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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. Th
by 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?
- throwaway2048 5y agoNOx are industrially useful and profitable to scrub out at large scale (and relatively easy too, just pass exhaust gasses through water) because it generates nitric acid, which is an extremely useful and relatively expensive chemical that is the basis for vast amounts of industrial processes. So the use of ammonia in power plants is relatively unproblematic, in fact I would not be surprised if tuning ammonia based power plants to produce the most amount of NOx possible was the most economic choice. As a bonus, nitric acid can be directly used to create fertilizers, which is one of the central usages of the Haber–Bosch process.
- ephbit 5y agoNot sure, whether there's a technically proven ammonia fuel cell yet. For some applications it could enable the use ammonia to generate electricity _without_ NOx emissions.
- ncmncm 5y agoYou minimize NOx production just by running a little bit rich. NOx output from natural gas plants is today kept down by injecting ammonia.