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Will Japan run on ammonia? Major chemical firms want to build the infrastructure

77 points by Trouble_007 5y ago

otherotherchris 5y ago
Most diesel and natural gas reciprocating engines can be switched to ammonia with only changes to fuel pumps and injectors. It's a great easily transported bridge fuel that can replace LNG export until the anti-nukes pull their heads out of their arses.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The only downside is that you're dealing with ammonia... I'm dubious simply because ammonia is so nasty to human life. Spills are far worse than diesel or even gasoline spills.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  You misspelled "replacement of the nearly the entire fuel system." "Easily transported"? Are you nuts? It has far less chemical compatibility than LNG and is wildly more dangerous to people. It gets even worse if the ammonia has any impurities. Ammonia is highly corrosive to zinc, brass, and copper. Copper, for example, is often used as crush washers in high pressure banjo bolt fittings used in oil and fuel lines in automotive applications. It's wildly incompatible with several elastomers (ie fuel lines and seals) and plastics (fuel tanks, sensors, tubing, etc.) If there are impurities in the ammonia, it starts eating the shit out of steel, too. I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work. Then there's the small problem of what happens when any unburned ammonia makes it past the rings into the crankcase....so the entire evap system now has to have ammonia-compatible parts...and since the evap system vents into the intake system, which is often made with lots of plastic, now you've got to replace the intake manifold. And since the oil is going to get contaminated with ammonia, the entire oil system has to have ammonia-compatible parts, too. In modern direct injection vehicles (diesel or gasoline) you're likely at a huge number of components that would likely need to see ammonia-compatible equivalents developed, manufactured, tested, and then installed on the vehicle. The high pressure pump on most passenger vehicles is driven off a cam and tightly integrated into the engine, for example. It's not just a matter of "swap out the fuel pump." Fuel tanks in passenger vehicles are often plastic and not trivial to remove, at all. Oh, and: renewable energy sources are significantly cheaper than nuclear, which is why wind and solar are replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1. You seem a bit outside your lane.
  - solstice 5y ago
    Really interesting. Could you post some sources?
  - otherotherchris 5y ago
    >"Easily transported"? Are you nuts? It has far less chemical compatibility than LNG and is wildly more dangerous to people. It gets even worse if the ammonia has any impurities. Why would there be impurities in ammonia generated from solar powered water electrolysis? Where are they coming from? Why would clean NH3 react strongly with carbon-managanese steel pressure vessel used in LNG transport? >I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work. Is emissions control installed on large marine diesels and stationary generation in Japan? >In modern direct injection vehicles Bzzzt. Wrong. This article is about coal power.
    - rini17 5y ago
      Water is such an impurity. Even diesel system can have problem with water condensing out of air during day/night cycle if no precautions are taken. And diesel won't react with water but ammonia will and very eagerly.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I doubt anybody seriously thinks ammonia will be a fuel in cars. But is practical for ships and peaker plants.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Yeah, ammonia and hydrogen as ways to store energy have significant challenges, they probably aren't worse than if we had to store natural gas. Ammonia is corrosive and needs to be cold, hydrogen needs to be compressed to be energy dense so it needs heavy walls. Both explode. Hydrogen leaks a lot around seals and through them, but welded tanks probably do fine. Natural gas needs to be compressed to be energy dense as a liquid, it explodes, it maybe has some technical advantages but the benefits seem narrow if you're starting from a fresh analysis. We're good enough at it to switch to an ammonia economy, people handle it safely all the time. It's just different risks.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    Natural gas is fairly safe (non-explosive) while compressed. It has to decompress and reach a pretty specific ratio of air-methane mix before it becomes explosive. Hydrogen, by comparison, is explosive across a much wider range of pressures and concentrations. Hydrogen also needs to be stored at far higher pressures than natural gas in order to reach comparable energy density, which makes it more difficult and expensive to handle and transport.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      We will not be using compressed hydrogen, so that doesn't matter. LH2 is kept at atmospheric pressure.
