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The foul-smelling fuel that could power big ships
- antihero 6y agoCan they use it in the same engines? AFAIK ships that have Diesel engines use regulation Diesel near ports and then cheap as fuck, nasty Diesel out in the open ocean to save costs.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTLDR Ammonia, generated with renewables (hydrogen from electrolysis and nitrogen extracted from atmospheric air combined with the Haber Bosch process).
- Metacelsus 6y agoSo it's basically just a way to store hydrogen as ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process isn't very energy efficient, though.
- elcritch 6y agoAre there more direct methods? It seems like ammonia would be much easier to transport than hydrogen, but at the cost of another loss of efficiency is a big hit. Though it might be cheaper for cargo ship operators who have a lot of capital investment. Looks like ammonia is mostly produced from hydrogen stripped from natural gas: https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24 https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
- toomuchtodo 6y agoDoesn’t have to be efficient with renewables that otherwise would’ve been curtailed (throwing away that clean energy). Still more energy dense than batteries (for marine vessel use).
- csours 6y agoI agree, but I'm curious to see how it will shake out in real life.
- ncmncm 6y agoHaber-Bosch is the low-tech method you use when you only have heat. With high-grade electric power, you can use efficient catalysis. The Chinese are doing a great deal of good work developing catalysts.
- 08-15 6y agoJust a way of storing hydrogen, as if that was a solved problem. Hydrogen liquefaction is less than 50% energy efficient. Haber-Bosch compares favorably to that.
- rbanffy 6y agoFoul-smelling as in "if you breathe it, you die".
- kccqzy 6y agoEh, depends on the concentration. I'm pretty sure your introductory chemistry teacher asked you to smell a dilute solution of it. And it's a common reagent in introductory chemistry classes so you've had plenty of chances of smelling it.
- Someone 6y agoYou can also buy ammonia solution in about every grocery or supermarket. It also is used as a stimulant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelling_salts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelling_salts: “They are also used as a form of stimulant in athletic competitions (such as powerlifting, strong man and ice hockey) to "wake up" competitors to perform better. In 2005, Michael Strahan estimated that 70–80% of National Football League players were using smelling salts as stimulants.”
- csours 6y agoAt the concentration needed to use as fuel, and in the confined machinery space of a ship, it could certainly be deadly.
- DaniFong 6y agoRight??
- troymc 6y agoI grew up on a farm in Canada and we would breathe ammonia when testing the ammonia nozzles on our air seeder. It didn't smell great, but we didn't die.
- userbinator 6y agoThe dose makes the poison. Everyone who has encountered the smell of urine has inhaled some ammonia fumes too.
- gruez 6y agoIsn't the current fuel (bunker fuel) already pretty foul?
- ncmncm 6y agoUnspeakably. And yet, at that, way better than it once was.
- Confiks 6y agoAnother option which I don't see mentioned often is using formic acid to solve the volumetric capacity problem of storing hydrogen. Compared to ammonia and methanol, formic acid is less energy dense, but due to recent advances in catalysts it has the potential for simpler and smaller systems in less demanding circumstances (heat, pressure) [1]. The only party I know of that is trying to bring this to market is Dens [2], formed out of a student group at the University of Eindhoven [3]. Their website is a bit high on the rhetoric (including trying to coin "hydrozine"), and their mockups looks like, well, mockups, but there are real technology advances behind this, for example their trial with a city bus [4] (Dutch). [1] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536423-002 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536423-002 [2] https://dens.one/products/ https://dens.one/products/ [3] https://teamfast.nl/technology/ https://teamfast.nl/technology/ [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200808210727/https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/deze-stadsbus-in-eindhoven-rijdt-nu-op-mierenzuur-en-dat-is-behoorlijk-revolutionair~bb027b8b/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200808210727/https://www.volks...
- ivanbakel 6y agoI appreciate that your last link isn't useful to most of the HN population - but it's also paywalled.
- Confiks 6y agoThanks for noticing. Fixed.
- jtvjan 6y agoI translated [4], hope it helps: https://jtvjan.nl/documents/mierenzuur.md https://jtvjan.nl/documents/mierenzuur.md
- koeng 6y agoFormate can also be used directly for biomass generation, meaning you can feed it to a vat of cells instead of glucose or sunlight. If you’re willing to eat cells, kinda solves a lot of food generation issues.
