First ammonia-fueled ship hits a snag
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
A lot of commentators believe that since ammonia is less inherently safe it will inevitably be less safe in practice. I am not convinced by that argument, and in general if there's a strong enough business driver then anything can be made safe. But what really swung me against the idea of ammonia as a shipping fuel is that the expected cost is barely any better than methanol (which is much more inherently safe) and is more expensive than biodiesel.
The shipping companies have a real conundrum on their hands - do they go ammonia, methanol, stick with diesel, or try to get near-shore and inland shipping onto electric? Ammonia-fuelled ships have to be THOROUGHLY designed from the ground up specifically for ammonia use; you have to be 100% committed to go down that path. Whereas biodiesel can simply be dropped in (you can of course choose to fill up with a biodiesel blend today, but nobody does because you can put emissions into the atmosphere for free).
Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. You could get electrolysers for free and still be unable to make cheap green ammonia. So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
The reason the cost of ammonia is barely better, or even worse, than things like methanol, is because the electricity process is still expensive.
But that can (and soon would!) become waaaay cheaper. Electricity __NOT__ on demand is dirt cheap and can be halved and quartered some more: Solar panels are _idiotically cheap_ these days and that state of affairs is not temporary.
We need more not-on-demand needs. As in, 'hey, uh, if theres some power left over cuz it's windy and sunny.. no prob! Let me run these ammonia producing machines at full power for a bit. No need for ammonia right now? No problem - compared to electricity, ammonia is vastly simpler to store'.
Ammonia is a great not-on-demand consumer of electricty. That's why this is necessary.
As you said:
> the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway.
That's exactly the factor that can become ridiculously cheap. It isn't today because there's not much point investing in solar/wind because they do not cover on-demand needs (when it's not particularly sunny/windy, then electricity prices are sky high and you want to build electricity production that can deliver then. And solar/windy by definition can't), and the primary issue is transport.
if the demand for ammonia skyrockets, you can solve it all. Ammonia does not need to be produced on-demand, and you don't need all that much transport (build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks).
The problem with this is the capex and running costs of that kind of machinery make it expensive to keep idle. It can be uneconomic even with free electricity.
Different factories have difference costs. When energy is significant they consider that. When energy is not significant they just run when it works out.
I don't have a lot of direct experience but my dad worked in factories most of my childhood. Every single one ran nearly 24/7. Was that a chance occurrence of the types of factories we had near where I grew up?
My understanding is that manufacturing tends to be the way you describe. I'd be surprised if that held true for all sorts of factories, especially in chemical production. Just a guess but I think paying chemical engineers for overnight shifts might cut into profits somewhat
EDIT: another comment sparked a memory, I'm thinking specifically of batch operators.
Is this true in chemicals?
Any industrially-produced chemical where continuous production is possible. I haven’t heard of such systems being competitive if left idle so someone can sleep.
Yes. I'm asking if there is a chemical-production process that can be run 24/7 but which isn't due to labour shortages somewhere that doesn't result in such production being shut down (or protected)?
Chemicals are globally-traded commodities. Some are perishable and/or difficult or even illegal to ship. So there is regional price variance. But ceteris paribus, if it can be run continuously, production will shift to where it is.
Loading & unloading ships & barges as well.
Some places only load railcars & trailers during days.
Also it's common for engineers to only work straight days and often their office is not on site, they actually only make visits. They do it as needed and can be very dedicated and effective, but of course they can't touch anything because that requires a unionized operator.
My father was a fireman. Knowing what I know from him, I would never go to work for a factory that they got THOSE massive energy demanding machines that run non-stop and the fuel is ammonia. It is a near-certain death sentence, especially in 'some countries' where safety is 'a bit more relaxed'.
This does not follow. The cost efficiency of ammonia production is highly dependent on the process being continuous and steady state. Every analysis that says ammonia is cost effective as a fuel is based on an efficient continuous process as a cost assumption.
If you are constantly starting and stopping based on electricity availability then your ammonia just became much more expensive. In which case, it is probably no longer cost effective as a fuel. Mixing "best possible price" and "worst possible process" and pretending these represent the same instance of reality is misleading to say the least.
Hydrogen is the overwhelming energy input to ammonia production. Hydrogen is readily storable -- this is done even today, when the hydrogen comes from natural gas, to smooth things out to keep the ammonia plant running -- so intermittency of renewables will be almost entirely countered by doing the same thing and storing the green hydrogen.
What matters is cost of electrolysers, but they have been getting very cheap in China.