      - Reason077 5y ago
        Liquid hydrogen is also pretty difficult and costly to store and transport, because it requires cryogenic storage. You need to make sure to keep it at −252.87 deg C or it's not going to stay liquid for long! It also takes a lot of energy to compress into a liquid in the first place, making it much less efficient as an energy carrier. Hydrogen used to get used a lot by the space industry (Space Shuttle, etc), but now days the modern rocket industry has been moving to other fuels (kerosene, methane) - largely because of the greatly reduced costs of handling those fuels!
- coderenegade 5y ago
  Methanol is probably better than ammonia as a vector for green hydrogen. It carries less hydrogen per volume, but it's a liquid at room temperature, trivial to transport, and it's generally less dangerous. It's also been used as a fuel for reciprocating engines for more than a century.
  - japanuspus 5y ago
    Methanol and ethanol share the same fundamental problem: they are both carbon-based, and despite global warming atmospheric CO2 is still well below 0.05% of the atmosphere which means it is very resource-consuming to extract it. As long as we still use some fossil fuels, you can capture at power plants, but in the long run it is a dead end. Ammonia, on the other hand, just requires nitrogen which is 70% of the atmosphere and very easy to extract in industrial quantities.
    - coderenegade 5y ago
      You don't need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using direct air capture (I agree that it's a dead end); you use existing sources of waste to intercept the carbon cycle. Sewerage, for example, contains carbon that was pulled from the atmosphere by a plant, or bacteria in the soil. Ditto for municipal solid waste, especially wood products and paper. If you need additional sources, you can grow fast-growing plants (seaweed is preferable, since it doesn't rely on good land) to pull carbon out. When you make methanol, processes like gasification and pyrolysis leave you with excess carbon in the form of carbon black, or ash. If you sequester this before it oxidizes, fuel production becomes carbon negative. Methanol is better than ethanol because a) you can't drink it, b) the single carbon molecule means it burns cleaner, c) you get more fuel for the same initial amount of carbon, and d) it doesn't compete with food production for arable land.
- zardo 5y ago
  And the emission control system.
reactspa 5y ago
Can anyone please enlighten me on: Why isn't more being done to build out infrastructure related to Green Hydrogen? It seems it just needs Water + Solar Energy. One would think it would be the top priority worldwide.
- bifrost 5y ago
  Because liquified hydrogen requires more containment than gasoline and you need really clean water to make reasonable hydrogen. AFAIK Nuclear is a lot better for this than PV anyways. I'm in the "PV is greenwashing" camp, I worked for Solyndra, that stuff was d i r t y.
  - alasarmas 5y ago
    What did you do at Solyndra? I didn’t notice it listed on the resumé in your profile.
    - bifrost 5y ago
      I was a subcontractor for a larger company.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Why are you generalizing relatively uncommon thin film solar panels to all solar panel types? I swear this is extremely common. People just say look these panels are bad, and nobody mentions that they are like 10% of the market at best.
    - bifrost 5y ago
      Because they literally are all that bad.
- shadowofneptune 5y ago
  It's not a very good form of energy storage or transport. It's not dense either as a gas or as a liquid, so it'd be difficult to use in all the places gasoline, propane, etc. are used now. It also burns very hot in a combustion engine and causes nitrogen dioxide pollution in the process. It's a solution, sure, but not a great one.
bifrost 5y ago
Unpaywalled -> https://archive.ph/arDQf https://archive.ph/arDQf This seems pretty cool. I'm not super familiar with the technology but from what I took out of the article it won't be a straightforward replacement for a lot of solutions. That said, seems neat, I'd be curious to try.
photochemsyn 5y ago
This article seems rather confused at best. Take this: > "So-called clean ammonia comes in two main varieties: green, produced with hydrogen that is created by splitting water with renewable electricity; and blue, made with traditional hydrogen from which the by-product CO2 is captured and stored underground." Underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion has been over-hyped for decades and never convincingly demonstrated. It still appears that the energy cost of collecting, piping and injecting all the CO2 from a fossil fuel combustion or hydrogen reformation process exceeds the total amoung of energy that the process generates. That means all the power produced by the fossil fuel power plant would be devoted to capturing, transporting and injecting the resulting carbon dioxide - a futile cycle leaving no energy available for any other use. Additionally, you have to ensure that the combustion of ammonia generates N2, not NOx (nasty air pollutants). The article doesn't seem to mention it, but it is an issue, for example: https://nh3fuelassociation.org/2017/10/01/methods-for-low-nox-combustion-in-ammonia-natural-gas-dual-fuel-gas-turbine-combustor/ https://nh3fuelassociation.org/2017/10/01/methods-for-low-no...
