Liquid Ammonia as Fuel — Summary

Like hydrogen as a fuel, liquid ammonia is a carrier of energy, as opposed to a source of energy.  When we create ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen, we add energy to form a compound that can later be broken down, releasing some of that energy for useful purposes at a time and place of our choosing.

In that sense, ammonia is like compressed air or batteries: you can only take out the energy you had put in earlier.  As a substance, this is constrated against gasoline and other fossil fuels, the chemical energy in which was created by our sun long ago.

But even though ammonia is not a source of energy per se, it carries with it the potential to solve many problems.  As I wrote earlier, it passes the five-point test for a clean energy solution that 2GreenEnergy associate Bruce Allen laid out in his book on solar energy.  Though there are points that can be debated here, it’s relatively 1) clean, 2) safe, 3) reliable, 4) scaleable, and 5) does not produce terrible side-effects, i.e., unwanted and unforeseen consequences.  Thus liquid ammonia seems to be a reasonable way to move large amounts of energy around a large land mass, store large amounts of energy locally, and store small amounts of energy in portable devices like cars and trucks.

I recently had a lengthy conversation with liquid ammonia ambassador (my words) Bill Leighty in which my understanding of the promises – and the challenges – of the fuel grew immensely.  First, let me say that there are a great number of top minds working in this fascinating area.  That much becomes clear when one realizes that, for each of the past six years, Iowa State University has hosted the Ammonia Fuel Conference — each meeting of which boasted a large number of extremely impressive participants.  Past years’ agendas are linked above.

Making ammonia even more attractive as a fuel is an issue that I wrote about earlier regarding a recent US Supreme Court decision.  As of April 2010, it is far more difficult for the federal government to exert power under eminent domain that would have facilitated the interstate transmission of electric power.  Now, if you generate wind energy in the plains or solar energy in the deserts, and want to ship to the coasts, there are dozens  — or hundreds of local jurisdictions that can stop you cold — for reasons they don’t even have to explain.  This means that utility scale energy solutions that are not coupled with ways to transport that energy are held hostage to local politics.  In particular, our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has no jurisdiction over the states or counties where power transmission is concerned – but — and here’s the good news, they do control interstate pipelines.

Still, challenges abound.  The two main generals on the battlefield for ammonia, John Holbrook and Norm Olson with their Ammonia Fuel Network, appear to have a considerable fight in front of them.  Perhaps the most obvious is that getting funding and other support from the public sector is hampered by the fact that neither the DoE nor the EPA consider ammonia a fuel at all, but rather a dangerous chemical. Thus, like so many other things in the clean energy business, ammonia as fuel becomes a matter of education, in addition to all the innovation that needs to come to bear.

And if you’re looking for high-density innovation, you’ve come to the right place.  Perhaps more than any other single arena within the larger setting of clean energy, the technology of creating and distributing ammonia – and then releasing the energy that went into making it – is changing quickly.

Today, almost all ammonia (NH3) is made from methane (CH4) — a process that is happening in great volume at many places around the globe.  Ammonia is the second most common industrial chemical (right behind sulphuric acid); 140 million tons are made each year – most of it used as commercial fertilizer.  Mainly, the natural gas in large “stranded” fields, e.g., in Western Australia, is converted to ammonia, shipped to Louisiana, and piped to the Corn Belt, and used as fertilizer. This is all still quite profitable despite the enomity of the logistics involved, as the gas is sold so cheaply (what else can they do with it)?

But guess where that carbon atom in the process goes?  It becomes CO2 — released into the atmosphere.  This is one more reason that the corn ethanol is such a catastrophe; most of the energy in that ethanol came from the ammonia fertilizer, the creation of which generated one CO2 molecule for each NH3 molecule it made.

But ammonia can be made directly from water, atmospheric nitrogen, and energy from renewable sources.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Matt Simmons and a large and impressive team of people are working hard on this currently.  I hope you’ll check out that website, and that you’ll read some of the articles presented in the past years’ Iowa State conferences.  You’ll see that a great deal of incredible work is going into reducing the cost of making and distributing the chemical once it’s made, building better engines that run on ammonia – and overcoming dozens of other critical challenges.