Ammonia synthesis is a high-pressure high-temperature process. One of the reasons to use a continuous steady-state process is that cycling it up and down causes thermal and pressure fatigue in the reactor. The safe operating life of a reactor can be surprisingly short if it is not operated at a steady state. If you want this to scale, it needs to be low maintenance and have a long operating life.
You could in principle centralize ammonia production with sufficient reactant reserves to ensure continuous production from variable low-density energy sources like solar or wind. However, this would require hydrogen pipelines that largely don't exist and would take a long time to build. We can't repurpose existing natural gas infrastructure and similar because they weren't built with alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. One of the big economic advantages of using methane for ammonia is that it takes advantage of the millions of kilometers of natural gas distribution pipeline that already exists.
I'm not averse to the idea but the enthusiastic proponents are pretending like the practical realities of industrial chemistry don't apply to them. We aren't going to get to a green future with rainbows and unicorns, we need to brutally realistic about the true requirements.
The argument that was being made seemed to be "renewables are intermittent, therefore ammonia synthesis based on renewable energy must be intermittent, or else use expensive storage". The counterargument is that hydrogen is the overwhelmingly most important input, and it is highly storable, so the intermittency of the inputs can be largely avoided at modest cost, allowing the ammonia plant to run 24/7.
You may not be aware, but we already have hydrogen pipelines coupled to ammonia plants. The US has ~1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines for this purpose. It's also not obvious to me why pipelines would necessarily be needed. After all, the ammonia plant could be built where the hydrogen is stored.
Producing a ton of hydrogen by electrolysis requires ~3x the energy to produce a ton of aluminum. It is, in fact, "insanely energy hungry". This isn't necessarily a problem but it does create logistical challenges.
Do you mean MWh? Because the units given don't make sense.
But 11 MWh would be too low.
I'm probably missing something here but why would you need to pipe hydrogen to the plant, rather than just generating it on site from power drawn from the grid?
Hydrogen requires 3x the energy of aluminum per ton, so it is an even bigger problem for hydrogen. Unlike aluminum, it is feasible to have large numbers of small hydrogen production plants but then you need to transport all that hydrogen at an acceptable scale.
Is this due to transmission losses or just because you couldn't feasibly build enough capacity cables to transmit large amounts of power over long distances?
The largest ammonia plant in the US requires around 2,000 tons of hydrogen per day. That would require 100 GWh per day to produce by electrolysis, which would require the entire output of a large hydroelectric or nuclear power plant, much like large aluminum refineries. Otherwise, you need to move a lot of electricity or a lot of hydrogen to have good efficiency, and there is infrastructure for neither.
Converting natural gas into hydrogen is also energy intensive. One of the big advantages of natural gas is that your hydrogen source is also your energy source and there is vast infrastructure for moving natural gas around.
Building green hydrogen pipelines likely makes more sense than trying to backhaul electricity from diffuse sources. A single hydrogen pipeline can reify a lot of electricity production without the concomitant transmission and management infrastructure.
100GWh is not small, but it's not impossible. The largest solar farm in operation is 5GW, and that could get you theoretically halfway there operating 10 hours a day.
It feels like the challenges are a lot easier to solve than with fusion or nuclear.
This will definitely be harder than nuclear. The expansive land use requirements means the legal battles pertaining to that would almost certainly span many decades. At least with nuclear there is a limited number of people that need to sign-off to have a viable project -- reforming that process probably would be simpler.
Cloudy weather would be an interesting problem I guess.
Steam has something like 200x the volume of the water it’s boiled from.
Worst comes to worse you run on grid for a few hours.
Supporting your point about solar panels continuing to be cheap, "mainstream" panels went up to 0.11€ per peak watt last month: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which was a new historic low price in September and down 21% from 0.14€/Wp in February of last year, itself a historic record low price at the beginning of last year.
The last time something like this happened to the energy supply, it was James Watt's steam-engine.
Ammonia makes zero sense as a general use fuel, but ships need MW of power over several days and aren’t in populated areas.
Assuming, it’s actually viable which isn’t guaranteed.
"build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks"
You can't pick that and then decide not to transfer the ammonia and decide not to transfer the electricity. Unless your solar plan is at the loading dock or something.
Yes you have to transfer electricity in that case. We already know transferring electricity is easy.
Don't get hung up on "picking" one as if the downsides get locked in at the pre-design phase. If it's difficult to transfer ammonia then nevermind go back to the existing easy option of wires.