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  I think the real meat of the article is further down, where they discuss replacing the Haber-Bosch process. That's what the article really ought to be about. Haber-Bosch is a huge emitter of CO2, and our industrial agriculture depends on it. That they intend to replace methane with ammonia would be nice, but regardless of that, if this Tsubame process can be made to work, it will have applications beyond that.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    They also talk about ammonia replacing methane in power plants, which is problematic. It’s very difficult to combust ammonia without producing a lot of NOx. That means more smog, acid rain, asthma and other respiratory disorders. We’ve gone to huge efforts to reduce and eliminate NOx emissions from vehicles and power plants, so it would be a major setback to start adding new sources of it. Wouldn’t industrial processes that use H2 directly generally be preferable to having ammonia as an intermediary?
bell-cot 5y ago
At least from the leading paragraphs, it sounds more like "switch from CH4 to NH3 for industrial-scale uses". Vs. actually using NH3 for residential heating and such. Wikipedia says ammonia is lethal above 500ppm...so probably not something that savvy residential users would be eager to switch to. And - if any little glitches in your distribution system let water in, you'll soon have concentrated NH40H in there...dangerous, very corrosive, and likely to do further damage.
- iamthemonster 5y ago
  Yes there won't be any ammonia use in domestic heating. Ammonia travels well by shipping because you can easily refrigerate it to a liquid, but I doubt it's going to become a widely-distributed fuel.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It is also liquid at normal temperatures given minimal compression. It will be practical to replace bunker oil on ships just by replacing tankage and plumbing, and maybe on trains. As toxic as it is, if leaked it goes up fast, so would not blanket a surrounding area like, e.g. methyl isocyanate (cf.). That said, spilling a lot of liquified NH3 could be bad.
- usrn 5y ago
  There's no way people are going to be burning ammonia in personal engines. The pollutants from burning it are far worse than burning hydrocarbons. On industrial scales it might be feasible to scrub the exhaust (and even recycle them, since they're economically valuable) but on small scales I doubt it could be done.
humaniania 5y ago
Isn't ammonia super toxic and lethal to humans?
- frereubu 5y ago
  At the top of the article: "It is a flammable and toxic gas, and in Japan it is regulated by several safety laws."
- weberer 5y ago
  I wouldn't say "super" toxic. Household window cleaner is 30% ammonia.
- kmbfjr 5y ago
  Yes. And a farmer can hitch a pickup to a trailer filled with 1500 gallons of anhydrous ammonia and take ‘er home.
langsoul-com 5y ago
Why don't countries go hard on nuclear instead of playing around with these "sustainable" new fuel types? They all consume a finite resource so it's really pseudo sustainable at best. The only real sustainable energy is sun, wind and hydro.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Ammonia is a practical storage medium, to be produced from excess solar and wind. And, it is useful as fuel for ships, which cannot competitive driven by solar or wind.
- trebligdivad 5y ago
  In Japans case because of Fukashima; whatever your views on Nuclear you can't really blame Japan for being spooked by that.
- pydry 5y ago
  Coz it's absurdly expensive to begin with even if it doesnt blow up at a cost of $800 billion like it did in Japan. Realistically it barely competes as it is with pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind even when taxpayers provide free disaster insurance and lavish subsidies.
ineedasername 5y ago
Assuming it's not 100% efficient, what does ammonia emit when burned?
- gs17 5y ago
  Nitrogen oxides for one thing.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Ah, not so great then. Although a quick trip on the goog indicated it can be burned at lower temps with less noxious output, though it may be a fine line to walk.
    - danans 5y ago
      Also, NOx scrubbers that remove a large percentage of it from combustion gases have existed for a long time because we use them in fossil fuel plants.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        That's good then-- preexisting proven technology.