- paul_f 6y agoWon't burning Ammonia create NOx emissions? It is not CO2, but NOx is also quite undesirable?
- Confiks 6y agoYou wouldn't burn the ammonia, but use a process to 'crack' ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen gas, for example [1]. No oxygen is involved. Edit: Upon rereading, I found that the article actually states: "There are challenges. Burning ammonia can create polluting nitrous oxides, therefore the exhaust needs cleaning up", which would indicate they're burning it. So either the reporter misunderstood or it's really a non-innovation then. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja5042836 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja5042836
- Hypx 6y agoIt's going to be both: It's not cheap to convert a ship to fuel cell power, so in the short-term a lot of them will just burn ammonia as a fuel. Longer-term, converting ammonia into H2 and N2 will be the more common strategy.
- troymc 6y agoYes, and that was mentioned in the article. I guess you need a catalytic converter or similar before atmospheric release.
- imglorp 6y agoYes, article mentioned needing to manage emissions. Evidently NOx scrubbers are existing tech.
- 08-15 6y agoNot necessarily. Ammonia burns to water and nitrogen, primarily. But the process is complicated, goes through many intermediate compounds and radicals, and won't have time to complete in a piston engine. The exhaust will therefore contain both some nitrogen oxides and some unreacted ammonia. The good news is that catalytic converters to destroy NOx are established technology, and they happen to use ammonia as a reductant. This is definitely doable for ships, probably doable for heavy trucks, and a bit annoying for smaller cars.
- ncmncm 6y agoThe great thing about ammonia is you can make it with just water, air, and electric power, and run the conversion only when you have excess power to burn. The next great thing is that, made under a wind farm, it is directly useful, on the regular farm often found underneath, as both fuel and fertilizer. Excess can be sold to the next farm over. So, no fuel or fertilizer transport costs. The third is that it provides a sink for power generation a long ways away from any power grid termination. So, it opens up huge swaths of territory where windmills would not be built, despite plentiful wind and space.
- oxfeed65261 6y ago“Around 90% of all goods traded globally are transported by sea...Marine transport produces around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.” Sounds like a bargain to me, frankly.
- Dahoon 6y agoNot if the 2% is 90% of transportation emissions (not saying it is, just that the number alone says nothing).
- Zigurd 6y ago2% would make marine fuel about 7% of transport greenhouse gas emissions. BUT marine fuel is insanely dirty. Easily 10X worse than land transport fuels and engines, and with no emissions mitigation. It might be simpler to require cleaner marine fuel, but marine fuel is currently a polluter at a large multiple of its share of greenhouse gas emissions. Also, ammonia is a very good candidate for an economically viable energy storage and transport medium for renewable energy generation. Hydrogen is expensive to store and embrittles metal containers and pipelines.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoWish they had Nordic model.
- jaclaz 6y agoNot so many years ago copies (of technical drawings), so called blueprints (actually whiteprints): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteprint were made from transparent originals using UV lamps on paper that developed through being exposed to ammonia vapours. Any architect/engineer would have (instead of a plotter) one of these machines, with a transparent glass or perspex/lexan pipe with inside one, two or three UV "neon" tubes in which you fed the transparent coupled with the reactive paper, a motor and a large belt would make the paper travel some 270 ° around the UV illuminated pipe, thus impressing the paper. Higher end machines had an internal "developing station" (basically a perforated pipe inside which small quantities (drops) of ammonia were slowly pumped and around which only the UV impressed paper passed), and there was a fan extracting air to a vent pipe leading outside. The earlier and lower end machines had a separate "developing station" consisting in a box (more sort of a large pipe) with a container of ammonia on top and a flap like door on the bottom through which you inserted the UV impressed paper rolled up. There was a small tap to regulate a flow of drops of ammonia from the container into the box/pipe. The first kind of machine, if properly operated, was almost odourless because the ammonia vapours were distributed on the paper and the fan did take out most of what was not absorbed by the paper, the second was a nightmare, the inside of the box/pipe was impregnated with a lot of ammonia (as the copy was rolled and had to be developed everywhere) and everytime you opened the flap (to remove already developed copies or to insert one to be developed) if you didn't hold your breath and/or you weren't very quick you would taste it for good, and anyway often you opened just a little too much the little tap and the copy would be wet from ammonia.