In other words, if that specific detail doesn't work out, it is not an argument against ammonia. It was just a potential bonus, not core to the idea. And it doesn't fundamentally change things. It's not the "opposite" plan.
Your argument at this point has just devolved into some variant of "don't confuse me with the facts"
The phrasing in that comment rejected the original plan as a whole, and that's not right.
Also the comment you called a "good plan" was still talking about shipping ammonia as a maybe! So even in that detail it's not the opposite of the original comment.
I think your first comment was fine, but it's not your first comment that I replied to.
I was thinking of navigable waterways which are common near major wind farms and some solar, not just major ports which rarely have a lot of space available. The UK is already facing issues with moving offshore wind around the country, an Ammonia plant could theoretically make a lot of sense.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.035...
You seem to be contradicting yourself here? If learning rates and technology improvement drastically drive down the cost of solar cells, as you say they might, and the cost of electricity dominates the cost of green ammonia, as you say it does, doesn't that mean that the learning rates and technology improvement in solar cells will drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia? Wouldn't that make ammonia much cheaper than biodiesel, keeping biodiesel from being competitive?
(I'm not sure ammonia is a competitive fuel for other reasons, such as the corrosion and safety issues discussed in the article, but it seems clear to me that if it's going to be uncompetitively expensive, it would have to be because one of the premises above is wrong, for example because the cost of green ammonia is dominated by capex or because solar cells stop dropping in cost. I don't see how you can sustain those premises and deny the conclusion.)
There is a ton of research going into improving the efficiency of the H2 > NH3 conversion, and there are at least two startups (Tsubame in Japan and a new one I don't remember). There's no rule that says you can't beat Haber.
Compared to methanol, ammonia is currently more expensive but vastly more scalable in the long run; once you reach the biofuel "ceiling" (roughly corresponding to the availability of farming and forestry byproducts) you're stuck making it via carbon capture, which has its own efficiency problems.
In theory the energy required to produce ammonia is negative (Hf < 0) but at standard pressure its formation is thermodynamically unfavorable (Gf = Hf + TdeltaS > 0). But the bigger issue is the very high activation energy barrier for ammonia synthesis, which results in a lot of energy being used to make ammonia at very high pressure and temperature.
Right now there are two competing approaches to reducing the cost of ammonia production. Tsubame is using a new ruthenium-based catalyst that lowers the reaction temperature (and therefore, also the pressure). The other method is by electrocatalysis. I don't know for sure that this is what NitroVolt is doing but their name certainly suggests it.
Presumably if you had some way of rapidly removing the ammonia produced from the reaction, like maybe a high-temperature highly polar solvent that reacted reversibly with the ammonia, but didn't dissolve much hydrogen or nitrogen, you could get by with a lower equilibrium amount of ammonia and thus much lower pressure. Anhydrous phosphoric acid seems like a potential candidate? But that's obvious enough that people probably tried it a century ago.
Long distance .. this is just a problem. As you say it won't be solved unless there's carbon pricing and ultimately restrictions on fossil fuels in general, forcing a replacement with more expensive synthetic and bio-fuels.
Containers might be a bit tedious for this. So, why not use autonomous tug boats and barges. The tug boats simply pull the load between charging stations. When they are empty they head for a charger and a full one takes over. This could even work with existing ships, which are commonly maneuvered around harbors using tug boats already.
Probably more than a few engineering challenges lurking here but it gets us out of the mindset that ships must be able to go for thousands of nautical miles without stopping for charging. I could see that working for a lot of coastal shipping routes.
.. but again for relatively short distances. You do not want to have relatively unskilled personnel attempting swaps at sea, or in bad weather (which is also very dangerous for ships under tow).
The China-EU distance is about 24,000km. I don't think more than one or two charging/swap stops are feasible on that route, so you're going to need something with 10,000km range at the very least.
There are islands like Hawaii where the above is not possible though so we still need something else.
You’re describing coaling stations [1]. They worked in the era of empires (one government controls the coaling network) and no other options. They’re uncompetitive today.
Any energy system requiring them will not be competitive against direct-sail systems. You’re paying for the crew and ship’s deterioration with every delay.
Is it? How many more deep water ports would be needed if every ship had to stop every night? What about if you're passing hostile or undeveloped countries? What about when you need to cross the Pacific or Atlantic? Cargo ships move at maybe 15mph - there's definitely huge parts of the world that don't have a well equipped deep water port every 360 miles. Even major western countries only have a handful of major ports.
