I feel my recent post on liquid ammonia actually posed more questions than it answered, and, as I’ve had a few recent conversations with some top people in the field, I want to make sure I shared some of the information I happened across.
First, we need to acknowledge that “ammonia as fuel” may be something of a misnomer. It’s fuel in the same sense hydrogen or a battery is fuel, i.e., it carries energy that we supply, to be released at a time and place of our choosing.
Our interest in the matter, therefore, is not as a replacement for solar, wind, geothermal, and the like, but for things that store and distribute energy, like high-voltage DC, compressed air, batteries, capacitors, etc. And on balance, it’s a fairly elegant solution. My friend Bruce Allen has five criteria that alternative energy solutions must meet: it must be 1) clean, 2) safe, 3) reliable, 4) scaleable, and 5) not produce unwanted side effects. It can be argued that ammonia meets these criteria nicely, thus making it potentially useful for three important needs:
moving large amounts of energy around a large land massstoring large amounts of energy locally, and storing small amounts of energy in portable devices like cars and trucks.
As I posted recently in my Summary of Liquid Ammonia, a bit of research has turned up a great number of top people who have made – and continue to make – impressive contributions to the subject. One, Bill Leighty, filled me in on the promises – and the challenges – of the fuel. In addition to his website, he pointed out the work that continues at Iowa State University which, for each of the past six years, has hosted the Ammonia Fuel Conference — each meeting of which boasted a large number of extremely impressive participants. Past years’ agendas are linked above.
Leighty refers to colleagues John Holbrook and Norm Olson as the “generals” of the ammonia battle, with their Ammonia Fuel Network, and the first skirmish they’re taking on, i.e., the fact that neither the DoE nor the EPA consider ammonia a fuel at all, but rather a dangerous chemical.
Today, almost all ammonia (NH3) is made from methane (CH4) — a process that is happening in great volume at many places around the globe. Note that the extra carbon atom becomes CO2 and is released into the atmosphere — one more reason that corn ethanol is such a catastrophe.
But the quest to make ammonia inexpensively from the hydrogen in water, atmospheric nitrogen, and energy from renewable sources is one that a great number of extremely senior people have embraced. One of these, Matt Simmons, has spoken to me about his project repeatedly, where great progress is being made to improve the efficiencies of these processes – while fighting the legal and political battles at the same time.
I urge readers to check out a few of these sources, and come to their own conclusions regarding liquid ammonia as a potentially key component to the global energy solution.
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