77 points by Trouble_007 5y ago

Most diesel and natural gas reciprocating engines can be switched to ammonia with only changes to fuel pumps and injectors. It's a great easily transported bridge fuel that can replace LNG export until the anti-nukes pull their heads out of their arses.

jandrese 5y ago
The only downside is that you're dealing with ammonia... I'm dubious simply because ammonia is so nasty to human life. Spills are far worse than diesel or even gasoline spills.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
You misspelled "replacement of the nearly the entire fuel system." "Easily transported"? Are you nuts? It has far less chemical compatibility than LNG and is wildly more dangerous to people. It gets even worse if the ammonia has any impurities. Ammonia is highly corrosive to zinc, brass, and copper. Copper, for example, is often used as crush washers in high pressure banjo bolt fittings used in oil and fuel lines in automotive applications. It's wildly incompatible with several elastomers (ie fuel lines and seals) and plastics (fuel tanks, sensors, tubing, etc.) If there are impurities in the ammonia, it starts eating the shit out of steel, too. I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work. Then there's the small problem of what happens when any unburned ammonia makes it past the rings into the crankcase....so the entire evap system now has to have ammonia-compatible parts...and since the evap system vents into the intake system, which is often made with lots of plastic, now you've got to replace the intake manifold. And since the oil is going to get contaminated with ammonia, the entire oil system has to have ammonia-compatible parts, too. In modern direct injection vehicles (diesel or gasoline) you're likely at a huge number of components that would likely need to see ammonia-compatible equivalents developed, manufactured, tested, and then installed on the vehicle. The high pressure pump on most passenger vehicles is driven off a cam and tightly integrated into the engine, for example. It's not just a matter of "swap out the fuel pump." Fuel tanks in passenger vehicles are often plastic and not trivial to remove, at all. Oh, and: renewable energy sources are significantly cheaper than nuclear, which is why wind and solar are replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1. You seem a bit outside your lane.
- solstice 5y ago
  Really interesting. Could you post some sources?
- otherotherchris 5y ago
  >"Easily transported"? Are you nuts? It has far less chemical compatibility than LNG and is wildly more dangerous to people. It gets even worse if the ammonia has any impurities. Why would there be impurities in ammonia generated from solar powered water electrolysis? Where are they coming from? Why would clean NH3 react strongly with carbon-managanese steel pressure vessel used in LNG transport? >I doubt existing emissions control equipment would work. Is emissions control installed on large marine diesels and stationary generation in Japan? >In modern direct injection vehicles Bzzzt. Wrong. This article is about coal power.
  - rini17 5y ago
    Water is such an impurity. Even diesel system can have problem with water condensing out of air during day/night cycle if no precautions are taken. And diesel won't react with water but ammonia will and very eagerly.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I doubt anybody seriously thinks ammonia will be a fuel in cars. But is practical for ships and peaker plants.
neltnerb 5y ago
Yeah, ammonia and hydrogen as ways to store energy have significant challenges, they probably aren't worse than if we had to store natural gas. Ammonia is corrosive and needs to be cold, hydrogen needs to be compressed to be energy dense so it needs heavy walls. Both explode. Hydrogen leaks a lot around seals and through them, but welded tanks probably do fine. Natural gas needs to be compressed to be energy dense as a liquid, it explodes, it maybe has some technical advantages but the benefits seem narrow if you're starting from a fresh analysis. We're good enough at it to switch to an ammonia economy, people handle it safely all the time. It's just different risks.
- Reason077 5y ago
  Natural gas is fairly safe (non-explosive) while compressed. It has to decompress and reach a pretty specific ratio of air-methane mix before it becomes explosive. Hydrogen, by comparison, is explosive across a much wider range of pressures and concentrations. Hydrogen also needs to be stored at far higher pressures than natural gas in order to reach comparable energy density, which makes it more difficult and expensive to handle and transport.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    We will not be using compressed hydrogen, so that doesn't matter. LH2 is kept at atmospheric pressure.
    - Reason077 5y ago
      Liquid hydrogen is also pretty difficult and costly to store and transport, because it requires cryogenic storage. You need to make sure to keep it at −252.87 deg C or it's not going to stay liquid for long! It also takes a lot of energy to compress into a liquid in the first place, making it much less efficient as an energy carrier. Hydrogen used to get used a lot by the space industry (Space Shuttle, etc), but now days the modern rocket industry has been moving to other fuels (kerosene, methane) - largely because of the greatly reduced costs of handling those fuels!
coderenegade 5y ago
Methanol is probably better than ammonia as a vector for green hydrogen. It carries less hydrogen per volume, but it's a liquid at room temperature, trivial to transport, and it's generally less dangerous. It's also been used as a fuel for reciprocating engines for more than a century.
- japanuspus 5y ago
  Methanol and ethanol share the same fundamental problem: they are both carbon-based, and despite global warming atmospheric CO2 is still well below 0.05% of the atmosphere which means it is very resource-consuming to extract it. As long as we still use some fossil fuels, you can capture at power plants, but in the long run it is a dead end. Ammonia, on the other hand, just requires nitrogen which is 70% of the atmosphere and very easy to extract in industrial quantities.
  - coderenegade 5y ago
    You don't need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using direct air capture (I agree that it's a dead end); you use existing sources of waste to intercept the carbon cycle. Sewerage, for example, contains carbon that was pulled from the atmosphere by a plant, or bacteria in the soil. Ditto for municipal solid waste, especially wood products and paper. If you need additional sources, you can grow fast-growing plants (seaweed is preferable, since it doesn't rely on good land) to pull carbon out. When you make methanol, processes like gasification and pyrolysis leave you with excess carbon in the form of carbon black, or ash. If you sequester this before it oxidizes, fuel production becomes carbon negative. Methanol is better than ethanol because a) you can't drink it, b) the single carbon molecule means it burns cleaner, c) you get more fuel for the same initial amount of carbon, and d) it doesn't compete with food production for arable land.
zardo 5y ago
And the emission control system.