And next to ammonia, biodiesel is almost drinkable.
But well, the silver lining is that the combustion products literally burning your lungs means that you won't unknowingly lock yourself in a room with a running engine.
With shipping, shooting for perfect is really expensive. But we're starting with a status quo that is really bad that can be improved upon.
For example, most ships are made out of steel. Steel is relatively heavy. There's a ship yard in Tasmania working on a battery electric 300meter long ferry made out of aluminum. They've built dozens of aluminum ships already. Aluminum is much lighter than steel and that cuts the amount of energy needed to move it around by about half. That's nice because batteries are expensive and don't provide a lot of range. But making ferries out of aluminum is of course something that could work for any kind of ship.
Fuel is really expensive. 50% fuel savings are very attractive to ship operators. Most ships burn bunker fuel. That's properly nasty stuff. So using only half of that would be an improvement. It's toxic, causes lots of pollution and is nasty if it gets in the water. Some cruise ships run on LNG these days. Much cleaner but it takes up space. Those ships are mostly still made out of steel. If you make them out of aluminum, they'd be a lot lighter probably and use less fuel. So smaller LNG tanks, less CO2 emitted, and more space for the passengers. Win win.
There are also some interesting things happening with composites and carbon fiber. That stuff is even lighter and there are some companies focusing on marine applications as well. So, we could cut weight and fuel usage of ships by using modern/different materials.
There are some experiments happening with using sails on ships to cut fuel usage further. If you add all this up, we could be cutting fuel usage significantly (40-70%) and make the emissions problem a lot smaller. And unlike synthetic fuels, this also translates into financial savings. So that means it's more likely to happen.
And if we eventually put batteries in these ships, they'll go a bit further as well.
It's not perfect. But probably a lot better.
Hmm. I'm suspicious about this - might be true for cars, definitely true for planes, but ships sit at neutral buoyancy, most of the mass is cargo, and the main component of energy expenditure is actually drag. So there's significant benefits to low drag hull designs or "slow steaming", but the actual ship material isn't terribly high up on the priority list. And aluminium is way more expensive.
If a ship's mass were mostly ship rather than mostly cargo, making it out of a heavier material would increase its water displacement, which would increase its drag. I don't know if that's a proportional effect; I think it's actually sublinear. But, since most of the mass is cargo, it won't make much of a difference.
If most of the mass weren't cargo, you could ship things more cheaply by sealing the cargo in giant plastic bags and towing it across the ocean behind a tugboat.
There’s really not a lot of room to make aluminum as cheap as steel, as all economies of scale have by now been mostly realized. The cost of energy is so dominant that it makes sense to run smelting plants idle most of the time with the crucible heated constantly just to take advantage of negative power prices (although there are other factors at play like subsidies and national security concerns).
Barring some sort of seismic scientific breakthrough in metallurgy, the current ratio of 2-3x the cost of steel is here to stay. There’s maybe a little room if we reach “peak aluminum” as the fraction of recycled scrap approaches 100%, but I don’t think that would make that much of a difference because we’re likely to hit “peak steel” before then (and again, its just easier to recycle from a logistics standpoint).
That isn't to say aluminum can't be used for ships. Only that it is tricky.
Anyway, this is the ship yard I mentioned. They have a few decades experience making ships out of aluminum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incat
With aluminum, any flexion — no matter how little — marginally reduces the strength of the material. Ergo, even under ideal conditions it's saddled with a limited service life.
We do something similar with bunker fuel of different grades. They are forced to use the good stuff near the ports and once in the open sea they start burning the muddy Godzilla.
Someone I knew died from inhaling ammonia vapors after the system wasn’t purged properly and they opened a valve. Having a whole ship fueled by it seems like insanity when there is fuel that does to that to a person.
It's kind of odd, ammonia was used back in the day on older systems. Then it was deemed too dangerous like you mentioned. But now, due to environmental impact it's now considered less dangerous and is "coming back".
Hopefully, it won't happen on the middle of a populated area.
It's called R-290 [0], but yes this is the same as in "propane grill."
I'm a "consumer," but the technicians I talk to about replacing a residential HVAC have mentioned that consumer HVAC systems need new fire detection (maybe also suppresion?) systems on the A/C side just because of the new ingredient.
Again, not propane for the heating side, but for cooling. Crazy.
[0] https://www.superradiatorcoils.com/blog/r-290-pros-cons-comp...
