5 ms·

The article mentions 'green ammonia' as a potential fuel source for shipping, and I would imagine that Yara is poised to be a large producer of the fuel. Using

by zengid 5y ago

The article mentions 'green ammonia' as a potential fuel source for shipping, and I would imagine that Yara is poised to be a large producer of the fuel. Using ammonia as a fuel source is something I've never heard of, so reading about it is fascinating: https://cen.acs.org/business/petrochemicals/ammonia-fuel-future/99/i8 https://cen.acs.org/business/petrochemicals/ammonia-fuel-fut...

leoedin 5y ago
It's actually a really interesting fuel (well, energy storage medium) with quite high compatibility with our current way of life. The best part is that you can synthesise it without carbon - which means the feedstocks are only really water, air and electricity. The downsides are toxicity (but this is probably manageable) and poor round trip efficiency. If we ever end up with excess energy (eg solar power in summer) then synthesising ammonia could be a good means of long term energy storage with very little capital investment required.
- audunw 5y ago
  I gotta imagine that the low efficiency can be managed by using batteries whenever possible. There’s already a hybrid ferry in Norway that uses batteries for the first and last part of the trip to avoid emissions near land. Would be perfect if it used ammonia for the middle part of the trip.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    There are lots more than that. See https://energiogklima.no/elektriske-bilferger-i-norge/ https://energiogklima.no/elektriske-bilferger-i-norge/ 42 fully or partially electric ferries now, 15 more by the end of the year.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Currently synthesising ammonia requires hydrogen and that comes from fossil fuels (the main process of extracting that hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas and, I think, the main carbon emitter from the current ammonia process). Green ammonia would be made with green hydrogen which is made from water with electrolysis with renewable energy. These ideas make it more obvious that any viable solutions to climate change will require a massive increase in energy production. Solar and wind require massive scale and nuclear seems to currently be very hard to set up and unjustifiable if unit costs of electricity go down.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  > Solar and wind require massive scale In what way? None of land area requirements, panel production, battery production nor turbine production seem particularly difficult in the modern economy in relation to the scale of the problem.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    You need a lot of “stuff” (land, raw materials, labour, etc) for your energy. I’m not sure how true this really is in comparison to e.g. fossil fuel or nuclear power, but I get the sense that a lot of space and resources are required for a very large power output whereas the energy density in land is much lower for solar and wind (though construction is likely cheaper). David MacKay had a great graph showing the power per land density of various energy sources and in the U.K. assuming that we could switch things like heating and transportation to electricity without loss of efficiency, we would need to roughly coat the country in solar or wind to match current energy consumption. Though the numbers may have changed since, they probably haven’t changed by the 2 orders of magnitude or so that would likely be required for the prospect of just solar/wind to be palatable.
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      To completely power the US with solar power would take several hundred square miles. In a country with three and a half million of them. We dedicate a lot more land just in parking lots.
    - leoedin 5y ago
      David MacKay's book is great, but it was written in 2009. Just re-reading the part about solar panels from the perspective of 2021 is quite eye-opening. He makes assumptions like 10% efficient panels (panels today are probably 18-22% efficient) and says that the required solar power would be "100 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world". The amount of energy he's talking about - around 1200 TWh - is now only 1.4 times all the photovoltaics in the world. In fact, last year the UK alone generated 11.77 TWh - which is about what the entire world generated in 2009 when the book was written. His book also doesn't really take into account efficiency savings. For example, his "Cars" section calculates 40kWh/day/person - or 0.8 kWh/km (1.25 km/kWh). An average electric car today might get 3 miles/kWh (4.8km/kWh) - as there's no highly inefficient internal combustion engine involved. Likewise his heating section doesn't take into account energy saving measures and it doesn't account for heating from heat pumps. It's also exceedingly unlikely that we'd use solar power in the UK to create fuels for aircraft or ships. So while David does make a good point (I think the book, overall, is excellent and I recommend it frequently), it also overstates significantly the energy required from renewables in the UK.
sudhirj 5y ago
It turns out a better energy storage system than hydrogen, actually. Think it has better energy density, easier to liquefy, and if you’re making hydrogen it seems to be a relatively easy step to add nitrogen (easily available everywhere as well). And you can burn ammonia in engines that are closer in design to their gasoline counterparts, as opposed to completely new hydrogen fuel cells. And the density is high enough for it to be a serious contender for aircraft fuel. So yeah, ammonia, assuming it’s made from green hydrogen (renewable energy) as opposed to blue hydrogen (from natural gas or oil with hand wavy carbon capture), has a lot of interesting prospects.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  You can burn hydrogen in ICE engines as well. In the 2000's both BMW and Mazda did limited series developments of cars that can be switched between burning gasoline and hydrogen - the BMW 750 with the M73 V12, and the Mazda RX-8 with the dual rotor Renesis Wankel engine. Currently batteries (and possibly fuel cells) seem to be winning out for cars, but burning hydrogen in large piston engines seems to be a promising option for ships. I've heard Yanmar is currently developing a large slow two-stroke marine engine burning hydrogen, probably in the 5 MW range.
boomlinde 5y ago
I wonder what they would do about nitrogen oxides from ammonia combustion. The article doesn't mention this.
- rini17 5y ago
  This problem solves itself as ammonia catalyzes nitrogen oxides back to nitrogen. It is widely used (named AdBlue) in diesel engines exhaust.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I had never heard of it either. Thank you! But I found lots links about it and it looks like some people are building container ships that run on it, Daewoo in South Korea being one of them. Very, very cool. https://container-news.com/ammonia-powered-mega-boxship-five-years-away/ https://container-news.com/ammonia-powered-mega-boxship-five... https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-ammonia-could-decarbonise-shipping/4014674.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-ammonia-could-de... Finding out about things like this gives me hope and confirms my belief that human ingenuity will allow us to deal with climate change and other huge problems that humankind will have to deal with.
- spurgu 5y ago
  Sweet summer child.

