How ammonia could help clean up global shipping

Envision thousands of deaths in a port city.

Why not LNG? Between massive explosions, it has half the carbon of long-chain gunk.

Hey, let's run those ships on batteries.

Maybe you missed the news: the port cities are already full of ammonia storage for agriculture. A container ship-ful is dwarfed by it. Explosions are almost always caused by human error. Things like we don't use dynamite to break up crust formed on things like ammonium nitrate.

They're working hard on hydrogen fuel cells to do just that. Hydrogen for the fuel cells is extracted from ammonia stored onboard.

The only one floating on a cloud around here is you.

onsdag den 31. august 2022 kl. 17.32.38 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

it is hard to store and transport and once you account for energy content it is only ~25% less CO2/KJ

burning ammonia seems like a recipe for making lots of NOx

Burning ammonia is how nitric acid is made. A major industrial product, but not a useful, safe IC engine fuel. That would be madness.

Jeroen Belleman

you could wash the exhaust, Afaik the local coal fired powerplant here makes money on the sulfuric and nitric acid they get from the exhaust cleaning

Half is more than zero. Refueling time with hydrogen in intercalated tanks is long, but ammonia is a pumpable liquid. Easier, I suppose, to pump with pipes than to swap in full tanks with a crane. Both options require refrigeration at the port.

CO2 recovery at sea might be cost-effective, too; Iceland has a storage scheme with good prospects, in the right kind of geology.

The equivalent of an industry EUA:

Quick summary of the ammonia production industry which has to be greened regardless:

Envision thousands of deaths in a port city.

A bit late, since the bores and rings corroded away long before. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Wiki says

Ammonia production is energy-intensive, accounting for 1 to 2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions,[150] and 3 to 5% of natural gas consumption.[151]

That doesn't sound efficient to me.

Babies make ammonia.

Your ignorance knows no bounds:

You're talking about an industry using a 100 year old process.

And for 99+ of those 100 years researchers have been working hard to find a process to replace it. Lots, if not most (too lazy to look up the numbers) of that ammonia goes into fertilizer production and is a significant portion of the cost of growing food. Whoever proves out a lower cost, more environmentally friendly process will be Tesla-level rich. There are some lab results using much more expensive catalysts that work at lower temperature and pressure, and some electrochemical cells that run for a while at the gram scale, but nothing remotely close to being ready for scaleup. It's a very hard problem that many people have worked on. It may happen faster than fusion power plants, but maybe not :-).

Stay tuned because it's already been licked.

Jeroen Belleman wrote: > On 2022-08-31 18:40, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote: >> onsdag den 31. august 2022 kl. 17.32.38 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com: >>> On Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:58:14 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs >>> snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: >>>

Gotta find work for all those fertilizer plants that the antihumanists are trying to prevent from helping feed people.

Phil Hobbs

What definition of 'efficient' are you applying? If ammonia production is energy-intensive, that's because it contains energy that can be released... which, after all, is what makes a 'good fuel'. As for carbon emissions, those aren't because of the ammonia use in ships, but because of choices about the process for generating it.

Well, we could run a ship from NG, or use the NG to make ammonia to run the ship, and do the math on that.

So we get more energy by burning ammonia than we would have got by using the input NG? Interesting chemistry there.

You don't have to get the energy to make ammonia by burning fossil carbon. The climate change denial propaganda that John Larkin reads and believes is paid for by the fossil carbon extraction industry, so they don't admit this.

It's cheaper to get the electric power required from solar cells and wind turbines than from any other source. Battery or pumped hydro storage would let you run the rather expensive plant more or less continuously, but you can store the ammonia produced indefinitely so you don't have to.