On Wednesday, General Electric’s turbine manufacturing unit agreed with a Japanese firm to develop gas turbines operating on ammonia to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
GE and IHI would work to develop technology that would allow some of GE’s existing gas turbine products to safely burn 100% ammonia by 2030, the companies each said in separate, almost identical statements on Wednesday.”We will focus our efforts on satisfying domestic and overseas demand for large-scale ammonia gas turbines, stimulating further demand for fuel ammonia and expanding the fuel ammonia value chain,” Hiroshi Ide, president of IHI Corp said.
This news caught my eye, as ammonia is a gas that can be toxic and corrosive. Under certain circumstances, ammonia can also ignite.
However, the efforts to make ammonia fuel a reality appear well underway.
Several firms are developing green ammonia, a route to ammonia in which hydrogen derived from water electrolysis powered by alternative energy replaces hydrocarbon-based hydrogen, making ammonia production virtually carbon dioxide–free. They are also investing in carbon capture and storage to minimize the carbon impact of making conventional ammonia, creating what the industry refers to as blue ammonia….A report compiled last August by Haldor Topsoe, an ammonia production technology firm, and other companies noted a number of those qualities. Ammonia has a higher energy density, at 12.7 MJ/L, than even liquid hydrogen, at 8.5 MJ/L. Liquid hydrogen has to be stored at cryogenic conditions of –253 °C, whereas ammonia can be stored at a much less energy-intensive –33 °C. And ammonia, though hazardous to handle, is much less flammable than hydrogen.
Furthermore, thanks to a century of ammonia use in agriculture, a vast ammonia infrastructure already exists. Worldwide, some 180 million metric tons (t) of ammonia is produced annually, and 120 ports are equipped with ammonia terminals.
Interestingly, Amogy Inc., a U.S. clean energy startup backed by a South Korean firm, has successfully conducted a test drive of a semi-truck running on its ammonia-based fuel cell platform.
Amogy tested a modified 2018 Freightliner Cascadia powered by its proprietary fuel cell system that directly turns liquid ammonia into hydrogen while on board, according to press releases by Amogy and SK on Wednesday.The 900-kilowatt-hour truck was tested for several hours on the track at Stony Brook University in New York. The full charging of the fuel cell took about eight minutes….Amogy’s technology enables the on-board cracking of ammonia into hydrogen, which is sent directly into a fuel cell to power the vehicle. Liquid ammonia has an energy density about three times greater than compressed hydrogen, making it cost-effective to store and transport.
Another team is designing ammonia fuel engines for use in marine vessels. They note one of the challenges is dealing with nitrogen oxide combustion products…which are environmentally less friendly than carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.
According to Foldager and Chatterjee, engine optimization and tuning will be paramount to keep in check one of the most harmful remnants of burning ammonia as fuel: nitrous oxide (N2O), which is a more harmful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The current plan is use SCR aftertreament to clean capture N2O, ammonia slip and NOx, too.In step with effective combustion, Foldager said overall engine reliability is paramount. “It has to be reliable. There’s only one engine in the ship, it’s the heart of the ship, it has to run 24/7. Third, we have to make sure that the emissions are acceptable.”
I will point out that we need a great deal of ammonia for fertilizers if we continue to enjoy eating regularly. Focusing on replacing fossil fuels with ammonia is probably not a good bet.
However, I wish the innovators much good luck. Their products seem much less destructive and more effective than other green energy options thrust upon the public.
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