by zengid 5y ago

leoedin 5y ago

It's actually a really interesting fuel (well, energy storage medium) with quite high compatibility with our current way of life. The best part is that you can synthesise it without carbon - which means the feedstocks are only really water, air and electricity. The downsides are toxicity (but this is probably manageable) and poor round trip efficiency. If we ever end up with excess energy (eg solar power in summer) then synthesising ammonia could be a good means of long term energy storage with very little capital investment required.

audunw 5y ago
I gotta imagine that the low efficiency can be managed by using batteries whenever possible. There’s already a hybrid ferry in Norway that uses batteries for the first and last part of the trip to avoid emissions near land. Would be perfect if it used ammonia for the middle part of the trip.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  There are lots more than that. See https://energiogklima.no/elektriske-bilferger-i-norge/ https://energiogklima.no/elektriske-bilferger-i-norge/ 42 fully or partially electric ferries now, 15 more by the end of the year.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Currently synthesising ammonia requires hydrogen and that comes from fossil fuels (the main process of extracting that hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas and, I think, the main carbon emitter from the current ammonia process). Green ammonia would be made with green hydrogen which is made from water with electrolysis with renewable energy. These ideas make it more obvious that any viable solutions to climate change will require a massive increase in energy production. Solar and wind require massive scale and nuclear seems to currently be very hard to set up and unjustifiable if unit costs of electricity go down.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
> Solar and wind require massive scale In what way? None of land area requirements, panel production, battery production nor turbine production seem particularly difficult in the modern economy in relation to the scale of the problem.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  You need a lot of “stuff” (land, raw materials, labour, etc) for your energy. I’m not sure how true this really is in comparison to e.g. fossil fuel or nuclear power, but I get the sense that a lot of space and resources are required for a very large power output whereas the energy density in land is much lower for solar and wind (though construction is likely cheaper). David MacKay had a great graph showing the power per land density of various energy sources and in the U.K. assuming that we could switch things like heating and transportation to electricity without loss of efficiency, we would need to roughly coat the country in solar or wind to match current energy consumption. Though the numbers may have changed since, they probably haven’t changed by the 2 orders of magnitude or so that would likely be required for the prospect of just solar/wind to be palatable.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    To completely power the US with solar power would take several hundred square miles. In a country with three and a half million of them. We dedicate a lot more land just in parking lots.
  - leoedin 5y ago
    David MacKay's book is great, but it was written in 2009. Just re-reading the part about solar panels from the perspective of 2021 is quite eye-opening. He makes assumptions like 10% efficient panels (panels today are probably 18-22% efficient) and says that the required solar power would be "100 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world". The amount of energy he's talking about - around 1200 TWh - is now only 1.4 times all the photovoltaics in the world. In fact, last year the UK alone generated 11.77 TWh - which is about what the entire world generated in 2009 when the book was written. His book also doesn't really take into account efficiency savings. For example, his "Cars" section calculates 40kWh/day/person - or 0.8 kWh/km (1.25 km/kWh). An average electric car today might get 3 miles/kWh (4.8km/kWh) - as there's no highly inefficient internal combustion engine involved. Likewise his heating section doesn't take into account energy saving measures and it doesn't account for heating from heat pumps. It's also exceedingly unlikely that we'd use solar power in the UK to create fuels for aircraft or ships. So while David does make a good point (I think the book, overall, is excellent and I recommend it frequently), it also overstates significantly the energy required from renewables in the UK.

sudhirj 5y ago

It turns out a better energy storage system than hydrogen, actually. Think it has better energy density, easier to liquefy, and if you’re making hydrogen it seems to be a relatively easy step to add nitrogen (easily available everywhere as well). And you can burn ammonia in engines that are closer in design to their gasoline counterparts, as opposed to completely new hydrogen fuel cells. And the density is high enough for it to be a serious contender for aircraft fuel. So yeah, ammonia, assuming it’s made from green hydrogen (renewable energy) as opposed to blue hydrogen (from natural gas or oil with hand wavy carbon capture), has a lot of interesting prospects.

semi-extrinsic 5y ago
You can burn hydrogen in ICE engines as well. In the 2000's both BMW and Mazda did limited series developments of cars that can be switched between burning gasoline and hydrogen - the BMW 750 with the M73 V12, and the Mazda RX-8 with the dual rotor Renesis Wankel engine. Currently batteries (and possibly fuel cells) seem to be winning out for cars, but burning hydrogen in large piston engines seems to be a promising option for ships. I've heard Yanmar is currently developing a large slow two-stroke marine engine burning hydrogen, probably in the 5 MW range.

boomlinde 5y ago

I wonder what they would do about nitrogen oxides from ammonia combustion. The article doesn't mention this.

rini17 5y ago
This problem solves itself as ammonia catalyzes nitrogen oxides back to nitrogen. It is widely used (named AdBlue) in diesel engines exhaust.

SyzygistSix 5y ago

I had never heard of it either. Thank you! But I found lots links about it and it looks like some people are building container ships that run on it, Daewoo in South Korea being one of them. Very, very cool. https://container-news.com/ammonia-powered-mega-boxship-five-years-away/ https://container-news.com/ammonia-powered-mega-boxship-five... https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-ammonia-could-decarbonise-shipping/4014674.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-ammonia-could-de... Finding out about things like this gives me hope and confirms my belief that human ingenuity will allow us to deal with climate change and other huge problems that humankind will have to deal with.

spurgu 5y ago
Sweet summer child.