8 ms·

Ammonia is probably the most scalable medium for energy storage. It doesn't need to be pressurized, and doesn't leak as easily as hydrogen does. You can also

• pictureofabear 3y ago
  You can also turn it into a bomb. That would be neat.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    As opposed to gasoline, hydrogen, or methane?
    • pictureofabear 3y ago
      Yes, those are quite flammable too.
      • louthy 3y ago
        They’re also all inflammable
      • red-iron-pine 3y ago
        paper is flammable. highly refined flour is flammable. gas is combustible aka it explodes.
    • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      methane/hydrogen/kinda gasoline at least combust into relatively benign substances, what happens when ammonia burns?
      • actionfromafar 3y ago
        The larger problem is when it doesn’t burn. Ammonia is nasty.
      • euroderf 3y ago
        Nitrogen compounds, plus a bit of leftover ammonia. All in need of cleaning up.
• mhandley 3y ago
  The Royal Society produced quite a good policy brief on green ammonia a couple of years back. Does sound very promising for a number of industries. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammonia/green-ammonia-policy-briefing.pdf https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammon...
  • rnk 3y ago
    The problem is there's no practical green hydrogen today. It comes from basically boiling/splitting water or extracted from natural gas or other fossil fuels. And the energy you could use to make the hydrogen could more efficiently just be used as electricity and stored in an ev battery. When/if we figure out how to efficiently separate hydrogen from water we can come back to it.
    • defrost 3y ago
      That's mighty big of you to step up and make these collective decisions for us all regarding hydrogen. It's a pity break away billionaires with heavy industry backgrounds haven't heeded your sage advice and are pressing ahead regardless. * https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power * https://norwegianhydrogen.com/ https://norwegianhydrogen.com/ * https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/green-ammonia-at-gibson-island https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/gree...
      • rnk 3y ago
        I'm not making decisions for society. I'm reporting the current reality. Consider looking at the disastrous situation in California for people with hydrogen powered cars. Typical discussion is at https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/comments/17md2gr/called_toyota_about_a_buyback/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/comments/17md2gr/called_toyot... I'm all in favor of alternatives for gasoline. We just need some that don't perpetuate carbon fuel use. The mirai folks end up paying way more for hydrogen than gas, way way more in that subreddit, run into unavailability of fuel, the stations break and aren't repaired. I was quite surprised when I came upon the discussions there. When or if we can create h fuel without using lots of fossil fuel and energy it would be great. Today it's primarily companies and govts perpetuating their industrial bases in Japan that seem to be pushing hydrogen.
• candiddevmike 3y ago
  Will every house need a windsock? (As required by industrial use of anhydrous ammonia). Maybe an ammonia leak detector like a carbon monoxide alarm?
  • anon84873628 3y ago
    That's what I'm wondering -- how significant are its irritant properties? When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances. Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses. But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.
    • blacksqr 3y ago
      Ammonia was used in early home refrigerators, and people died in their sleep from exposure to leaked refrigerant with distressing frequency. There was a race to design leak-proof refrigerators; Einstein was issued a patent. Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
      • kragen 3y ago
        i think it was sulfur dioxide that was the culprit in those deaths, and the einstein-szilard refrigerator was also an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, though it didn't have leak-prone moving seals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade) freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely
        • batushka3 3y ago
• Tade0 3y ago
  When it does leak, it forms an aerosol that travels low to the ground and that is pretty deadly.
  • argiopetech 3y ago
    "Pretty deadly" in the "2 good breaths and you're unconscious in it till you die" sense.
    • mapt 3y ago
      Just as with chlorine gas: Luckily, we're incredibly sensitive to the odor of even safe-ish trace quantities of the toxin, so the actual risk is dramatically mitigated in any environment where there's air mixing. Smell it, back away until you can't smell it, and you're a survivor. Just don't, say, descend an elevator shaft into an un-ventilated sub-basement with ammonia storage. The amount of inconsequentially small ammonia leaks which nevertheless the owner insists on a service technician fixing immediately because of the alarming odor, actually form most of the case against ammonia as a refrigerant, which it's otherwise well-suited to.
    • euroderf 3y ago
      Nose-detectable at 1 ppm. Dangerous at (IIRC) 10 or 20 ppm.
  • theluketaylor 3y ago
    Yeah, it can be nasty. Ammonia is a very common refrigerant for ice rinks here in Canada. Operators die every so often across the country due to undetected leaks. Ammonia seems like a grid scale storage solution, not something we can distribute across people’s homes. Home storage we should start focused on thermal batteries since it’s highly proven technology that needs almost zero maintenance.
  • marcosdumay 3y ago
    And when burned it produces high amounts of pollutants that are about as deadly. (Fixable with the application of enough catalizers, that are made of material that is more expensive than gold.) Besides, differently from what the GP claims, it does need to be pressurized. It can indeed be used as a fertilizer, requiring careful application because if it's over-applied it's pretty deadly to any plant, and if applied incorrectly it can leak from the soil and become pretty deadly to anything above it. But some people really do love the stuff and believe it's a solution to everything.
• mike_d 3y ago
  It will never happen because if you can get large amounts of anhydrous ammonia or something you can convert into it you can make large amounts of meth.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  Not happening, way too many safety concerns for this to be viable tech. What we need is better batteries, not Ammonia or Hydrogen, those are essentially obsolete given present day tech, another billion or two into battery research and we should see the end of Lithium Ion (we're pretty much there already but for a penalty in density, but that's not a limitation for stationary storage systems) cost wise.
• euroderf 3y ago
  In Scandinavia you have summers with vast amounts of uncaptured sunlight. I wonder if ammonia is the way to capture and use it.