I'll agree that the equipment is heavy-duty, but disagree if you mean "massive." The energy density of CO2 is so high that suction lines can be 2"-4", 6"-8" is common for ammonia. Modern systems use many (a dozen+) small recip compressors instead of larger HP screw compressors. When all is said and done, CO2 systems are small enough that they are frequently contained to a single rack and placed on the roof of a building, whereas a comparable ammonia system requires its own engine room and a significantly larger footprint.
The biggest opportunity for CO2 to outperform ammonia is in heat recovery and reuse. I had a customer who was exploring selling his (waste) heat as a utility to a neighboring food processor.
It also smells like rotten fish.
Your standard household ammonia CONCENTRATE people sometimes use for cleaning is 99% water - you dilute it significantly for use. Even used correctly it is nasty stuff.
That seems to be true for ammonia as well, at least according to the Wikipedia page's [1] section on Combustion:
Ammonia does not burn readily or sustain combustion, except under narrow fuel-to-air mixtures of 15–28% ammonia by volume in air.
That doesn't sound too horrible, it feels like gasoline/petrol is easier to combust (although I know it's the fumes that are actually flammable).
Warning that 15% air-ammonia mixtures can burn is like warning that 100 kg of TNT could give you a concussion if it fell on your head. It's just not the concern at all.
The comparatively small quantities of petrol carried in automobiles is not a grave hazard, though fuel tanks are protected against damage or ignition, and fires do happen. Larger vehicles, on land, sea, and air, often burn the comparatively safer kerosene (aviation) or diesel (heavy machinery).
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Distillate" and "NGL" (natural gas liquids) are used in some instances, and can boil well below 100°C. Butane boils at -0.5°C / 31.5°F.
2. As I'd just mentioned in an earlier comment. I thought a well-known cruise ship or ocean-liner had been converted to petrol, but can't find a reference. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344605>
I assure you I am not.
I specifically compared it to lubricants to avoid a bunch of people mentally anchoring the discussion around diesel. Bunker C (the common one, also the most thick one) is basically on the automotive oil spectrum when it comes to viscosity.
Go to 0:00 for room temp and 9:00 for operating temp (which is low enough for a plastic soda bottle and a bare hand to be appropriate). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZZ591x0Ajs. Sure looks like 5w20 to me. Def thinner than gear oils and any comparison to 000 grease or roofing tar on a hot day is laughable. Bunker fuel is solidly on the oil spectrum.
> bunker fuel is solidity
You seems to be knowledgeable in that domain and has something interesting to share but I don’t understand your point. What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ? What is the preside point you don’t agree with GP? Please EMLI5.
It's on the same order as most petroleum oils that people deal with and thinner than pretty much every petroleum product that is generally characterized as thick. Thinner grades of motor oil and most hydraulic oil is a bit thinner but thicker grades of motor oil, gear oils, all sorts of greases and tars are all more viscous. Bunker oil doesn't "need" to be heated to be pumped any more than motor oil does though heating it and the accompanying thinning does a lot to help with combustion which is why they do it (and then the rest of the systems that handle it get designed to take advantage of this) and invoking the fact that this is done kind of implies a comparison with the other petroleum products that get heated before being used and in most people's experience this is going to be products used to patch roofs and roads which is unhelpful because those don't even flow except at the highest extreme of naturally occurring temperatures. The only context in which bunker oil is particularly thick is if you're a fuel supplier and spend all day dealing in much less viscous stuff.
I guess it's just pedantry at the end of the day.
And yes, the numbers were timestamp references.
Decidedly thicker than automotive oil, and probably thicker than axle grease or vaseline / petroleum jelly.
The ship in which that was used (triple-expansion steam engine, late 1800s design, built and used during WWII) directed spent steam around the incoming fuel flow directly prior to boiler injection, and that steam then wrapped around the fuel line and part of the fuel tank itself to heat the oil to the point it would flow.
Side note: Venezuelan oil is very thick and viscous, and requires mixing with lighter fractions of petroleum to be pumped out of wells. Venezuela typically imports what would otherwise be waste light fractions of petroleum, generally from the US or Nigeria (heavily dependent on political winds) in order to do this. A significant fraction of US petroleum exports go to this or similar uses. (I suspect Canadian tar sands see similar treatment though I don't have a source on this.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Maritime_fuel_classif...
Referring to the timestamps in the linked video (i.e. from the start of the video to 9 minutes).
The point was that risks can be managed.
