This could enable fertilizer production with no CO2 emissions. The numbers in the paper suggest that it might prove cheaper than natural gas based production which is common today. Fertilizer production is 2.1% of all CO2 emissions right now.
"In addition to its use in the fertilizer and chemical industries, ammonia is currently seen as a potential replacement for carbon-based fuels and as a carrier for worldwide transportation of renewable energy."
Long-term grid storage?
Publication: 22 July 2022
Anyone know if maybe some pilot / small scale production facility has been set up in the mean time?
I've read about a farm that produced its own fertilizer, but dunno whether that uses this or some older / unrelated process.
Would be a huge breakthrough in any case.
They're trying to avoid using the stuff in industrial refrigeration it's so nasty, and yet here we are gleefully considering rolling down the highway with it in the cheapest vessel industry can lobby for strapped to our bum.
I guess the notion has passed so quickly we haven't had time for the media to program us with corporate agendas...
Ammonia is easier to liquify than hydrogen, and is in many respects easier to handle. However, it's definitely not something you want to have a spill of at a gas station or in your garage, and for that reason, it probably won't have "consumer" uses.
As far as industrial gasses go, it's certainly nowhere near the worst, and there's plenty of ammonia tankers on the roads today, but large spills do kill people every now and then.
I was once in a presentation which claimed formic acid to be a better alternative, but I'm not an expert in that field, so I can't comment on its merits.
Enough hydrogen to power humanity by fusion is readily available anywhere :)
Or maybe a regional factory with short pipelines.
As for the idea itself. Ammonia as fuel fails the first principle of safe design. It’s a poisonous gas. Using it as a fuel is a willingness to trade the safety of people for a cheaper fuel.
“willingness to trade the safety of people for a cheaper X” is exactly what we should expect car companies (and companies in general) to do, because that’s what they’ve done so often though history.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo “These stupid trucks are literally killing us” -NotJustBikes
Being near either one as it explodes would be bad, but I wonder which one looks more impressive movie-effects-wise? :)
If there were an oxidizer in the mix somehow, it would be rather more explosive.
I once got to watch some moderately crazy students fill an ordinary party balloon with a stoichiometric mix of hydrogen and oxygen at ambient temperature and pressure. When it was ignited, the result was extremely impressive. No one was injured (because we were all warned to protect our ears and open our mouths and balloons don’t produce significant shrapnel), but the shock wave was not at all subtle.
We ran into two problems. First, a number of the flames blew out on their way up. No fireball.
Second, we ran out of balloons pretty fast. So he cast around for ideas, and decided to fall back on a box of condoms. They held a lot more hydrogen than the balloons.
They were also equally likely to go out before blowing up. I always imagined them coming down on someone's lawn, causing no end of confusion.
[DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! And if you're tempted, there's one thing I left out that's necessary for it to work properly, and the only thing I'll say about it is this warning: https://sciencenotes.org/add-acid-to-water-or-water-to-acid/ ]
The stoichiometric premixed balloon is only 2/3 H2 by volume, so it releases 1/3 less energy, but it’s a whole different experience when the energy is released essentially all at once. Interestingly, there was no noticeable fireball from the premixed balloon.
A premixed H2+air balloon probably makes a fine explosion, too :)
Oh, I'm quite aware. The other fun game we played was with his acetylene welding torch and balloons. It has separately controlled tanks of acetylene and oxygen. Acetylene only = nice big fireball. Acetylene + oxygen = no fireball at all, instead a very loud boom + a bit of a shockwave.
But H2 takes up most of the space in the balloon, and acetylene is nice and compact, so considerably more total energy should be available with acetylene!
I don’t know whether oxyacetylene will detonate nicely, though, or whether a balloon-sized oxyacetylene mix will merely combust subsonically.
Add the issues with hydrogen embrittlement and Ammonia starts to look trivial by comparison. People deal with industrial quantities of Ammonia on a regular basis without significant issues. Hell even gasoline and diesel are toxic and can be quite dangerous
No, they have significant issues on a regular basis still.
And plenty of more recent examples: https://www.fox29.com/news/tanker-truck-fire-closes-stretch-...
Ammonia is one of the most common chemicals manufactured and transported around the world and has plenty of accidents but hydrocarbon accidents get into the hundreds of deaths: 150 dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoa_disaster 500-600 dead 5000–7000 suffering severe burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juanico_disaster 167 dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
People even hook up to natural gas lines after events big and small like: 300 dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion or here’s a recent event which destroyed 60-100 homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
I suppose it's worth noting in your second link, the fatalities were from the kinetics of the impact, which is a hazard that belongs to "things with velocity" rather than "things containing fuels".
We can assume that uncontained fire and explosion are categorical hazards with fuels.
Ammonia has significant risks that few other proposed fuels present and I believe it's worth considering whether this is something we want moving outside of hazmat routes between industrial zones.
Major spills of either are dangerous but rare compared to how much is being created and transported. We’re only ~5x as much gasoline vs Ammonia today. Considering most cars would be EV’s I suspect the total amount of Ammonia produced even with widespread adoption isn’t going to change by that much. Say Long haul trucks, heavy equipment, aircraft etc.
PS: Which isn’t to say Ammonia is actually a good fuel, the only thing I can think that actually used the stuff was the X-15. So it would need significant economic advantages to end up adopted.