reactspa 5y ago

Can anyone please enlighten me on: Why isn't more being done to build out infrastructure related to Green Hydrogen? It seems it just needs Water + Solar Energy. One would think it would be the top priority worldwide.

bifrost 5y ago
Because liquified hydrogen requires more containment than gasoline and you need really clean water to make reasonable hydrogen. AFAIK Nuclear is a lot better for this than PV anyways. I'm in the "PV is greenwashing" camp, I worked for Solyndra, that stuff was d i r t y.
- alasarmas 5y ago
  What did you do at Solyndra? I didn’t notice it listed on the resumé in your profile.
  - bifrost 5y ago
    I was a subcontractor for a larger company.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Why are you generalizing relatively uncommon thin film solar panels to all solar panel types? I swear this is extremely common. People just say look these panels are bad, and nobody mentions that they are like 10% of the market at best.
  - bifrost 5y ago
    Because they literally are all that bad.
shadowofneptune 5y ago
It's not a very good form of energy storage or transport. It's not dense either as a gas or as a liquid, so it'd be difficult to use in all the places gasoline, propane, etc. are used now. It also burns very hot in a combustion engine and causes nitrogen dioxide pollution in the process. It's a solution, sure, but not a great one.

bifrost 5y ago

Unpaywalled -> https://archive.ph/arDQf https://archive.ph/arDQf This seems pretty cool. I'm not super familiar with the technology but from what I took out of the article it won't be a straightforward replacement for a lot of solutions. That said, seems neat, I'd be curious to try.

photochemsyn 5y ago

This article seems rather confused at best. Take this: > "So-called clean ammonia comes in two main varieties: green, produced with hydrogen that is created by splitting water with renewable electricity; and blue, made with traditional hydrogen from which the by-product CO2 is captured and stored underground." Underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion has been over-hyped for decades and never convincingly demonstrated. It still appears that the energy cost of collecting, piping and injecting all the CO2 from a fossil fuel combustion or hydrogen reformation process exceeds the total amoung of energy that the process generates. That means all the power produced by the fossil fuel power plant would be devoted to capturing, transporting and injecting the resulting carbon dioxide - a futile cycle leaving no energy available for any other use. Additionally, you have to ensure that the combustion of ammonia generates N2, not NOx (nasty air pollutants). The article doesn't seem to mention it, but it is an issue, for example: https://nh3fuelassociation.org/2017/10/01/methods-for-low-nox-combustion-in-ammonia-natural-gas-dual-fuel-gas-turbine-combustor/ https://nh3fuelassociation.org/2017/10/01/methods-for-low-no...