You can make the same point without resorting to name calling
However no ship fueled without such trained crew should get anywhere near one that is. Only special shipyards should allow such a ship to dock - even the route from the open ocean needs to be controlled - no beaches "near" those ships. I'm not sure what a right margin of safety is, but don't allow such ship into your national waters without first knowing that.
I could see that. At least, it sounds good in principle. But with ships sailing under flags of countries with lax safety requirements it may not be practical.
I hope you are being sarcastic.
No amount of training could ever make it feel 'safe', everything about it is 'if you make a mistake, even a small one, it WILL kill you'.
Other fuel cell based technologies seem to be working on scaling up, they can supplement electrical generation for crew before working with the existing generators with the aim to eventually replace them.
Like trains, ships get technical benefits from being hybrid. This makes it relatively easy then to be made more hybrid, plug into shore power when available, add some batteries and, solar panels etc.
There's no one easy fix but lots of little ones. The most interesting one I saw discussed is contracts that share the blame when delays happen. Previously ships would race to their destination and then wait around because if they missed a connection they would be held responsible. Now they can all go at slower, more efficient just-in-time speeds and the costs of the occasional missed deadline are amortized. With fuel savings they all come out ahead so it's a win-win.
This sentence confuses me. The shipping industry runs on natural gas? If so, why is there regret? My impression is that most systems using natural gas right now are in a good position.
What am I missing here?
The proportion of LNG fuelled cargo tankers out there right now is about 2% but for new orders, about 30% of them are LNG fuelled so that small percentage will grow rapidly.
However, for United States LNG in particular, the LNG production chain actually has very high emissions of methane. The industry has been fighting to keep that as unclear and unquantified as absolutely possible, and there's a good reason for that - when you take into account the methane emissions along the whole value chain from drilling through liquefaction, LNG's climate impact (in terms of global warming) is no better than coal. I'm sure it's beneficial compared to bunker fuel, but the climate benefit is much much slimmer than first believed.
Better read the data now before it gets stricken from the record.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/methane-supe...
Were we supposed to guess New Mexico, Turkmenistan, and Iran, or am I missing something?
2nd 'graph of the linked article:
In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates.
<https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/methane-supe...>
If producers are intentionally venting off the methane, it isn't leaking, it's being released.
> A leak is a way (usually an opening) for fluid to escape a container or fluid-containing system, such as a tank or a ship's hull, through which the contents of the container can escape or outside matter can enter the container. Leaks are usually unintended and therefore undesired.
I thought LNG was methane. What am I missing here?
That's not possible in practice: LNG leaks at almost every single step, and monitoring of it has been inconsistent and poorly implemented. Add in the significantly higher greenhouse effect of methane in the atmosphere, and you lose essentially all the potential benefits (not to mention the ultimate issue of continuing to add sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere - it's still a fossil fuel).
Why are you sure of that?
Oils release an amount of CO2 that's midway between natural gas and coal. So unless bunker fuel is causing some other big release of greenhouse gasses, if natural gas is near coal then it's worse than bunker fuel.
On top of that, doesn't the sulfur pollution from bunker fuel have a cooling effect?
I'd assumed that a main engine's efficiency with bunker fuel was awful and with LNG was much better, meaning LNG had emissions as a shipping fuel.
But I think taking into account the methane emissions of upstream production (which varies incredibly wildly depending on the production environment) LNG from most of the world (particularly the USA) will be a worse shipping fuel on a global warming basis than bunker fuel.
Thanks for picking that up.
The cooling effect of sulphur dioxide emissions (which make sulphates in the atmosphere) is a whole Pandora's box that I'm unqualified to open but yes, there's a significant cooling effect from the SO2 emissions of bunker fuel and the 2020 rules change on VLSFO dramatically slashed the shipping industry's SO2 emissions (noting that SO2 emissions have also been falling across the board, and shipping is only one component of that). https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/sulfur-dioxide-emis...
If you read through industry journals, you can find some point in the late 80s where the industry journals were all reporting about how all ships would need to go back to burning coal soon. I'm pretty sure this was just a fantasy that shipbuilders paid the journals to push as it would mean the opportunity to sell lots of new ships.
I doubt the statement you quoted is grounded in any reality.
(I'd think that petrol itself would be a less desirable fuel for some of the same reasons as ammonia: it's heavier-than air, sinks, and burns rapidly or explodes when vapours combine with air.)
Climate change. Maybe you've heard of it?