Ammonia is probably too unsafe for cars and boats. But anything filled by professionals like trains or ships would work. But might work to have tank exchange system like with propane.
This is not to mention everything else. The immense death toll directly (crashes) and indirectly (pollution, particulates, etc). The waste of space in cities. The waste of time in traffic that is unfixable if everyone is driving in an individual car. Etc etc. I wish people would stop trying to save the auto industry and start looking at the root of the problem.
Result, reduces carbon footprint of travel - land shipping - ability to build out modern towns - etc
Toss in a bill to require all train lines to also install national fiber. You now have enabled the revitalization of large swaths of the county.
Well its not like you can put any petrochemical fuels in you coffee
N2 + 3H2 -> 2NH3
This method of direct electroreduction should not confused with the Laser-induced method discussed elsewhere in the thread, which has abysmal numbers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-shipping-industry-is-betti...
https://www.wartsila.com/media/news/30-06-2020-world-s-first...
https://www.lr.org/en/about-us/press-listing/press-release/i...
https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/maritime-fuel-mix-cou...
But the main concern is that ammonia burns slowly. It might work in power plants but not in EVs
The lower explosive limit of hydrogen is ~4%. By comparison the 300 ppm immediate danger to life and health threshold of ammonia is .03%.
It is intrinsically dangerous, i.e. without a source of ignition, at concentrations 2 orders of magnitude lower than the LEL of hydrogen.
Not every hydrogen leak is a concern, but just about every ammonia leak is.
The established OSHA 15 minute exposure limit for ammonia is 35 ppm, 8 hours is 25 ppm.
The Toyota Mirai, a production hydrogen car, uses a type IV carbon fiber pressure vessel rated for 70 MPa / 10,000 psi.
Type V are rated for 15,000 psi.
It is not necessary to liquefy hydrogen for adequate range in ground transport applications: The Mirai yields a 402 mile EPA rated range on gaseous hydrogen.
The tanks weigh 93kg filled with 5.65kg hydrogen, yielding an approximately 190 kWh of stored energy.
All without corroding flesh in trace concentrations.
By comparison the Tesla Roadster's 450kg battery pack yields a 200 kWh capacity.
Ammonia is and would likely continue to be stored in metal pressure vessels as an obvious cost optimization and thus would compare unfavorably to hydrogen pressure vessels' effective energy density where that area of the performance versus cost optimization space is not available due to embrittlement.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/japans-ammonia-coal-co-firing-st...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/japans-ammonia-coal-co-firing-st...
which I just can't imagine being clean when I consider that nitrogen oxides are also a concern with combustion fuels, not to mention it being an inefficient "battery" if you're making ammonia from green hydrogen and then burning it and spinning a turbine.
Fertilizer production via this method might be a good fit for times when rates are low or even negative due to wind energy overproduction during off peak.
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-plasma-technology-world.html https://portal.nifa.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/1025777-lo... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.2c06357 (paywalled)
"plasma" and "NOx" seem to be the keywords here (so other process than discussed here).
Not at scale (yet), cost unclear. But the technology exists, and being improved upon.
So I'm not exactly holding my breath. It's a big improvement over previous methods, but there's still a long way to go.
Switching to carbon free ammonia would be no great task, just a price hike and some minor retrofitting.
Could you explain exactly why you would say this?
Working past their fake news headlines like 100%. Hydrogen is almost 100% and that's not big if true.
We are decades away for renewable electricity only for our electric needs.
Then you have oil and many other things electric can replace which are worse than gas.
What about this is big? In a dream world of unlimited electricity everything is easy, like synth fuel and fertilizer and climate control. Today, burning coal to make fertilizer doesn't seem good, if this is true.
We’re decades away from 100%, but how long away are we nationally from 50%, 65%, 90%, 99%?
As solar production ramps up to higher percentages there is going to be more and more peak power in excess of demand. Industrial scale electrochemistry is going to be one of the alternatives to batteries that’s going to be developed.
Already nitrogen fixation requires a huge amount of energy, this process at scale could very well require less energy than the modern haber process.
When solar hits a certain ratio of production there will be a daily peak where electricity will be very cheap because there’s too much of it, regardless of what people “advocate”.
Electrochemistry things are where it’s at, metal refining specifically.
Aluminum production from ore has one step where you literally just make what is effectively an enormous battery out of aluminum ore and “charge” it, when it’s fully charged you’ve turned aluminum oxide into pure aluminum. It can even be run backwards to produce electricity because it’s literally a battery (a really shitty one). So there’s not a huge capital investment or complex process and electric input is actually a significant portion of the cost.
Other simple electrochemistry things that do have a major portion of the cost in electricity can do the same when costs get low enough. There’s a lot of recycling that becomes possible with cheap clean energy that you would never do with fossil fuel electricity.
They don’t shut down entirely because the aluminum has to stay molten at a thousand degrees, but they can scale the energy usage significantly, this is becoming more of an interest in the last decade.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/amp/article/german-firm-turns...
Also, we need a fuel for long distance transport like ships when batteries won’t work. Ammonia will always be cheaper than synthetic fuel because no carbon doesn’t have to come from air, and it stores better than hydrogen.
There may be lots of surplus electricity in the future but there will also be a lot of demands for carbon capture, hydrogen, long term storage, and chemical processes.
The main challenge is building cheap electrolysers without so much regard to efficiency, in order to use all the power when available. Most commercially available electrolysers today are expensive and cannot ramp up and down quickly.