ammonia won't mean wasting this infrastructure.
An engineer at Toyota must be a big fan of John Clark's "Ignition!", or Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsworthy_Gurney (see Other work)
What I particularly like about EVs is their low maintenance. You remove many components that are required with ICE. Regenerative braking makes your brake pads last a crazy amount longer. And now with this ammonia engine we are adding even more components to the vehicle? No thanks. Not to even mention the fuel distribution problem.
With EVs, you remove many of the components that are required with ICE. Hence, it doesn't matter how good you are at making those components and sourcing them from suppliers. Hence, a random startup can do nearly as well as Toyota, with their billions in capital invested and decades of experience.
It's kind of a shame, though, since I'd love to have something with the reliability of a Toyota that also applies that reliability to the EV powertrain. Maybe one of their ex-employees will start something.
They can't fire tens of thousands of factory workers so they're doing absolutely everything they can to keep those production lines going in some way or another.
I personally don't understand why they can't retrain those staff and build other things such as an EV charging station factory. But yeah, I guess they have little imagination or drive to actually solve the problem and instead play with stupid moonshot ideas like this.
The only thing they have left is a great reputation for building ICE cars. Not sure how long that will last though if this madness continues.
* They can't retreat into a niche
* Their bread and butter is efficiency, accumulated through tears and scale effects through decades of experience. That's a pretty deep moat. All that is partially reset with an industry-wide change
* Global copper, cobalt, lithium reserves (new deposits are found but with way lower grades, also it takes 15 years currently to set up a new mine) may be enough for the westernized world; but they are not for the whole world. This means effectively reducing the global market. In other words: they are against de-growth. But IMHO this will happen anyway with oil depletion looming in.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/316786/global-market-sha...
If we're going to reduce car noise, the only option is to make them go slower and move them away from residential areas.
Next.
The charging standard is converging to the current dominant player who has functioning charging and who's cars road trip just fine - Tesla.
If Toyota doesn't get some decent EVs to market soon they will simply be left behind and will turn into a financial and branding husk while everyone else does the real work, eventually vanishing into the dustbin of history as one of GM's sub-brands. They can't magically produce innovative products unless they get into the game. In 7 years it will be game over.
They still can't admit they missed the boat.
If they spent half this time making cool EVs, or delivering great battery improvements, they could be back in the game. Instead of letting China dominate more with each passing month. So strange.
moving closer and closer to the world of Fallout
Toyota has mastered precision replicable production of internal combustion engines and related components.
This has been Toyota's perpetual money tree. I'm sure the reward systems inside Toyota management favor those who improve it and protect it.
I'm sure at first they laughed at these pipsqueak EV guys with software backgrounds.
Toyota engineers who propose and work on alternative fuels, like ammonia, are probably not laughed out of the room - which is also full of other career internal combustion engineers.
W. Edward Deming helped start the Toyota Way, by introducing high quality manufacturing processes after ww2.
I'm sure they laugh at Elon for being unable to produce a high quality and error-free product, with infinite money and all the latest technologies at his fingertips.
Toyota's unending crisis will continue, by design.
imagine a Hilux or Tacoma truck EV with Toyota reliability added on there. meanwhile TSLA can't do QA to save its life. the EV F-150 is so hot Ford can't keep up with demand.
Now, electric is threatening to completely eliminate their market advantage of high longevity cars.
So, they'll come up with any excuse not to switch away from complex mechanisms. Since this is their primary advantage in the market.
Hybrid, which is still a gas powered vehicle, is even more complex mechanically. Having both an internal combustion AND an electric power train, with a complex mechanical transmission for allowing both to run at once.
So while hybrid cars where even more in the Japanese expertise of long lasting mechanisms, electric vehicles are in the exact opposite direction. Etremmely simple mechanically.
It is sad. Not only did they lead with hybrids, they also led when the US "big 3" were so entrenched and had allowed their products to become crap, because no one really had a choice. Then Datson, Honda and Toyota brought very small, inexpensive, high reliability vehicles to the US, and were massively successful.
It's so ironic that now they want to sell bloated "luxury" vehicles, just likje the US big 3.
They've become the pox they originally succeded by countering...
I personally think they could've dominated the market on reputation alone.
"Anhydrous ammonia is stored as a liquid under pressure. When released to the environment, though, it becomes a toxic gas. Liquid anhydrous ammonia expands 850 times when released to ambient air and can form large vapor clouds. It may aerosolize and behave as a dense gas, even though it is normally lighter than air. Anhydrous ammonia may also cause water vapor to condense in the air forming a visible white cloud. Therefore, when anhydrous ammonia is released to the air, it may travel along the ground in a cloud instead of immediately rising into the air and dispensing." https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/index.cfm/43,320,230,349,html
They are doomed if they keep whistling past the graveyard like this.
Toyota is pulling a Canonical who wrote their own desktop. Toyota will flop… again, after hydrogen… trying to win it all.