(And it turns out things with LNG ships are much worse than previously believed. They not only emit CO2 - a bit less than traditional bunker fuel, but not much - they also emit methane, and in no small quantities. The LNG industry likes to pretend that these emissions are small and neglegible, but whenever someone goes out and actually measures them, they are substantial.)
We already have a workable solution: liquid methane. It can be synthesized from captured CO2 about as cheaply as ammonia, and we can just use the fossil methane as a bridge for now. More importantly, there are whole fleets of methane-powered ships now.
Methane has a higher global warming potential, but only if it leaks. And this can be minimized, especially once fossil fuel mining is phased out.
So at least at first glance to me that looks very favorable vs the bunker fuel ships normally use, which is also horribly toxic but also floats and is much harder for creatures to get rid of.
The ship's tank is not at STP. The ammonia inside it is pressurized into a liquid.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/ammonia-liquid-thermal-pr...
Not a big deal on the ocean. And yeah, better than an oil spill.
Ammonia can directly act as a nitrogen fertilizer, and plants love that. Mammals quickly convert it in their livers, but aquatic animals can't handle having it in their bloodstream and die quickly from it.
High concentrations can overwhelm the liver, and then its toxic even for humans. Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa.
pbmonster says "Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa."
As in "dissolves the mucosa"!
The 1976 ammonia truck disaster:
In 1976 a truck of ammonia gas ruptured on a freeway interchange in Houston. The scene was akin to early World War I gas warfare. The Houston Post newspaper office building was about a half mile from the spill. The ammonia cloud rolled over and past the building in minutes but quick-witted building engineers shut down the air circulation system so no one inside was hurt. The greenery around the building and area was scorched brown by the passing heavier-than-air ammonia cloud:
"How A Deadly Cloud In Houston Decades Ago Led To ‘Shelter-In-Place’ (good pic of the initial truck explosion):"
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/04/25/...
Film footage of the scene and victims - moderately gory:
"The worst accident in Houston history: The 1976 ammonia truck disaster":
Things would be different near coasts where sediment is washing in.
You're better off building things closer to where they are needed rather than relying on shipping for cheap consumer goods. Bunker fuel oil, LNG, ammonia, it's all putting the cart before the horse.
And that gas turbine can also run on many other fuels - LPG, LNG, gasoline, diesel, etc.
My guess is this ship will do 1 run on ammonia for the press release, and then will run on LPG for the rest of its life for economic reasons. The original fuel cell design is far more picky about fuel sources and therefore wouldn't have had that possibility.
Greenhouse gas solution? no.
Ammonia will (and does) leak into the environment where it becomes a part of the natural nitrogen cycle. The end result of the natural nitrogen cycle is N2O (aka laughing gas) which is a greenhouse gas 250-350x more powerful than CO2.
Running the world on ammonia, even if logistically possible, will likely accelerate climate change, not slow it.
https://www.cma-cgm.com/news/5012/maiden-call-of-cma-cgm-iro...
Ammonia too complicated?
https://zero.fortescue.com/en/case-studies/green-pioneer
I dont think so.
As for doing it with electricity; that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas. If you want to reduce carbon emissions, turn your attention to other industries. Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
Sure but they were working with the constraints of the times. Renewable electricity generation doesn’t have the same level of maturity and it’s already surpassing fossil options with tons of room to scale.
> that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas.
We have an effectively infinite supply of electricity but a finite supply of natural gas. The trends are clear. Electricity is going to continue to get cheaper essentially forever and fossil fuels will continue to become more scarce and thus expensive until it's not economical to use them.
You just have to draw the timeline long enough and electricity becomes the cheaper option for ammonium production and renewable electricity becomes the cheapest electricity source.
> Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
Ammonia prices don’t have to go up if demand goes up. Price increases are only one possible outcome of an increase in demand. The other option is an increase in supply. With sufficiently cheap electricity everything becomes affordable. When we deplete natural gas supplies ammonia will get more expensive.
Food will also cost a lot more when farmland gets too hot to be productive.
The last thing anyone should be doing is betting the food supply on scarce fossil fuel sources.
It is a shame petroleum-based fuels are so damn convenient.
Still read this one though probably, seems interesting.
Ammonia is also lighter than air. When it is first released it is typically cold, so it sticks around until it warms up. Eventually it will float up into the atmosphere.
One disadvantage is its lower energy density, you need to store twice as much of it as bunker oil.
One advantage that I can see for Ammonia is that the ingredients it is composed of are readily available from the environment. Also, the fuel may be upgraded by cracking it into hydrogen and nitrogen using waste heat from the engine. Hydrogen gives a bigger pop in the cylinder, Ammonia doesn't burn as easily.