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
I think the real meat of the article is further down, where they discuss replacing the Haber-Bosch process. That's what the article really ought to be about. Haber-Bosch is a huge emitter of CO2, and our industrial agriculture depends on it. That they intend to replace methane with ammonia would be nice, but regardless of that, if this Tsubame process can be made to work, it will have applications beyond that.
- Reason077 5y ago
  They also talk about ammonia replacing methane in power plants, which is problematic. It’s very difficult to combust ammonia without producing a lot of NOx. That means more smog, acid rain, asthma and other respiratory disorders. We’ve gone to huge efforts to reduce and eliminate NOx emissions from vehicles and power plants, so it would be a major setback to start adding new sources of it. Wouldn’t industrial processes that use H2 directly generally be preferable to having ammonia as an intermediary?

bell-cot 5y ago

At least from the leading paragraphs, it sounds more like "switch from CH4 to NH3 for industrial-scale uses". Vs. actually using NH3 for residential heating and such. Wikipedia says ammonia is lethal above 500ppm...so probably not something that savvy residential users would be eager to switch to. And - if any little glitches in your distribution system let water in, you'll soon have concentrated NH40H in there...dangerous, very corrosive, and likely to do further damage.

iamthemonster 5y ago
Yes there won't be any ammonia use in domestic heating. Ammonia travels well by shipping because you can easily refrigerate it to a liquid, but I doubt it's going to become a widely-distributed fuel.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It is also liquid at normal temperatures given minimal compression. It will be practical to replace bunker oil on ships just by replacing tankage and plumbing, and maybe on trains. As toxic as it is, if leaked it goes up fast, so would not blanket a surrounding area like, e.g. methyl isocyanate (cf.). That said, spilling a lot of liquified NH3 could be bad.
usrn 5y ago
There's no way people are going to be burning ammonia in personal engines. The pollutants from burning it are far worse than burning hydrocarbons. On industrial scales it might be feasible to scrub the exhaust (and even recycle them, since they're economically valuable) but on small scales I doubt it could be done.

humaniania 5y ago

Isn't ammonia super toxic and lethal to humans?

frereubu 5y ago
At the top of the article: "It is a flammable and toxic gas, and in Japan it is regulated by several safety laws."
weberer 5y ago
I wouldn't say "super" toxic. Household window cleaner is 30% ammonia.
kmbfjr 5y ago
Yes. And a farmer can hitch a pickup to a trailer filled with 1500 gallons of anhydrous ammonia and take ‘er home.

langsoul-com 5y ago

Why don't countries go hard on nuclear instead of playing around with these "sustainable" new fuel types? They all consume a finite resource so it's really pseudo sustainable at best. The only real sustainable energy is sun, wind and hydro.

ncmncm 5y ago
Ammonia is a practical storage medium, to be produced from excess solar and wind. And, it is useful as fuel for ships, which cannot competitive driven by solar or wind.
trebligdivad 5y ago
In Japans case because of Fukashima; whatever your views on Nuclear you can't really blame Japan for being spooked by that.
pydry 5y ago
Coz it's absurdly expensive to begin with even if it doesnt blow up at a cost of $800 billion like it did in Japan. Realistically it barely competes as it is with pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind even when taxpayers provide free disaster insurance and lavish subsidies.

ineedasername 5y ago

Assuming it's not 100% efficient, what does ammonia emit when burned?

gs17 5y ago
Nitrogen oxides for one thing.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Ah, not so great then. Although a quick trip on the goog indicated it can be burned at lower temps with less noxious output, though it may be a fine line to walk.
  - danans 5y ago
    Also, NOx scrubbers that remove a large percentage of it from combustion gases have existed for a long time because we use them in fossil fuel plants.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      That's good then-- preexisting proven technology.