One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
That’s a red herring. Getting hydrogen and nitrogen out of their naturally occurring forms (bonded to other things or to themselves) and turning it into ammonia is very energetically intensive.
> One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
I can think of many such scenarios if money is no object.
But as you say, they currently run on bunker fuel which is essentially garbage. You have to pay people to take that of your hands. It is being ridiculous to think that they would switch, on their own dime, to burning ammonia. And green ammonia at that which is orders of magnitude more expensive.
Who is willing to pay the resulting shipping costs?
Synthesizing hydrocarbon analogues of fossil fuels (petrol, kerosene, diesel, bunker fuel[1]) is possible and has been theoretically demonstrated.[2] The problem is that it's not economically feasible, in large part due to structural market failures in the price of petroleum.[3]
Physical abundance of the constituent elements has little to do with production costs of the resultant fuel.
And hydrocarbons are vastly preferable to ammonia as fuels for all kinds of reasons: energy density, noncorrosive nature,[4] non-toxicity, convenience in general handling and storage, etc., etc., etc. So long as you're synthesizing fuels, make it the good stuff, not poison.
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Notes:
1. That last is probably a non-starter. It's harder to synthesize longer-chain hydrocarbons, so far as I'm aware, and the primary driver of bunker oil for marine propulsion is that it's an otherwise low-value surplus from conventional petroleum production, even a large fraction of much extraction, e.g., Venezuela's very tarry petroleum,and Canada's tar sands. Lighter fractions would be easier to synthesize and more attractive as fuels.
2. For about 60 years, including research at Brookhaven National Labs, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab, as well as with a Google moonshot project. A list of sources is here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970111>
3. A deep topic, but given the fact that we're extracting petroleum at roughly 1 million times its rate of formation, and in a highly unsustainable fashion, there's a fair argument that petroleum ought to be priced about 1 million times its current market price. The economics of nonrenewable resource extraction is grossly irrational and divorced from physical and geological realities. On rates of formation, Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf> (PDF). Previous discussions: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
4. Indeed hydrocarbons are routinely used as lubricants and protectives for metals and other materials.
Like anything else, risks can be mitigated.
The main concern for me is at dockside where there are lots of people nearby. Ideally I think they'd "lock down" and depressurise the ammonia system (except the storage tank) when close to port, and only bring it online when out at sea and far from population.
Also the refuelling process seems a bit risky. But these things are already quite routine; ammonia is already a large-volume industrial commodity with well-developed controls.
And many options exists that are less inherently dangerous than ammonia. Like methanol. At least it’s a liquid and not nearly as bad.
But ammonia is chosen as a predatory delay strategy. They build the engines to be dual fuel (ammonia and methane) and then feign surprise when they have to run it on methane since the ammonia supply chain “isn’t ready yet” and the prices “need to come down a bit”.
1. https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
Ammonia is being pushed as a predatory delay strategy. The article hints at this when it talks about the engines being dual-fuel (ammonia and methane). Given the massive price difference between green ammonia and methane it doesn’t take a genius to know what their next message will be “our ships are ammonia ready, we will run them on methane until the ammonia supply chains are ready then we’ll transition to it”. Expect they have no intention of transitioning.
The ships are “ammonia ready” in the same way my driveway is Ferrari ready. All that’s missing is a lot of other people’s money.
In the end, gas leaks are always bad. But at least you can easily smell an ammonia leak.
I'm not sure how likely fire is in case of a leak.
IIRC, they add a very nasty smelling chemical to LNG so that leaks are evident before they get explosive. In the case of ammonia, the additive is not really needed, and the toxicity being much higher makes me think that, by the time you realize you are breathing ammonia, it's already too late.
Would be interesting to know if its commonly added to industrial LNG. Because we burn a lot of that - even if you only add a few ppm thiol to natural gas, that's a whole lot of sulfur being burnt...
Hopefully in a deserted rock in the middle of nowhere.
https://blog.ballard.com/marine/worlds-first-liquid-powered-...
Beavers? Lets say you want to steer the population away form reasonable environmental goals like high speed rail or public transport (which has to cost something to keep bums out). You then pick some mad-sob with a insane initiative like "rewild skunks in the inner city parks" and pump that up with donated millions. Result, that mad- as a hatter, propagates his "initiative", riles up the masses and his co-goals - which may include high-speed rail get discredited.